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3D-printed gun against 3D-printed heart
The US Senate has voted to extend a ban on the production and use of plastic guns for another ten years. The move was prompted by the threat of mass at-home 3D gun printing. Are 3D printing technologies useful or harmful and what else can they produce? VoR’s experts look into the issue.
The 2nd amendment to the US Constitution protects the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. Over the next decade, however, those arms will be made from anything but plastic. No sooner had plastic guns, light and invisible to metal detectors and X-ray scanners, become possible thanks to 3D printers than they were banned over fears that crimes may be surging.
The problem with 3D printers is that anyone who has it at home can create both lethal guns and their non-lethal replicas and use them to commit robberies or other crimes, said Andrei Masalovich, President of the Inforus IT consortium.
“If a gun is made from modern plastic, no scanner will detect it. You can walk through a metal detector, unstopped, and then take out a plastic gun looking exactly like a real one out of your pocket. It’s a serious problem and there is a special law prohibiting such stunts at airports. With the appearance of 3D printing, anyone can take cheap plastic and make an item imitating a lethal or health-threatening object. And that’s got nothing to do with terrorism. Terrorists and organized crime groups have long procured themselves undetectable plastic knifes and single-shot guns made from thermoplastic with a 3D printer and containing no metal,” he told the Voice of Russia.
In May 2013, a 25-year-old US citizen, Cody Wilson, invented a thermoplastic 3D-printed handgun that fires real bullets. Its sole steel component is a firing pin made from an ordinary nail. Wilson posted a blueprint of his 3D Liberator rifle on the Internet. Experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made two copies of his gun and test-fired them: one exploded, the other successfully fired eight shots. Liberator’s blueprint had been downloaded 100,000 times before the government ordered its removal.
With 3D printers being sold at fairly affordable prices starting from $3,000, virtually anyone can make himself or herself a toy gun.
3D printing technologies originated about three decades ago and were first employed in car manufacturing. There are 3D printers for industrial and at-home use, ink-jet and laser, using thermoplastic, iron chips, wood chips, plaster and even biological cells as initial printing staff.
Biomodelling is a promising branch of 3D printing, said Albert Yefimov, director for IT cluster projects at the Skolovo Foundation.
“It means you can virtually model human organs with a 3D printer. Different physical principles will be applied, of course, to create organic tissue, but the idea is the same – slowly printing one layer atop another. Russian scientists, for example, have 3D-printed a human liver using an ink-jet printer. Liver tissue is fairly heterogeneous, which enabled them to create an artificial liver looking exactly like a real one. They filled the cartridge with liver cells and the machine printed the tissue layer by layer,” Yefimov said.
While 3D bio-printing is only just being tested in research centers, non-organic 3D printing is conquering consumer markets. “Whatever you invent we will print!” is the motto of 3D Fabrication Laboratories (FabLabs) opened in various cities of the world, including Moscow.
Source: http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_12_11/3D-printed-gun-against-3D-printed-heart-1699/
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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