I belatedly joined the 3D printer club and got myself a brand new Bambu P1S. (Days before the next-gen P2S was released it turns out, but I got the P1S on sale so I don’t feel so bad.)

I have wooden floors.

So I’ve been printing printer foot adaptors to make the optional rubber anti-vibration feet (which I also bought) more effective.

Here’s the 3D model for the adaptors. You open it in the app, select your printer and filament, and it prints directly.

Here are the adaptors printing on my insta.

I am very very into this as a concept: using the printer to print parts of itself. It is a glimpse of the old vision of 3D printers as bootstrapping machines. The old vision and maybe the future too.

(Bootstrapping (Wikipedia) in the self-starting sense, i.e. analogous to one who would lift himself by his own bootstraps, which is where booting/rebooting/etc for computers comes from.)

For instance RepRap:

a free desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic objects. Since many parts of RepRap are made from plastic and RepRap prints those parts, RepRap self-replicates by making a kit of itself - a kit that anyone can assemble given time and materials. It also means that - if you’ve got a RepRap - you can print lots of useful stuff, and you can print another RepRap for a friend…

RepRap started in 2005. Remember the heady days of maker culture? People really felt like we were on a path to decentralising and democratising manufacturing; putting the means of production in the hands of everyone.

I believe the RepRap project is now dormant.

But it harks back to an older idea, being John von Neumann’s concept of a universal constructor:

the self-replicating machine consists of three parts: a “description” of (‘blueprint’ or program for) itself, a universal constructor mechanism that can read any description and construct the machine (sans description) encoded in that description, and a universal copy machine that can make copies of any description.

Autopoiesis, right? A system that creates and maintains itself. Life!

In 1980 Robert Freitas took the universal constructor idea for a Nasa study and came up with the self-replicating interstellar probe, still the most rapid architecture for reaching every star system in the Milky Way (due to its exponential growth). On reaching a new star system, REPRO would build mines and factories etc in the local asteroid belt or whatever to make >1 copies of itself, which would then travel onward to multiple other star systems, rinse and repeat.

BTW:

As previously discussed, given the effectiveness of the Von Neumann probe approach, I feel that it’s likely that our own civilisation is merely a stepping stone (as previously discussed, 2022) in someone else’s exploration of the galaxy.

So when I’m printing parts for my new printer using my new printer, I am not just taking a shortcut around ordering accessories off Amazon.

Nor am I just being part of a nascent democratic mode of production.

But rather:

I am participating of the first inch of the first step to develop the tools and technologies that will one day be used to build the very first self-replicating Von Neumann probe and so light the fuse on the human exploration of our home galaxy.

In a microscopic way anyhow. The feeling is there. And the printer foot adaptors are handy too. Bright orange!