A huge milestone has just been reached in what is currently a very niche area of research, but one which I’m convinced will affect all of our lives within the next decade. It has the potential to create machines, for free, which will themselves allow people to create almost any other object.

It sounds abstract, but the RepRap project has successfully created a rapid prototyping machine that can fabricate all of the parts needed to make a copy of itself. This takes a bit of work to get your head around, but is quite a profound achievement.

Rapid prototyping machines create small objects, usually in plastic, and are used mainly by designers to get a feel for 3D artefacts; just design on-screen and hit print, and 20 minutes later you have the door handle of the new Ford Focus that you’re working on.

This one, though, can make all the parts you need to construct another, as well as any object you program in to it. So you could build one, and use it to make another for everyone on your street, and they could use it to make replacement parts for any appliance around the house, a new case for their mobile phone, anything they want – including another RepRap machine.

This exponential growth is extremely powerful, and given no constraints on raw material could provide everyone in the world with one in just a few months. Interestingly, the group are working on using commonly found plants as a raw material with the ultimate aim of doing just that.

At the moment the machines are mostly limited to relatively simple plastic parts, but they’re working on enabling it to create chips, circuits and metal components. It’s a strange design process; make it more capable and it gets harder to make the parts to construct one – a very fine line, and one that is very hard to hit.

Each generation could be made slightly more powerful, though, bootstrapped by the previous, slightly simpler machine. If you couple this ability with genetic algorithms for hardware design optimisation, or even the open source creation model, you soon have all sorts of improvements and project-forks to handle applications we can’t even think of yet.

I’ve spoken to the people that work on this project several times, and they all have some fascinating ideas on where this could go; a mobile handset that decentralises the communications infrastructure, for instance, or a machine to legally circumvent the copyright on new, expensive, but life-saving drugs by mixing up the raw ingredients at home.

The strangest part is that this project isn’t a massive, well-funded effort. Some of it is based at the University of Bath, but many of the people who work on it are enthusiastic amateurs all around the world. That means if you want to get involved at home (they can always use decent Java programmers), then you can – there aren’t many cutting edge areas of research where that’s possible.