No college dorm room is complete without a printer. Or, in my case, two that I never use because engineers at George Fox get free printing. As it turns out, no space station is complete without a 3-D printer. The 3-D printer is part of something relatively new called "additive manufacturing." For as long as people have built things, just about the only way we've done it is by removing substance from a starting piece of material until we have the shape we want. We call that starting piece of material "stock," and in the past, we'd find the piece we want through subtractive manufacturing.

Now, things are different. Engineers entering the field are being taught about new processes of creation that will revolutionize the industry. In the future, manufacturing will be more efficient. That's a good thing because as earth's population grows exponentially and standards of living increase around the world, resources will become more and more scarce. History tells us that new resource supplies will be found, and more efficient processes will allow those sources to last longer. This will be one of those new processes.

So how does a 3-D printer work? Well to oversimplify things, they work like this: a layer of the building material in powder is deposited, a laser melts together the powder to form a very thin cross section of the item being printed and the action is repeated until you have the completed product. What's crazy is that this can be done with more than just plastic. Powdered titanium, steel and aluminum can all be used with 3-D printing.

As the technology advances, imagination will continue to urge it on. What will additive manufacturing be used to make in the future? Already it is used to create super-fast drones in half the time it would have taken otherwise. The most exciting thing about this is that the world still does not know exactly what it will make with additivie manufacturing.