The promise of advanced fabrication technology that can copy itself is a truly remarkable concept with far reaching implications.

Imagine having a machine hooked up to your computer that’s like a printer only, instead of printing in two dimensions on paper, it “prints” in three dimensions by building up layers of plastic.

Imagine that this same machine is able to reproduce 60% of the parts required for its own construction. So that it can, in effect, almost reproduce itself — save for a few electronic components and a selection of nuts and bolts.

Imagine being able to design, on your computer, a widget that you can then immediately manufacture a prototype of — in the comfort of your own home!

Imagine the material costs of this machine to be only around €500 and that the plans for its construction and the software to drive it are available free of charge and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Is this science fiction? An impossible fantasy?

You might think so. But you’d be wrong. Such a machine exists and it’s called RepRap (Replicating Rapid-prototyper).

Researchers at the University of Bath in the UK have designed and built such a machine and, in what might well turn out to have been a truly historic moment, on the 29th May 2008 the RepRap achieved self-replication.

[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment…

I think this is absolutely amazing. I’d love to have one of these at home. I can think of so many circumstances where it would be handy to make a little widget at short notice. The RepRap guys tell us that the next version of the machine “will be able to make its own electric circuitry - a technology we have already proved experimentally - though not its electronic chips. After that we’ll look to doing transistors with it, and so on…”

Where does this end? Will my children and future generations simply download files from the Internet and produce their own goods on demand? How would this affect the market economy? Is this beginning of the end of the manufacturing industry or, as The Guardian newspaper proclaims, the dawn of a new industrial revolution? The sociological, political and economic impact of this is surely massive. Imagine what could be achieved in the Third World with manufacturing at this level…

Whatever the future of the RepRap machine and its descendants, I’m certain it’s going to have major repercussions on our way of life once it gets out of the lab.