The 3D printer and its dangerous uses

Between the many incredible innovations we find the 3D printer. A really incredible technology, which can print everything starting just from the digital project and the more suitable raw materials. Some uses are much more amazing than others, like the organic print or the help of the 3D printers outside the planet Earth.

From the medicine point of view, the 3D printer already printed artificial organs. For the moment its usage is still really limited, but already in the 2013 was printed the first ear in 3D, while in the 2014 was the time of the first transplant of a 3D printed skull. At the moment many artifical prosthesis are printed in 3D and the ongoing revolution will soon bring astonishing results.

Another amazing usage is without any doubt the one to print every object the human being knows everywhere in the universe, by using the available materials. It’s thought, infact, to use the rocks and the available materials on the martial ground to print the houses of the first human colony, without bring with use nothing more than a massive 3D printer.

But this won’t be the first spacial 3D pritner neither. On the ISS, infact, there is one of them, which is used to realize daily usage objects and small working tools, like the first spacial wrench realized by starting from a digital project sent from the planet Earth.

When the 3D printer starts to be a problem

All of it is without any doubt amazing and it leaves us without words, by waiting for an amazing future. But like everything, there is always the downside. If everything can be printed which is the limit? The imagination from one side and the good sense from the other, if there is.

The biggest danger comes from the possibility to print in 3D even weapons. Everyone can download the projects online, due to the fact that there are many of them, illegal and homemade, and realize his own weapon at home.

The alert comes from the United States, where the 3D printed weapons quickly spreaded. Until few years ago, though, there were few homemade defenders of justice, which realized and spreaded online instructions and projects to realize at home many weapons realizable with the 3D printer.

But lately the problem became much more complicated and unmanageable, arriving to create groups of hundreds of people which work behind this project.

Deterrence Dispensed

Deterrence Dispenced is an anonymous group that, according to some internal source, interviewed by a british magazine, counts more than hundred people, that constantly work to the development of printable weapons and their spreading online.

“If the government wants to catch me first it has to find my identity. I’m one of the many that do this job, even if the government will ask me to stop I will do it anyway. Someone spends his time on the videogames, I prefer to spend hours projecting weapons”.

Therefore, because of the materials of which those weapons are made, they escape to the control of the metal detectors. A problem that is growing in the whole United States, where the usage of fire arms is already a well known problem, which now risks to get worst.

They start to write laws to fully avoid those weapons, but how can they stop their quick spreading through Youtube, Twitter and many social networks and messaging apps?

What the experts say

Even though the governements are worry that the spreading of those fire arms, which pass unseen and it’s impossible to register, risks to increase the criminality and the terrorist attacks, there is who saw an unexpected aspect.

Some fire arms’ experts, infact, believe that those projects printed in 3D are much more dangerous for the owners that for the hypothetical target.

Even the best guns printed in 3D could shot only five times before to explode in your hands. Therefore it’s enough even a small defect at project level or assembling one to let it explode even before to do a single shot.

It’s hoped, at least, that this revealing can be a warning to everyone would like to realize weapons at home to give up. Meanwhile it’s thought even about how to avoid that those projects arrive on the chips of the printers. The technology wants to be a great help for humanity and not an enemy to be afraid of. 

This post is also available in: Italiano