There are many directions that RepRap might take in the future, close and far. It has the potential to be a portable fabrication center in remote locations, both on Earth and in space. It could provide a presently unimaginable resource for impoverished communities, printing tools both primitive and complex, as well as larger, modular resources. It could repair itself and print replacement parts for other machines.

Portable fabrication could allow us to deploy probes to celestial bodies that we are uncertain of, and upon arrival to construct for itself the best possible propulsion system for the new environment as analyzed on-site. Then, newly mobile, it could seek out resources it requires for sustained replication, and perhaps print the parts necessary for the efficient collection of these resources on this foreign world. Then, freed from immobility and hunger, it could give birth to whatever form of machine necessary, perhaps sending back knowledge to our homeworld, perhaps to ready the foreign world for our arrival or colonization.

Sustained replication is one of tenets of life as we understand it, allowing in part for the process of evolution. A machine that can fully self-replicate is likely a necessary requirement of reaching the singularity.

There is the mundane – almost certainly the day will come that a machine will be able to print a functional iPhone in place for it’s user, downloaded offline as a 3DPDF.

Matt and I look forward to contributing any to any and all of these futures.

Undertakings such as ours, with the goal set from the beginning far out of reach, are very much a problem of balance. There really is no unsolvable problem, but the difficulty is the proportion of effort to apply. There is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that Matt and I can build a Mendel, but a Mendel is nothing new, they have been built time and time again before us. The magic is in our balanced divulgence of effort to each sub-part of the project, to mete out an appropriate amount of willpower to solve each problem that is presented to us in a manner that we might finish this summer, or this year, to leap to still greater ends.

“When you’ve hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, ‘Okay, Nature, that’s the end of the nice guy,’ and you crank up the formal scientific method.”
_{- zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, robert m. pirsig}

Neither a classical or romantic approach can achieve much of particular value alone, and without Matt on my side, I would not have the confidence to attempt such outrageous goals.