It would be truly tragic on all sorts of levels if someone managed to make a vitamin-free reprap out of lego before the offspring of Darwin et al managed it. Can’t see it happening in a hurry though… or more accurately, if/when we get to a point where a 3D printer or CNC router can produce shiny plastic things to the same engineering tolerances of Lego… then the world will truly have changed. Big time.
it would be impossible.
to make lego parts (like gears) with that tolerance, you need higher precision mechanics than lego. that’s it.
I’m playing with the idea that you might be able to get around low-tolerance hardware by using sensors that allow the system to re-calibrate 1000 times a second.
I mean we somehow managed to go from stone-tools to gazillions of transistors on a microchip the size of a (little) fingernail. Impossible isn’t always as impossible as it looks.