Food Replicators

You've seen replicators feed the crew of Star Trek, but will real humans ever be able to press a button and zap an entire meal into existence? If so, are we anywhere close to that today?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Be there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says I lost
my poor meatball when somebody sneezed. I'm Joe McCormick, and

(00:22):
I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. Our host Jonathan Strickland is out on
vacation this week, so Joe and I are going it alone.
He is out getting the top of his head sun burned. Yes,
that is usually what happens. Actually, well, I don't know.
He might wear a helmet on the beach. I'm not
sure a helmet. Jonathan is not really a hat person.
He's more of a helmet person. I've seen him wear

(00:43):
baseball caps, although I think that the helmet thing would
go better with his entire mad scientist persona. So right,
But you know what I bet Jonathan is doing while
he's out on vacation. What I bet he's eating some
delicious food. Oh, I bet he is. I'm kind of
jealous of his delicious food. Yeah, that's that's one of
the things you do on vacation, right, eat delicious food
and you take pictures of it and you send it

(01:04):
back to the people at home in order to make
them jealous specifically. But do you know a really cool
place you can go where you almost definitely don't get
to eat delicious food? Um? Space? That's exactly right. I
was just reading a little review of some space food
that came out I think it was in two thousand
seven or so and Discover magazine about what the astronauts

(01:26):
eat up there at the I S S. So they
had a food critic eating it, and it didn't sound
too appealing. Apparently a favorite among the astronauts is the
shrimp cocktail, which sounds disgusting to me. But is it
dehydrated rehydrated shrimp? I would assume, yeah, I'd have to
assume that's what it is. That doesn't sound like a

(01:47):
party to me personally. It comes in packages, you know,
and you've got to add hot water, I guess, and
with a syringe. It's not really Uh yeah. The whole
process of eating in spaces is designed so that you
get a minimum number of crumbs out into the open
air because um are closed air, as the case may be,

(02:09):
because those can can bounce around and reck all kinds
of systems and you know, so so it has to
be very specifically engineered for this entire um a um
conservation of resources so that you're not creating unnecessary waste
and be right making sure that you're not making a mess. Well,
as we learned from the Simpsons episode Deep Space Home,

(02:30):
or if you just crack open a bag of potato
chips in the capsule, they could clog the instruments. The
science of the Simpsons is pretty rock solid, right. So
so a lot of the foods there you get are
they're designed to be easy to eat from a little
uh pouch or something like that, and there their shelf
stable for transport up into space. And so that's understandable. Uh,

(02:54):
but wouldn't it be great if you could get any
food you wanted in space? I mean, I'd take that
option here, honestly. Well yeah, but you know who does
get any food they want in space? The people on
Star Trek they do, along with those Nancy jumpsuits. How
do they get it? Do they just have a really
good chef on the enterprise replicators? Replicators? Of course, we've

(03:16):
all seen the whole tea Earl Gray hot kind of thing. Um.
For those of us who haven't, Captain Jean Luke Picard
has a fondness for Earl Gray tea hot. So he
goes up to the wall and there's a little nook
in the wall and he speaks to it. He says,
teh hot, and it comes right out. Yeah. It molecularly

(03:39):
assembles this or possibly sub molecularly assembles this, this cup
and the tea and makes it warm and serves it
up to you. Because that is what computers of the
future can do. It's a dream come true, really, and
that's why today we're talking about food replicators. That's our
that's our topic for forward thinking to you today. Is

(04:00):
this possible to make a food replicator? And if so,
how would it work? So how do they work on
Star Trek? Well, so it's it's a machine that creates
material objects and it's not in Star Trek actually limited
to food, is it right? You can make any I mean,
like I said, it also creates the cup when you

(04:20):
order a cup of tea. So uh. But they also
use it for for building all kinds of things and
like getting new clothes I imagine stuff like that. Yeah,
you can basically you can produce parts with it, I
think too. If you want to repair the enterprise, you
can make something that you need to go in a
certain place. Basically, the only things that can't make are
things that would make the plot too easy if you

(04:43):
were able to just manufacture one. So I think it
can't make new like drive fuel, can't make dilithium crystals
or right, because that would be that would be ridiculous.
And in a lot of episodes seems to be used
as like it's comic relief, the sort of jokes where
people of the jokes like there are too many options
at Starbucks. I just want coffee. They do that in

(05:05):
Star Trek, right, you know, I just want playing hot
tomato soup, not any of these seventeen varieties. Or it's
the joke where the human language to computer language compatibility,
where the I mean, even though this is an extraordinarily
advanced computer system, for some reason, if you say hot
earl gray tea, it doesn't necessarily get it um. And

(05:25):
also they use it to I think illustrate some principles
about like economics or the prime directive, like is it
ethical to share replicator technology with planets that don't have
this kind of thing yet? Sure, and to make overall
commentary about how this, this incredible future is partially perfect
because nobody is hungry. Right, that's a big thing on

(05:45):
the show. That's the economics point. I guess you know.
There's this idea of a post scarcity economy in Star Trek,
which we can talk about later in this episode. Okay,
so how does this actually work on Star Trek? Okay, well,
I I'm very happy to have some angry Trek ease
correct me if I get this wrong. But presumably I

(06:06):
believe it works on the same principle as the transporter.
That is what I have read as well. Okay, so
the transporter, you get on the transporter, it takes all
the atoms in your body, converts them into energy, zaps
them somewhere else, and reassembles them from that energy into
matter there. So the replicator then would have to be

(06:28):
working a little bit differently, and that it's not taking
food from some transporter deck somewhere else and not to you.
It's just making it out of some other matter or energy. Right.
There's not a Starbucks on Klingon. That's that's shipping you
your muffins. Right, So it would be like if you
got into the transporter and it transported you somewhere, but
turned you into a bunch of muffins, delicious muffins for

(06:51):
for the Klingons or whoever ordered them. Um, but you
wouldn't have to use live humans. Don't look so shocked, no,
I mean you could probably turn anything into muffins, right right.
And I think that that's the point of of of
these replicators, is that they're using waste materials from the ship. Um.
Again not necessarily humans as an all soil and green

(07:13):
but um, but but but other stuff that has been
used and they don't need anymore to to transfer into
delicious muffins. Okay, well, let's talk about the different ways
it could theoretically be working. That's one, it's taking waste material,
so taking matter and then changing that into other matter. Um.
And that could be done I could imagine at a
couple of different levels. One would be at the molecular

(07:36):
or atomic level. So say you throw in a bunch
of human excrement and trash from the cafeteria, just put
it right back in. And uh, I don't know what
else they use, just stuff they don't want on the enterprise,
Old old Captain Kirk Laundry. I am done with this
keyboard right, yeah, bye bye, don't need it anymore. So

(07:58):
that gets broken down into atoms and molecules, and then
those get reassembled by some magical procedure into the food
you want to eat. And please, I'm open to correction
on this issue as well, But it would seem to
me that if you were just breaking it down to
the molecular or atomic level, you would be limited in

(08:19):
the kind of things you would produce, because you'd have
a certain number of carbon atoms and a certain number
of iron atoms, and you would have to rearrange those
into something that would use basically the same number of
the same kinds of atoms. Right, So, if you've got
a teacup and you want tuh, that's maybe a difficult conversion. Yeah, right,

(08:40):
I don't know what atoms are in a teacup. Yeah,
if you've got leftover juice and you want tea, maybe
that's a little bit easier to wrangle. I don't know.
I'd imagine the cup would be harder. I don't know
that this is all speculation, but at any rate, there's
a there would be a way to get around this,
right sure. Yeah, if you take this down to the
subatomic level, wherein your build holding the kinds of atoms

(09:01):
that you need, right, then you have the same parts
for all atoms, right, you need neutrons, protons, electrons. And
if you can break it down to that level, well
then you can make whatever atoms you need. You can
make whatever molecules you need, and you can make whatever
nanostructures you need, which build up and up and up
until you have whatever kind of thing you want to build.

(09:21):
It's the most basic, not the most basic, but the
farthest down the chain we'd need to go a good
operative building block. Yeah, yeah, of course, there are some
questions about this because if you're talking about taking apart
atoms and then using the sub atomic particles, there's a

(09:41):
thing that happens when we split atoms. Yeah, yeah, that
whole nuclear vision thing or yes, yes, vision, I used
the correct word, uh is produces a great deal of
energy and so and I'm not sure that I would
personally want yeah, bombs going off every time. I just
want a cup of tea. Yeah, okay, So that's a
definitely a concern. Not to make it seem like just

(10:04):
breaking it down to the atomic or molecular level would
be totally a piece of cake. But let's think about
the other way, which is, instead of going from matter
to a different kind of matter, would it be possible
to just take energy, just straight up energy from the
ship's power plant and turn that into the atoms we
need in order to make our food. Uh. Theoretically, yes,

(10:27):
we do know about a process that's called pair production,
where where you can basically convert a photon into a
positron and an electron, electrons being you know, mattera UM.
But that's that's you know, at the single photon level,
and you're only creating electrons, and I'm not sure how
that becomes a cup of tea UM. Also, the the

(10:49):
amount of energy that it takes to kick off this
process is quite a bit of energy. Yeah, again, this
would be a problem at the physics level. I think
what we'd have an uh an amount of energy and
a scalability question here. But it is true that you
can turn energy into matter, just like you can turn
matter and energy with a nuclear reaction. You can split

(11:12):
a photon into an electron and a positron and those
two would fly off in opposite directions and and there
you'd have an electron. This is a massive particle it's
it's matter, um, and so that you could also just
think about it in terms of the Big Bang, Right,
So you have like expanding energy that cools and turns
into material material we know and love today. So that

(11:35):
is something that is theretically possible. Is it practical? Probably not.
It seems very doubtful to me. Yeah, possibly never. I mean,
considering that we're doing these kind of pair production experiments
at like the largest particle colliders on the planet in
single units. Uh yeah, yeah, Okay, so if we just say, okay,

(12:00):
I believe, we just put on the I believe hat
and say it works, it works. Are they any good
as chefs on the in the Star Trek universe at least?
And we're about to get to some some real facts,
don't worry. Oh no, everyone likes talking about the Star
Trek universe eternally. Um uh. You know, I think that
the characters on Star Trek all are a little bit

(12:20):
doubtful about that kind of thing, or not all of them,
but but the you got your foodies, you know. Yeah.
I think that Rikers sometimes through like dinner parties on
the on the Enterprise in order to show off his
renaissance mannishness and be really rykery about stuff. Yeah. Yeah,
and um, like he'd actually cook, could actually cook, Yeah,

(12:42):
make a point of cooking and show off to all
of his friends how good of a cook he was.
So is this like the star trek century equivalent of
the people who go out in the woods and bow
hunt elk these days? That just like cooking in a
walk is their equivalent of that? Yeah, although there's there's
always a quality issue. I mean, like, like you said,
it's a it's a replicator. It's providing sustenance and not

(13:04):
necessarily quality sustenance. Um. I think also like Picard had
a couple of jars of caviare stashed around because real
caviare is superior, according to him, to replicator caviare. Yeah.
And you can actually kind of imagine if this were
real technology. You can see why it would be the case.
It might be an issue of resolution basically, Like Okay,

(13:27):
so you imagine you're an audio file and you love music,
and you're one of those people who you can you
say you can really hear the difference between an MP
three file a digitized version and hearing the music played live. Well,
I mean, I guess anybody can tell the difference between
MP three and hearing it live to some people don't
care that much, right right, right, Um, But there is

(13:48):
a there's a resolution difference. Anytime you take a real
world analog phenomenon and turn it into digital data, you
are you know, you're shaving off the edges. You're experiencing
a loss, right um. And there's also a slight question
of whether it's um healthy or or even ethical from
a from a basic human standpoint to eat replicator food

(14:11):
when you have the option to to grow food the
normal way. Um. That There was an episode of Deep
Space nine that dealt with that, where there was this
kind of like bloody ish group of colonists who, um,
even when presented with the with the technology, basically refused
to use it. Huh. I didn't see that one Deep
Space nine. I think I'm one of the only like
five people on the planet who really liked that show. Well,

(14:33):
I wouldn't go there. But this, of course is a
it's a common idea that like technologically produced or assemboled
food in sci fi that's often seen as like you
can tell there's something wrong with it, Like in Cronenberg's
version of The Fly there's a part where they they've
got a teleporter pod in that movie and they teleport

(14:53):
a steak from one to the other and Gina Davis
eats it and says, you know, yuck, it tastes synthetic. Yeah. Right,
But but there's been this this idea of hope for
this kind of artificial food concept for a really long time.
I mean going back to like the sixties with the
Jetsons and food pills. Oh it goes back before that,
Oh definitely. Yeah. How about the French chemist Pierre Eugene

(15:16):
Marsillen Marchillen mark. I don't do French names. Well Bertelo
I I did not look it up, so I'm okay.
He's a French chemist named Bertolo, and he was he
was an important French chemist. But there I found this
great old article, uh called foods in the year two thousand,
Professor R. Bertolo's theory that chemistry will displace agriculture. And

(15:38):
that was by Henry J. W. Dam in uh McClure's
magazine September. Okay, so so they were looking forward to
foods in the in the incredible year two thousand. Yeah,
what will it be like in the year two thousand
and He did not imagine Chippotle. What he imagined was, well,
I mean, to a chemist back then, you can see

(15:59):
why this would make sense. He says, the foods we
eat are entirely made up of atoms. I mean, duh.
Most people don't know this, But basically you've got four
leading elements. You've got carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, with a
few others thrown in of course. Yeah, I mean, and
you can make the You can find all of those
elements and say, a piece of charcoal, a glass of water,

(16:22):
and a breath of air. Sure, so why can't we
turn those things into delicious food? Right? And that was
actually Burlow's idea. He was like, look, agriculture is on
the way out. Why are we raising crops the old
slow way? And yeah, why are we doing it like
that when we could just take these atoms and make

(16:43):
all the nutrients we need. Obviously there are a few
other elements too then, in addition to the ones he named,
But the principle basically holds and and so I don't
think he was quite imagining the star trek level of
the Replicator, but he was imagining a a cheap, plentiful
chemical synthesis of food, right, And he wasn't even the

(17:03):
only person working on the issue around that time. There
was one uh Gen Front who manufactured an artificial meat
from brewery and distillery wastes in nine and and I
mean the stuff was nutritionally superior to beef, but how
did it taste? Um Front in front of Front himself

(17:24):
has this really terrific quote in which he says it
would be a hundred times better if foods were without
odor or savor, for then we should eat exactly what
we needed and would feel a great deal better. What
seems certain is that such synthetic foods are nourishing. Okay, okay,
So what he was saying was that it doesn't matter
if it tastes and looks like cardboard, because it's good

(17:46):
for you, so eat it right well. And so they
were talking about uh having plentiful nutrition, which is a
different kind of thing than on Star Trek, but touches
some of the same themes of like a post scarcity idea.
In fact, Bertelow even seems to hint that he thinks

(18:06):
that perhaps this kind of chemical manufacturer of resources will
make humans more peaceful. Basically, one of those like like
end all wars will be brought by artificial meat kind
of things. Well, it's an interesting idea. Yeah, if you
if you have something that can just easily produce the
resources we need, maybe conflicts will fade away. He also,

(18:29):
I think mentioned that something. There's something about the brutalizing
effect on humans of having to kill animals for meat
makes us, you know, yeah, angry people, poor ethical decision
making processes. I don't personally kill the animals I eat,
so perhaps I've I've been like shielded, like removed from

(18:51):
the fishing once when I was a kid. But that's
that's about it. Okay, But these are not the only
past futurists have looked ahead and said, oh, chemical synthesis
of food, in fact, are one of our favorite people. Here,
Arthur C. Clark predicted replicators pretty much like what they've
got on Star Trek. Uh. Yeah, and here you predicted

(19:12):
those for Oh don't know if we're on track for
that one, Arthur, But yeah, he predicted UH a universal replicator.
This is a quote universal replicator based on nanotechnology. UH
is now available to create any object, from gourmet meals
to diamonds. The only thing that has value is information

(19:33):
that was for the year on his future timeline. Right.
But but the press is really fond of kind of
citing Star Trek replicators every time some kind of new
product or technology comes out that that looks even vaguely promising,
right us, some of the recent stuff like like lab
grown beef. Oh yeah, so lab grown beef is really cool,
but it's not really in the same ballpark at all.

(19:56):
Oh no, No, it's an entirely different sport, I think. Yeah, okay,
so we've talked about that on this podcast before. But
lab grown beef is a brand new advance basically just
from last year. It's organically grown beef, so it's real beef.
It's not fake beef. It's just grown in in vitro,

(20:16):
in in in glass in a test tube rather than
in a cow's body. Right. So you take some stem
cells out of a cow's muscle, and then you create
the right lab conditions and you just allow these cells
to multiply and make cow muscles in a little dish.
You add them together and you can make beef out
of that, and and that's great. You know, it offers
potential future advantages in terms of things like consuming less

(20:38):
energy to produce the meat, and it avoids animal cruelty,
and so that's awesome. But it's not really anything like
on demand food synthesis. I mean, one thing I'd say
is that it's only one kind of protein. It's not
like it's making you a plate of a meat and
three sides like the Star Trek replicator would. And it
takes time and energy to grow. Uh. It's a slow process,

(21:02):
not an instantaneous on demand thing. Sure. Sure. There's also
nothing cost free about it. Oh yeah, it's possibly way
more costful. Expensive would be the word I'm looking for. Uh,
than than just growing a cow, would be right, It's
definitely more expensive. Now, the the advantage, I guess would
be that it takes less energy in the long run

(21:23):
and has a smaller car carbon foot print. Yeah. Um,
But another big buzzword three D printing. Three D printing food. Okay, Yeah,
let's let's talk about a few of these. Uh. I
want to talk about the NASA one, the NASA pizza.
NASA pizza okay, so an pizza of the stars, this
is real. NASA announced it would fund a project on

(21:46):
three D printed food, So they're getting into future nom
noms for space and It gave a DW five thousand
dollars to a Texas based company called Systems and Materials
Research Corporation to develop three D printed food for future
space mission. All right, the prototype uses shelf stable powders
and oils mixed with water to construct stuff stuff stuff,

(22:08):
you know, dough or tomato, sauce or whatever. Yeah, there
is video online of this, uh, this printer prototype making
a pizza, and let me tell you, looks absolutely delicious
if you are into death by cafeteria food. Not to
downplay their achievement at all, I'm sorry. I shouldn't make fun.
But the idea that you've got a print or printing

(22:29):
a pizza is pretty cool. But it doesn't look like
the my favorite pizza. It looks a little bit strange, um,
you know. And and any time that you're that you're
working with shelf stable ingredients, it's not an ideal situation
for nutrition, I think. Yeah, and laying them on a

(22:50):
substrate one tiny dot at a time. Yeah, still still
kind of expensive and awkward. But there's more than just
the pizza right there. There are people, plenty people three
D printing food. Oh absolutely. Uh. Sugar is a big one.
Right now. Um, there's there's a pair of kids named
Liz and Kyle von Hasseln who um agreed to make

(23:10):
a cake for a friend's birthday. Yeah, and then realized
that they didn't own an oven, Um, but that they
did own a three D printer. Because these are very
first world problems that some people have. No, No, I'm
brilliant people. They realized that precise combinations of water and
sugar can be printed in layers just the way that
the plastics would in a three D printer. And they've

(23:31):
got a version that works with chocolate too. Essentially, they're
just making really fancy looking frosting with structural capacity. Um.
If you've ever watched video of sugar sculpture before, you'll
appreciate how being able to design and print improbable structures
is is pretty nifty rather than having to you know,
work with um molten sugar lava because that's like death. Um.

(23:55):
But but you probably wouldn't be able to survive long
on this kind of food. UM. If you heard buzz
by the way about chef jet printers, perhaps especially from
south By Southwest, that's the brand that that these guys created. UM,
and bigger names are getting into the confectionery three D
printing business to Hershey just struck a deal in January

(24:16):
with three D Systems to develop chocolate confectionery printing technology. Yum,
there's actually a product I read about. I feel kind
of strange about it. Uh So, it's a product called
Natural Machines FOODINI three D printer. It can, supposedly, if
the ads are to be believed, print delicious meals, including pizza, ravioli,

(24:39):
and other stuff. And this isn't so much for space
as for sort of ease and luxury. So the idea
is that makes ingredients like ravioli that you don't have
the time, skill or desire to make my hand. It
can make like rolled pasta and and stuff like that,
printing it one layer at a time. I can sort
of see that making sense as a as a thing

(25:02):
if if the ads are again to be believed as
good as it looks. Okay, yeah, I've seen. I'm a
little bit dubious about that one because the price point
is like one thousand, three hundred dollars, and that seems
like an awfully low price for for revioli whenever you
want it. I don't know, I could be I could
be wrong. Um, but wait, there's more. Um. There's also

(25:22):
a one Jeffrey Lipton, who's as of late was a
Cornell engineering PhD candidate, And uh, he and some some
other Cornell people started experimenting with printing food in two
thousand nine, UM, using like gelatin and flavorings to create
little snacks. And I have a quote from Mr Lipton
He said it was met with universal condemnation. It was

(25:45):
very soil and green. Who are those people on Star
Trek who didn't like the replicator? Yeah? Uh they've since then,
um switched their research to the kind of pre processed
foods that we've been talking about here, you know, creating
like keish or meatloaf for noodles, or veggie chips or
something like that from from kind of deconstructed food bits,

(26:07):
you know. And anything that you can run through a
food processor and shove out as some kind of loaf
is basically okay for three D printed food, But anything
more advanced than that seems like a no go at
the current moment, which, by the way, I do want
to say is not necessarily a dis on that kind
of food construction method, because I mean, like we said,
in those in those protein related episodes that that lab

(26:29):
grown beef stuff was in those aired back in September,
if you guys want to go look for them if
you missed them. But a lot of the food that
we currently like, like bologna, for example, is already really
highly processed. Lots of cold cuts, in fact, are made
from deconstructed or emulsified meat that has been shaped and
rebonded using animal or vegetable proteins. Rebonded. Okay, three D

(26:53):
printed food. I think that means we're sort of a
little bit closer to replicators, but not really. I mean,
this certainly isn't assembling food at the molecular level for
magic meal production, And first of all, it's not assembling
the molecules that make the food. The whole process works
on the macro level. It's laying down little dots of

(27:14):
pre prepared edible ink. And those dots, I mean they're
made from a recipe, So it's pre prepared powdered dough
or tomato sauce or cheese. It's not like molecules of
carbon and calcium and things being put together one at
a time um on a spaceship. It seems like these
printable materials would have to be pre prepared. It also

(27:36):
is an instant I mean, if you watch this going,
I again not to knock it, but it's really pretty slow.
Yeah it's three D printing. It's not gonna go immediately.
It's not gonna pop out in a few seconds like
the replicator does. It also doesn't really solve any problem
about sourcing nutrition, the scarcity thing. So if we had
a replicator, we wouldn't have to worry about where food

(27:58):
came from. It could just make it out of anything.
This needs to make it out of food, right, And
in fact, it involves a whole bunch of processing of
regular food in order to get it to a state
that you can put it through this printer. So exactly.
So it's really more just a way of a very
convenient way in space perhaps, but a way of turning

(28:19):
bulk food stuffs into recognizable dishes on a spaceship. Uh.
But what else is there? I mean, I think it's
time we just go back to nanotechnology. Uh, that's that's
the solution to everything. But this is I think if
we want to talk about real proposed technology that people

(28:41):
are actually thinking about, this is the closest thing. We're
going to get to the idea of the replicator, which
is the idea of the molecular assemblar slash nano factory.
So what's the deal with the molecular assimilar slash nano factory?
All right? The idea of it goes like this. Picture

(29:02):
all of those great factories you've seen, and like how
it's made. Okay, done, coke bottles or all right, Now,
picture all of that on the nanoscale with like entire
factory floors taking up some some dozen nanometers, as as
molecules are being sorted and atoms are being rearranged, and
then increasingly large molecules are built and pushed out through

(29:24):
increasingly large factory floors. Um this this is accomplished not
just through mechanical manipulation but also through chemical reaction. Right,
You'd be like positioning reactive particles at certain points to
form a chemical bond with something to move it along
exactly and eventually so you're you're going to get macroscale
bits that more bigger machines can use to build whatever

(29:47):
you'd like. Okay, So that's sort of like a printer idea,
but it's like printing one atom at a time kind
of and and adding them together more and more until
you have building blocks you can work with, and then
eventually you can produce a computer or a steamed fish
or I don't know what steamed fish replicator, Give me

(30:12):
a steamed fish. Well, you know, whatever you'd like. Steamed
fish is very healthy. Um. But but okay, so how
realistic is this? Well, I'd say we're probably not even
close if this is possible at all. So people like
that this was made popular. The idea of molecular simblers
was made possible by one of the big minds behind nanotechnology,

(30:34):
who was ka Eric Drexler. And there was another nanotechnologist
named Richard Smalley who sort of argued with Drexler that
they published back and forth years ago. It was more
than a decade ago um about whether molecular assemblers were possible,
and and Smalley had criticisms about how these machines would

(30:54):
be too clumsy to do what Drexler was saying that
they could possibly do. Um. But obviously I don't have
the level of technical sophistication or knowledge to adjudicate this.
It seems to be a debate that's ongoing whether it's
possible to build synthetic machines machines right thing in order. Yeah, yeah,

(31:16):
at that scale and that elegance, in order to do
what we want them to do. Right. But it it
does seem that if it is possible, it's not like
we're almost there. It is going to be a ways
off if it's possible at all. Sure, and some some
other thinkers like like Mitio CaCu have have pointed out
that molecular assemblers do exist in real life. I mean

(31:37):
in nature. Yeah, that that that's almost a trivial fact
actually in biology, like you know, enzymes and ribosomes, right,
because we I mean every day turn um, you know,
a glass of water and a burger or whatever into
cells in our body. Yeah. So ribosomes are they are
these structures inside the cells in your body that they

(31:58):
take a bunch of amino acids. It's like, I want
to fix this up, and they make chains of amino acids,
turn them into proteins, and then those proteins are the
things that make your body. Yeah. Yeah, I was I
was laughing off camera because off off Mike, because I
enjoyed Joe's intercellular narration voice very much. Okay, so what

(32:19):
about synthetics. Do we have anything along the lines of
a ribosome that's actually been created in the lab, well,
believe it or not, something kind of close. So last
year there was a news release from the University of
Manchester discussing how a team based in their School of
Chemistry had created a machine that's kind of like an
artificial ribosome. So it's a synthetic molecular machine on the

(32:42):
nanoscale that's capable of putting together molecules and it's much
slower than a real rubiosome, but basically it works. And
their findings were published in the journal Science in and
so that's really great, but it's very it's small scale,
it's low, and it's not versatile, right, it's not versatile

(33:04):
like the idea of a real replicator. So I don't
I don't want to just shove that aside. I mean,
that's really cool research, but it's not if you saw
a headline saying like we've built a replicator, that's not
what it is. And and one of one of the
other problems that we're talking about here is um the
amount of energy it would require in order to I mean,

(33:26):
I mean some some of these terrific advances that we
have been talking about are operating at a cellular level
which is really quite small and very slowly, and in
a lab which has huge resources. Um, how how how
is this ever going to be practical or scalable? Yeah,
it's a good question whether you're going with the sci

(33:46):
fi Star Trek model where the mechanisms are I'm just
not sure what they are, or you're going the nanotech model.
Either way, you've got big hurdles. The star Trek model
seems to have this completely unreasonable energy requirement. Um. The
nanotech model is based on mechanisms that we can't really
predict if they're feasible at all. So what does seem reasonable?

(34:11):
I want to say a few things. Um. One thing
is I think I'd be personally more willing to accept
the idea of a future machine that turns waste material
into something like bulk sugar or a homogeneous mass of
protein gruel, which would maybe like the main constituent of
some kind of like space tofu sure, Um, some kind

(34:34):
of building blocks, so that we could at least create
stuff that could be used by by real actual chefs,
right right right, you would be making constituents of food
rather than whole complete dishes that are programmed with atomic
precision to have this side and this main course. And yeah, yeah, yeah,

(34:57):
that seems fanciful to me. But I and see with
some degree of plausibility, maybe you know, you just take
the waste products from the ship and you have some
chemical process that turns them into usable carbohydrates. Okay, maybe
we can go with that. But there's also this interesting

(35:18):
Uh it's a it's a problem that Lawrence Krauss talks about.
And he's a physicist cosmologist, and he has a book
called The Physics of Star Trek. Yeah, and it's this
atoms to bits problem. So, uh, the best I can explain,
the way I understand it is, once you're talking about
a complex enough piece of matter, the amount of information

(35:41):
you would need to represent it digitally and thus to
read and write and store it is just ludicrously huge.
Um and so, and how would you assemble it quick enough?
So if there's just some massive identical copy and paste molecules,
you're making the same molecule over and over, that seems
a little less fantastical to me. Um. And in fact,

(36:02):
it might even be able to be done with some
very simple chemical reactions, Like you wouldn't even be doing
it mechanically. Maybe you just introduce some catalyst and and
you're doing the chemistry right there, just mixing it up basically.
You've also you've also got scaling problems here. I mean,
I mean, let's say that we've got nanobot armies that
can construct whatever atoms we want and whatever configurations we want. Um,

(36:25):
Like you kind of alluded to a second ago, Joe,
it could take a nano scale machine millions of years
to construct a meaningful amount of macro scale material. I mean,
remember that the nano equals billionth like, like, there are
some hundred and fifty billion atoms making up just the
genetic material that the DNA and RNA inside a single
human cell um. And that's some of the smallest bits

(36:48):
involved in in a cell. So so you know, even
if you had trillions of nano bots, it could take
a serious minute to create a burger. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um.
I think that's something that's often skipped over when people
are discussing this molecular as simbler or nano factory idea.
Seems like it would take a long time. Yeah, like,

(37:08):
I cannot imagine that the number of nano bots that
would require be required to do that kind of work,
And and you're basing this on on nanobot magic to
begin with, so it's like, welp, yeah, I also want
to introduce a maybe less scientific concern, but just something
that we would also need to keep in mind. The
idea of eating normal foods in space almost necessarily to me,

(37:31):
requires artificial gravity. Oh sure, I mean it was. It
wasn't t Earl gray hot in a hermetically sealed container
that isn't going to spill face te Earl gray hot
to scald me. It just floats out of the cup. Uh. Yeah,
it doesn't make sense, Like, oh, I really want a sandwich,
but you can't put it down or the pieces of

(37:53):
bread and everything float apart, and also all of the
crumbs from the sandwich start mucking up your computer systems. Yeah,
i'd I'd almost have to imagine that for this to
even be worth it, you'd need artificial gravity, I guess,
for except some specific types of food that would be
easy to clump together. Sure, yeah, just just add lots

(38:14):
of magical clumping nanobots and then, like an apple would
be fine, I guess, you know, not so much like
a ball of cotton sour soup. I although, from from
what I understand about space food, everything is presented in
cube form like like like like bite size forms, so
that you could so that you don't have to bite
anything off. Ever, you can just pop a single unit

(38:34):
of it and chew with your mouth closed. So that's
the kind of future I want to live in. Everything's cubes.
You've got a board cube, you've got a dinner cube,
and that's it. Okay, So let's put on the I
believe had again. Sure, I just I believe. I believe
there's a replicator. It's coming in twenty to forty years. Sure, sure,
we got it. What does it actually mean? What? What

(38:56):
are the implications of replicator technology for the world. Lots
of people talk about about this idea of a post
scarcity economy, right, so that the economy is based on
the fact that there is a limited amount of stuff
and people are competing for goods, you know, and that
you can't get everything you want, and that's why we
have things like like money as as a workaround to

(39:18):
to trade for stuff that you need that you don't have. Yeah,
but how radically would it change society if you didn't.
I mean, if you could have any physical thing you wanted,
we we would be free to to to do whatever
we wanted to to to work out new problems, to
seek out new life and new civilizations. I mean, you know,

(39:39):
it's we would We wouldn't be tied to the same
daily grind that we are right now. I think that
that could be true, But I think you would have
to take on board one other assumption, um, which is
something about energy. I would like to observe that even
in the Star Trek universe, a replicator is not completely
a free lunch. You're still making one investment, which is energy, right, Yeah, yeah,

(40:05):
so you need energy to run it, and if we
are to stick with the ideas of physics, it may
take a lot of energy. Yeah, I'm picturing right, you know,
like we were talking about earlier, when you're getting down
to the to the molecules and and and splitting atoms
and stuff like that, that's dangerous energy territory. Right, So

(40:25):
this would depend on basically a vast energy surplus. And
there are sci fi thinkers and future ologists and all
kinds of people who have imagined that in the future,
energy could become its own currency, like I think Arthur C.
Clark imagined that in the future you wouldn't have dollars,
you'd have megawatt hours. That's the currency you use um.

(40:47):
And so if that is the case, if we still
have limited energy, then I can see a replicator not
really fixing the problems because you'd just be trading one
scarcity for another. Right, You're just transferring it to an
energy problem you would have to work out called fusion
or whatever in order to run your replicators. And then right,

(41:08):
but so if we assume you've got replicators and you've
got basically limitless free energy, then okay, then maybe I'm
on board with the idea this post scarcity thing is
for real. I mean, do you think it would really
end all wars? It was? Was that nice French fellow? Correct?
Do you think? I don't know if the idea of

(41:28):
uh so you could have any foods you wanted manufactured
on the spot and it's just free food on demand,
whatever you want. Uh I don't know if most wars
are started by people who have trouble getting enough to eat.
I you know, certainly revolutions have been started over scarcity
or or unequal distribution certainly of resources um and and

(41:52):
lots of fighting has been done over particularly desirable or
fertile bits of land, especially in pre industrialized ages. UM.
But you know, I don't think it's necessarily a war
ender because humans are still humans. But but right, you know,
like we were saying it, it frees It frees people
up to do more of what they want to do

(42:14):
rather than you know, it removes a layer of what
has to be done. Right. So I guess the question
then is, once people have no rational motivation to fight
each other, would they still do it? I mean, would
they come up with reasons? I don't know, you know,
I which is which is probably appeared on my shoulder
and told me I had the start of war. It

(42:37):
happened penguins, and penguins are pretty mean. Okay, So even
if we never get replicators, I do want to emphasize
that some of the technologies we mentioned today that have
been maybe mistaken for or yeah uh, not entirely accurately
compared to a replicator can still make a big difference.

(42:57):
So I want to emphasize again lab grown meat. I
think that's awesome actually, and it really it really could
in the future, if made cheap provide nutrition to millions
of people with a much smaller carbon footprint than real
meat and without animal cruelty. And that's definitely a real thing,
oh sure. And and three D printed meals in space
could make space travel much more comfortable, which could be

(43:19):
a huge factor in trying to uh set settle other planets, right,
I mean comfort matters when you're in space. You've got
people who are astronauts. They need to be performing at
their mental and emotional peak. Food is a big part
of that. If you're eating nasty gunk from a sealed container,
I mean that it wears on you. That doesn't help. Um. So,

(43:43):
and even if somehow we are able to create this
magical Star Trek style replicator, I guess it probably would
be a huge boon to human life. Even if it
doesn't eliminate war or energy is an issue or any
of that, it's still if it just means more people
have access to nutritious food. You can't really look down

(44:04):
your nose at that. Oh absolutely not that that would
be a lovely thing right now in this on this
current planet, not even not even with Star Trek jumpsuits. Involved.
So I think that just about wraps up our conversation
here about food replicators. UM. We hope that you have
enjoyed this episode, and hey, if you have any ideas
for other episodes that you would like to hear, please

(44:25):
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(44:47):
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