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In 2012, six single-family homes were made by a 3D printer in China. The inventor of that technology is now working on a 3D printer designed to construct buildings on Mars. Does this technology have a future on Earth? Or does the future of homebuilding involve modern factories that leverage robots to build wood or steel framing similar to the types of machines you might find in modern automotive plants? Sponsored by: If you’re a startup, apply for DigitalOcean’s Hatch program, where if selected, you’ll have access to their cloud for 12 months, in addition to technical training and mentorship. You can also go to do.co/predictingourfuture and ask the sales team for a free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt 3D-Printed Homes In January of 2015, a company revealed a six-story home that they made with a 3D printer. The best to way to explain how a 3D printer works is to contrast it with a typical printer that uses ink to print on a sheet of paper. The thickness of the ink is so infinitesimally small that if you held the paper up to your face, you likely wouldn’t be able to see any elevation of ink on the printed area of the page. Now imagine if the printer used a thicker type of ink and printed on that sheet of paper not just once, but in multiple layers over the same area. Eventually the inked area would become raised. If you used a different printing material other than ink, and you altered the printer’s instructions to achieve a certain height, you might eventually be able to print something like a plastic bowl. That’s how 3D printing works, and the options of materials and instructions you can use to print are only limited by your imagination. 3D printing is currently an explosive field where lots of entrepreneurs have trained their sights. Already, we have 3D printers that make toys, apparel, even car parts. How about 3D printing to make a home? The same company that used the 3D printer to make that six-story home in 2015 had a year earlier made 10 stand-alone one-story houses with a 3D printer from construction waste and cement. Although, I must tell you that I wasn’t at all impressed by the video I saw of the 3D printed home on YouTube. The company that made these homes basically rigged a giant squirt gun to repeatedly squirt layer after layer of cement in a pattern that ended up forming the walls of each house. If 3D printing is going to revolutionize the construction industry, it certainly won’t happen with this implementation. Nonetheless, I wanted to speak to the inventor of this 3D printing technology to see how this technology might be used more effectively in the future. Colonies On Mars And Machines In The Meteor Belt Behrokh Khoshnevis is a professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California. He patented the Contour Crafting system that seems to have been sloppily implemented to 3D print the house in the YouTube video. Behrokh has no relationship with the company that built those homes. If you really want to see the future of construction, you have to listen to how 3D printing would work in the most ideal circumstances. What I’m about to explore is out of this world. Literally. Behrokh is currently working with NASA to use 3D printers to build structures on Mars. Behrokh Khoshnevis: “I approached NASA with a proposal to use lunar and Martian in situ material and build the structures. As opposed to all the proposed methods of taking stuff from here and building stuff on those planets, I recommended a much more viable approach. If there is a technology that can use what is up there, of course it would be economically much more attractive.” Me: “So the extraterrestrial approach would be, you would transport the 3D printer, if you will, and the associated materials?” This was a pretty stupid question. Prior to speaking with Behrokh,