I somehow missed pointing to last week’s CNN article about Adrian Bowyer and his RepRap project.

In this interview Dr. Bowyer compared the RepRap to agriculture. This is a good reminder that self-replication isn’t magic. It’s not something for nothing. Energy, raw materials, and information are essential to the process – just like agriculture.

Also, his goal is a little more modest than a perfectly self-replicating machine.

Bowyer said the target of the project was to create a range of devices that could be assembled for around $500 using additional components commonly and cheaply available in hardware stores.

Which is practically free for a machine that can make almost any kind of electronic gadget. $500 certainly beats the current price of a prototyping machine – $45,000.

Then Dr. Bowyer made his case to environmentalists.

If the machine can copy itself, it can make its own recycler. When you break something you can just feed it into the recycler and break it down to its raw materials and re-build it.

The key ecological point is that it cuts down on the transportation necessary both to manufacture products and to dispose of them. Every household would have its own recycling set-up.

I hate to brag but (Well, that’s not true at all. I love to brag! I must have been thinking of somebody else.) back in March I speculated that:

[Too much stuff] would probably be a problem at first. We have these fab labs that can make us anything we want…and so we begin filling our house with this stuff.

Pretty soon we’d realize that more than the stuff, we need space to walk. At that point – particularly if fab labs had become reasonably fast in operation – we might start living a “Just In Time” lifestyle.

If we need something we’d fabricate it, use it, and then toss it in the fab recycle bin where the basic materials could be used again to fab something else.

A smart fab lab could even keep an inventory of the bin. If you asked it to fab something already in the bin it could ask: “That item has been fabricated and is awaiting recycling, are you sure you’d like to refab?”