Jurassic Park – Life In A Word

My wife’s sister and her husband just wrapped up a visit here in South Carolina. On the drive down from Colorado they made several sightseeing detours, but the trip back was pedal-to-the-metal… with the exception of one stop: the Moon Marble Company in Bonner Springs, Kansas. Moon Marbles stocks beautiful handmade wooden games and toys but c’mon, who braves the barren wastelands of Kansas for those? Marbles on the other hand, would draw me in like a bee to nectar.

A marble is the perfect example of a sphere, isn’t it? I love spheres (including the word itself; much more elegant than “ball” or “orb”). Take a semicircle, revolve it a full loop around its diameter and voila! – a sphere. Calculating the volume of a sphere involves cubing its radius but let’s stop right there with the math lesson. Cubes and spheres just don’t belong in the same conversation.

Most of you readers are tuned in from the Northern Hemisphere, the half of our planet above the Equator. I find it cool to think of Earth as a sphere (with “big blue marble” a close second). It’s the biggest sphere we humans know (or have you been to Jupiter?) At your next party, wow your friends by telling them Earth is actually an oblate spheroid: flattened at both poles and bulging at the Equator. Ewwwww. Not a very pretty sphere, now is it?

Here’s the paragraph where I cop out and simply list a bunch of spheres, like oranges, Christmas ornaments, eyeballs, pearls, and the moon, but that’s just so three-hundred-blog-posts ago. Spheres can be much cooler. For instance, picture an atom (I’ll pause for those who need a microscope). An atom is a spherical cluster of neutrons and protons (which are also spheres) encircled by whizzing electrons (more spheres). Did you know your body is made up of over 7 octillion atoms? That’s a lot of spheres. You might want to lose a little weight.

Glinda traveled to Oz in a sphere (photo courtesy of MGM)

Soap bubbles are spheres. Sure, you aim to create those giant wibbly-wobbly monsters but for the most part you generate a cloud of perfectly spherical transparent globes, born on a whisper of air and extinguished seconds later. I’m guessing soap bubbles have the shortest lifespans of all spheres.

When a college buddy visited several years ago, he brought a paperweight made by an artist near his hometown in New Jersey. It’s a glass sphere with just the slightest bit of the bottom lopped off so it doesn’t roll off my desk. I’ve picked up a lot of tchochkes over the years but I’m not letting this one go. Did I mention spheres are cool?

Three years before he wrote Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton authored a novel called Sphere. It’s about a group of scientists exploring a giant spacecraft sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. In the spacecraft’s cargo hold: a mysterious sphere, determined to be extraterrestrial and literally mind-blowing. Mark my words; spheres can be as terrifying as dinosaurs. Read it.

Star Wars focused on a giant spherical colony – the Empire’s “Death Star” – but the air went out of my perfectly round balloon as soon as I saw the giant divot on its side, not to mention all those channels and openings pierced by the X-wing starfighters. In other words, the Death Star was a decidedly less-than-perfect orb. So I applauded alongside everybody else when Luke Skywalker blew this sphere to kingdom come.

Here’s a place you wouldn’t expect to find a sphere: a Christian hymn. In the first verse of This Is My Father’s World we have, “All nature sings and round me rings, the music of the spheres”. The plural throws me off, because more than one sphere suggests more than just Earth (the entire solar system?) Or maybe we aren’t singing about the planets at all. A quote from August Rush seems relevant; the final line in the movie: “The music is all around us… all you have to do, is listen.”

We’re starting to go round and round here (heh) so let’s conclude with the world’s largest sphere. The Guinness Book writers will deem it so once the “MSG Sphere” opens in Las Vegas in a few months. At 300 feet tall and 500 feet wide, the Sphere will dramatically change a skyline that’s already pretty dramatic, especially with 1.2 million LEDs on its surface generating all sorts of images and animation. For concerts, sports, and the like, the Sphere can seat up to 18,000 spectators. I plan to be one of them… just as soon as I make it to Moon Marbles in Kansas.

Some content sourced from the CNN Travel article, “This futuristic entertainment venue is the world’s largest spherical structure”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw the movie, Jurassic Park. I’d read the Michael Crichton novel so I already knew the story, but I still couldn’t wrap my mind around that first dino scene, where a brachiosaurus casually munches on the uppermost leaves of a forty-foot tree. The gigantic creature was so lifelike I thought, “Where’d Steven Spielberg get a dinosaur?” In my defense, computer-generated imagery (CGI) was brand-spankin’ new back then. A ferocious T-Rex looking and moving like the real thing was still jaw-dropping in the 1990s. And I’m having the same reaction to the stuff rolling off 3D printers right now.

If you’re like me you haven’t paid much attention to 3D printing. You see some of the items a 3D printer can generate and they seem like child’s play. In fact, 3D printing reminds me of a 1970s toy called “Creepy Crawlers”. You had these tubes of colored goop you squeezed into metal molds, and then the molds went into an electric oven. The goop would grow from flat to 3D with heat, and suddenly the oven was spilling out all kinds of bugs and spiders you could drop on your friends. (There was also consumable goop called “Incredible Edibles”; products to compete with whatever the girls were making in their Easy-Bake ovens).

But I digress. Here’s my 3D printing naivete in a nutshell: I still think my 2D printer is the more impressive technology, cranking out high-resolution photos and perfectly addressed envelopes. I mean, whatever would I need a third dimension for?

Yep, I am seriously naive about 3D printing. The scope of this topic is mind-boggling if you really take the time to understand its potential. Here’s a good example. Picture a printer as big as your living room. Picture a printer cartridge of concrete instead of ink. Now watch the printer build your living room, one horizontal layer at a time. The printer can also build the rest of your house. Just add plumbing and electric when it’s done.

Without getting too far into the weeds, let’s define 3D printing for what it really is: additive manufacturing (AM). Here’s an easy way to picture the AM process. When you build a log cabin you lay out the entire foundation of logs for the house – with breaks for the doors – before you add the next layer of logs. You work your way up a layer of logs at a time, keeping those breaks for the doors, adding breaks for windows, pipes, and such, completing the structure with a sloping roof on top. Perhaps you add a fireplace in the process; again, layering bricks on top of bricks until you’ve reached the top of the chimney.

That’s pretty much how a 3D printer works. It “pictures” an object in horizontal layers and “prints” it from the ground up. 3D printing has been around longer than you think. 3D printers were developed as early as the 1970s (preceding your inkjet 2D printer!). The early versions just had to be manually programmed. Once we attached a computer and software, 3D printing really came into its own.

Watch the following video of a 3D printer confidently layering a basket weave – it’s mesmerizing:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/5/5d/Hyperboloid_Print.ogv/Hyperboloid_Print.ogv.360p.vp9.webm

The products speak for themselves, of course. A shortlist of the more cutting-edge printed creations gives you an idea of where our world is heading:

Cakes and pastries – The “ink” is baked goods in one nozzle and frosting in another. Design it on your computer screen and then “print”. It’s like the Easy-Bake Oven on steroids. Only you don’t need the oven.
3D-printed confectionery from Ukrainian chef/architect Dinara Kasko
Bones – No, not some plastic or other polymer designed to replicate bones, actual bones. It’s called bioprinting – the fabrication of natural tissue using cells and other building blocks, and it’s coming soon to a clinic near you. Don’t worry how long a broken bone will take to heal; just replace it!
Buildings – Forget about building that log cabin one layer at a time. Your 3D printer will do the whole job for you (and it’ll still look like a log cabin). Your printer can also build sturdier houses out of concrete. This one’s on the market in Riverhead, New York, for $300K.
Vehicles – 3D printers have already created boats, kayaks, and most of the makeup of cars and trucks. Long ago I was impressed with the robotics of the Ford Motor Company, employed on a long assembly line to build cars one part at a time. A 3D printer can essentially do the same job standing still, no assembly line required.
You – I could speculate on the potential for a full bioprint but let’s avoid that scary future for now and just say, a 3D printer can create a figurine to look exactly like you. Think of it as printing a 3-D photograph.

If your mind is not blown by what you’ve just read, consider this: 3D is already passe. That’s right, we’ve already moved on to 4D printing. 4D – at least with printing – refers to materials that can change shape with time, temperature, or some other type of stimulation. A good example would be a printed window shade, sitting tight and virtually unnoticed at the top of the window in daylight but expanding to full cover as darkness falls.

Don’t know about you but this level of technology makes my head hurt. When I’m done with this post I’m gonna push “print” and generate a nice 2D copy for my files. Oh, and maybe watch Jurassic Park again.

Some content sourced from the 7/24/2020 Forbes article, “What Can 3D Printing Be Used For?”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Tag: Jurassic Park

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