Will interplanetary shipping even be necessary in a future with nanofabricators?

3-D printers, replicators, nanofabricators etc. are all technologies that, when pushed to their logical limit, seem to make the transport of finished goods obsolete when all you need to do to obtain any given item is simply supply your fabricator with the right raw materials. In a future with ideal fabricators, the only things that will ever be shipped between various human settlements (planets, colonies and space stations) are raw materials. Hydrogen, helium, and iron hauled from the asteroid belt and extracted from uninhabitable worlds will become the only commodities worth physically transporting across large distances.

Is this vision of the future accurate? I want to write a story where space truckers and space pirates are an important element of the plot, but the utter absence of scarcity except in the form of raw materials seems like it would kill piracy and most forms of theft pretty effectively. At the same time I'm aiming to be pretty high on the sliding scale of hard sci-fi, so completely ignoring fabricator technology and pretending that we won't improve on 3-D printing at all in the next century and a half isn't really an option without completely discrediting the plausibility of my worldbuilding.

Is there any way around this? Are any of my assumptions incorrect?

posted almost 8 years ago

Z.Schroeder‭

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