10 ms·

This induces some severe Star Trek replicator fantasies. Though I assume the result of this compares to having a cup of earl like opening a lego drawer vs. a vi

This induces some severe Star Trek replicator fantasies. Though I assume the result of this compares to having a cup of earl like opening a lego drawer vs. a visit to Legoland

TeMPOraL 5y ago
I've been thinking about it a lot, and I feel that the road to Star Trek replicator is not through matter synthesis. Instead, a better way - perhaps the only way - is through some sort of universal feedstock (or few of those) and a library of carefully designed chemical processes (possibly involving nanoengineering). It seems nice at first - the idea of turning raw energy into things. But the amount of energy required is just ludicrous, going through antimatter intermediary is extremely dangerous, and... there's really no point. It isn't buying you anything. If you tried to store the amount of energy needed to replicate a kilogram of stuff in some advanced batteries, you'd quickly discover that those batteries now weigh a kilogram more. E=mc^2 works both ways - storing energy adds mass. So, unless you can literally fly through a star and suck it dry as you replicate your tea, replicators won't be reducing weight of a starship. It turns out, matter itself is the ultimate energy storage device. And then, turning energy into matter just gives you elementary particles. You need more work to assemble that into useful stuff. This is nuclear work, and then chemical work. So why not just ditch the matter/antimatter intermediary, and start from some feedstock that already has the necessary elements, and is optimized to be easy to react into the stuff you want (and then to be recycled from that stuff)?
- imglorp 5y ago
  I think this is right. And this, plus unlimited power (coming soon) gives you the route to the Roddenberry economy where everyone works to improve themselves and society and there is no money. Think about it. If you put dirt in the replicator and you get a Rolex or a hamburger or a garment, you don't need money for anything: everyone is equal and they can go off and study or work on whatever they want. Wealth is a false proxy for social status anyway.
  - lippel82 5y ago
    Real Estate! That'll be the only valuable thing in such an economy.
    - White_Wolf 5y ago
      we'll all have a pocket universe to design as we wish :D
    - monkeybutton 5y ago
      That's something that always bugged me. Why does Picard get to have an entire, private vineyard to himself?
      - layer8 5y ago
        Maybe when beaming down to earth they really beam down into a holodeck (or the Matrix).
      - CalRobert 5y ago
        Primogeniture, apparently. Great thread athttps://mobile.twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/1200230627544649735 https://mobile.twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/12002306275...
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        That's a great (and long) thread. Reminds me of a pet theory I have: that the post-scarcity utopia of the Federation is based on expansionism, and not sustainable. They've managed to turn Earth into a paradise and give (mostly) everyone great life quality, but they did this by doubling down on exponential growth, which manifests in the constant need to get more and more planets to join the Federation. You can see the expansionist vibes all over the show, and they've even been hinted at by various aliens in DS9 (although without any mention of economic implications).
        swalsh 5y ago
- dTal 5y ago
  Energy does have one big advantage over matter: you can send it at the speed of light. The implications of this in a world with both mass->energy and energy->mass conversion are left as an exercise for the reader.
  - bovermyer 5y ago
    Unless, of course, you take speed out of the equation by folding space to transport things.
    - ptr2voidStar 5y ago
      Let's not get carried away now - shall we? :)
- scarygliders 5y ago
  Sounds a lot like the CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen) food I've read about in some science fiction novels I've read. It would make sense that if you could "print" food from CHON then to restock during your inter-galactic travels you'd just need to find some nice asteroids with the requisite materials.
  - ptr2voidStar 5y ago
    Fascinating! I've never heard of CHON before. I like this idea ...
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I'm thinking higher level than that, for practical reasons. Assembling complex things - particularly biologics - from raw atoms is a painful, slow, and energy-intensive work. The growth rates of various organisms on Earth give you a ballpark of how fast you can get with this. I for one would love replicators to work faster if possible :). I feel a better idea would be to make universal feedstock (or family of those) out of complex molecules - perhaps proteins, or protein-like nanostrutures. Molecules selected for having energy advantage in bulk reactions and precision nanowork required to assemble the most common things people replicate.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    CHON food would not really work because it doesn't have any sodium or chloride, and who wants to live without salt? (But more seriously, we need our mineral nutrients to survive.)
    - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
      Well, then just add an S and a Cl in there.
      - npongratz 5y ago
        >> ... because it doesn't have any sodium or chloride ... > Well, then just add an S and a Cl in there. If we're talking sodium, wouldn't "S" instead be "Na"? Though I'm guessing sulfur has some importance as well.
- bovermyer 5y ago
  But Star Trek replicators don't work through matter synthesis, they work through matter transformation. It's a variant of transporter technology; a source fuel is deconstructed and then reconstructed in the desired configuration.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I know. Or at least that's how I interpreted various remarks during the show. Direct matter synthesis doesn't make sense in this context, but I've seen a lot of people on the Internet assume this is what happens. The way they talk about it on the show could lead you to either theory, for both replicators and transporters. But to the extent we're discussing it as technology we could potentially have, and/or may want to make happen, I feel it's worth pointing out that transforming feedstock is a better design, doesn't require mastery of bulk antimatter processing, and is perhaps closer to possibility than one would otherwise assume. Hell, I'd go as far as saying that there are problems with reasonable "attacks"[0] on the road to a replicator - engineering, chemical and biotech problems we could be working on right now. -- [0] - In the Hamming sense, see https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html.
  - ape4 5y ago
    Like 3D printing.
- unclewalter 5y ago
  Of course I don't think your statement's motive is to understand how we replicate the exact process of what is in Star Trek in the real world. More of a functional equivalent. However, because I have the poster, if you look at plans of the Enterprise, it contains a large volume that is reserved for "bulk matter". I believe it's this, along with some transporter technology enables the replicator to create a variety of combinations of chemicals and materials.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Oh, nice! I never saw that in any of the supplemental materials I stumbled upon. Which Enterprise is on the poster? Do you have a link handy?
    - dougmwne 5y ago
      Poop, gentlemen. The bulk matter is poop.
      - Razengan 5y ago
        And red shirt corpses
      - unclewalter 5y ago
        dougmwne's right. Though I can't find my poster online (for the life of me), the technical manual is pretty clear: [...]The various waste sludges recovered from the water recycling processes are a valuable resource. The organic waste processing system subjects the sludge to a series of sterilizing heat and radiation treatments. The waste is then electrolytically reprocessed into an organic particulate suspension that serves as the raw material for the food synthesizer systems. Remaining byproducts are conveyed to the solid waste processing system for matter replication recycling. [...] Material that cannot be directly recycled by mechanical or chemical means is stored for matter synthesis recycling. This is accomplished by molecular matrix replicators that actually dematerialize the waste materials and rematerialize them in the form of desired objects or materials stored in computer memory. While this process provides an enormous variety of useful items, it is very energy intensive and many everyday consumables (such as water and clothing) are recycled by less energy intensive mechanical or chemical means. Certain types of consumables (such as foodstuffs) are routinely recycled using matter replication because this results in a considerable savings of stored raw material (See: 13.5). From tngtm section 12.5: https://xaeyr.typepad.com/files/franchise-star-trek-tng-technical-manual1.pdf https://xaeyr.typepad.com/files/franchise-star-trek-tng-tech...
- noneeeed 5y ago
  That's basically the idea in The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson. It's years since I read it but it's set in a world of nanoengineering where whatever you need can be created out of common feedstock.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I've never read it. Thanks, I'm fast-tracking it to the top of my "to-read" pile!
api 5y ago
Unfortunately the energy requirements of those replicators would be ludicrous… like 10x the yield of the Tsar Bomba (largest H-bomb in history) to make a cup of tea. Replicator malfunction would be an extinction level event. Just do E=mc^2 on the mass of your cup of tea.
- Retric 5y ago
  More like 1/10th the Tsar Bomba. 1KG = 9e16J, where the bomba was ~209 PJ or 2e17J and a cup of tea is only like 0.2kg so 2e16J.
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    So only merely wiping a city off the map, nothing as dramatic as an extinction level event, then? ;)
  - rainworld 5y ago
    Twice that. One cup antimatter, one cup ambient matter.
    - ta988 5y ago
      I would prefer a cup of dark matter please.
      - airstrike 5y ago
        Joseph Mallozzi has you covered, then
    - Retric 5y ago
      Not everything that produces mater also produces antimatter otherwise the universe would be a 50:50 mix of each. Why Baryon asymmetry exists is unknown, but as long as we’re talking magic tech we might as well make it efficient.
      - 5y ago
simion314 5y ago
Star Trek will use existing matter to replicate stuff(but maybe not all the time) , otherwise it would cost a lot of energy.
newpavlov 5y ago
You forget about one smaaaal issue: disposal of created antimatter. Also why bother creating matter from energy when even today we are able to create stockpiles of raw elements (although quite inefficiently and with almost no control over isotopic composition). Assuming that waste will be converted back to those elements, you don't need those stockpiles be too big and energy consumption will be modest when compared to creation of matter directly from energy.
- csunbird 5y ago
  What about using the antimatter as engine fuel?
Khoth 5y ago
Much like how we can turn lead into gold but don't, this process isn't remotely cost-effective. There's plenty matter lying around that you can have for probably 20 orders of magnitude cheaper.

This induces some severe Star Trek replicator fantasies. Though I assume the result of this compares to having a cup of earl like opening a lego drawer vs. a visit to Legoland

TeMPOraL 5y ago

I've been thinking about it a lot, and I feel that the road to Star Trek replicator is not through matter synthesis. Instead, a better way - perhaps the only way - is through some sort of universal feedstock (or few of those) and a library of carefully designed chemical processes (possibly involving nanoengineering). It seems nice at first - the idea of turning raw energy into things. But the amount of energy required is just ludicrous, going through antimatter intermediary is extremely dangerous, and... there's really no point. It isn't buying you anything. If you tried to store the amount of energy needed to replicate a kilogram of stuff in some advanced batteries, you'd quickly discover that those batteries now weigh a kilogram more. E=mc^2 works both ways - storing energy adds mass. So, unless you can literally fly through a star and suck it dry as you replicate your tea, replicators won't be reducing weight of a starship. It turns out, matter itself is the ultimate energy storage device. And then, turning energy into matter just gives you elementary particles. You need more work to assemble that into useful stuff. This is nuclear work, and then chemical work. So why not just ditch the matter/antimatter intermediary, and start from some feedstock that already has the necessary elements, and is optimized to be easy to react into the stuff you want (and then to be recycled from that stuff)?

imglorp 5y ago
I think this is right. And this, plus unlimited power (coming soon) gives you the route to the Roddenberry economy where everyone works to improve themselves and society and there is no money. Think about it. If you put dirt in the replicator and you get a Rolex or a hamburger or a garment, you don't need money for anything: everyone is equal and they can go off and study or work on whatever they want. Wealth is a false proxy for social status anyway.
- lippel82 5y ago
  Real Estate! That'll be the only valuable thing in such an economy.
  - White_Wolf 5y ago
    we'll all have a pocket universe to design as we wish :D
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    That's something that always bugged me. Why does Picard get to have an entire, private vineyard to himself?
    - layer8 5y ago
      Maybe when beaming down to earth they really beam down into a holodeck (or the Matrix).
    - CalRobert 5y ago
      Primogeniture, apparently. Great thread athttps://mobile.twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/1200230627544649735 https://mobile.twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/12002306275...
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        That's a great (and long) thread. Reminds me of a pet theory I have: that the post-scarcity utopia of the Federation is based on expansionism, and not sustainable. They've managed to turn Earth into a paradise and give (mostly) everyone great life quality, but they did this by doubling down on exponential growth, which manifests in the constant need to get more and more planets to join the Federation. You can see the expansionist vibes all over the show, and they've even been hinted at by various aliens in DS9 (although without any mention of economic implications).
        swalsh 5y ago
dTal 5y ago
Energy does have one big advantage over matter: you can send it at the speed of light. The implications of this in a world with both mass->energy and energy->mass conversion are left as an exercise for the reader.
- bovermyer 5y ago
  Unless, of course, you take speed out of the equation by folding space to transport things.
  - ptr2voidStar 5y ago
    Let's not get carried away now - shall we? :)
scarygliders 5y ago
Sounds a lot like the CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen) food I've read about in some science fiction novels I've read. It would make sense that if you could "print" food from CHON then to restock during your inter-galactic travels you'd just need to find some nice asteroids with the requisite materials.
- ptr2voidStar 5y ago
  Fascinating! I've never heard of CHON before. I like this idea ...
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I'm thinking higher level than that, for practical reasons. Assembling complex things - particularly biologics - from raw atoms is a painful, slow, and energy-intensive work. The growth rates of various organisms on Earth give you a ballpark of how fast you can get with this. I for one would love replicators to work faster if possible :). I feel a better idea would be to make universal feedstock (or family of those) out of complex molecules - perhaps proteins, or protein-like nanostrutures. Molecules selected for having energy advantage in bulk reactions and precision nanowork required to assemble the most common things people replicate.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  CHON food would not really work because it doesn't have any sodium or chloride, and who wants to live without salt? (But more seriously, we need our mineral nutrients to survive.)
  - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
    Well, then just add an S and a Cl in there.
    - npongratz 5y ago
      >> ... because it doesn't have any sodium or chloride ... > Well, then just add an S and a Cl in there. If we're talking sodium, wouldn't "S" instead be "Na"? Though I'm guessing sulfur has some importance as well.
bovermyer 5y ago
But Star Trek replicators don't work through matter synthesis, they work through matter transformation. It's a variant of transporter technology; a source fuel is deconstructed and then reconstructed in the desired configuration.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I know. Or at least that's how I interpreted various remarks during the show. Direct matter synthesis doesn't make sense in this context, but I've seen a lot of people on the Internet assume this is what happens. The way they talk about it on the show could lead you to either theory, for both replicators and transporters. But to the extent we're discussing it as technology we could potentially have, and/or may want to make happen, I feel it's worth pointing out that transforming feedstock is a better design, doesn't require mastery of bulk antimatter processing, and is perhaps closer to possibility than one would otherwise assume. Hell, I'd go as far as saying that there are problems with reasonable "attacks"[0] on the road to a replicator - engineering, chemical and biotech problems we could be working on right now. -- [0] - In the Hamming sense, see https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html.
- ape4 5y ago
  Like 3D printing.
unclewalter 5y ago
Of course I don't think your statement's motive is to understand how we replicate the exact process of what is in Star Trek in the real world. More of a functional equivalent. However, because I have the poster, if you look at plans of the Enterprise, it contains a large volume that is reserved for "bulk matter". I believe it's this, along with some transporter technology enables the replicator to create a variety of combinations of chemicals and materials.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Oh, nice! I never saw that in any of the supplemental materials I stumbled upon. Which Enterprise is on the poster? Do you have a link handy?
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    Poop, gentlemen. The bulk matter is poop.
    - Razengan 5y ago
      And red shirt corpses
    - unclewalter 5y ago
      dougmwne's right. Though I can't find my poster online (for the life of me), the technical manual is pretty clear: [...]The various waste sludges recovered from the water recycling processes are a valuable resource. The organic waste processing system subjects the sludge to a series of sterilizing heat and radiation treatments. The waste is then electrolytically reprocessed into an organic particulate suspension that serves as the raw material for the food synthesizer systems. Remaining byproducts are conveyed to the solid waste processing system for matter replication recycling. [...] Material that cannot be directly recycled by mechanical or chemical means is stored for matter synthesis recycling. This is accomplished by molecular matrix replicators that actually dematerialize the waste materials and rematerialize them in the form of desired objects or materials stored in computer memory. While this process provides an enormous variety of useful items, it is very energy intensive and many everyday consumables (such as water and clothing) are recycled by less energy intensive mechanical or chemical means. Certain types of consumables (such as foodstuffs) are routinely recycled using matter replication because this results in a considerable savings of stored raw material (See: 13.5). From tngtm section 12.5: https://xaeyr.typepad.com/files/franchise-star-trek-tng-technical-manual1.pdf https://xaeyr.typepad.com/files/franchise-star-trek-tng-tech...
noneeeed 5y ago
That's basically the idea in The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson. It's years since I read it but it's set in a world of nanoengineering where whatever you need can be created out of common feedstock.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I've never read it. Thanks, I'm fast-tracking it to the top of my "to-read" pile!

api 5y ago

Unfortunately the energy requirements of those replicators would be ludicrous… like 10x the yield of the Tsar Bomba (largest H-bomb in history) to make a cup of tea. Replicator malfunction would be an extinction level event. Just do E=mc^2 on the mass of your cup of tea.

Retric 5y ago
More like 1/10th the Tsar Bomba. 1KG = 9e16J, where the bomba was ~209 PJ or 2e17J and a cup of tea is only like 0.2kg so 2e16J.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  So only merely wiping a city off the map, nothing as dramatic as an extinction level event, then? ;)
- rainworld 5y ago
  Twice that. One cup antimatter, one cup ambient matter.
  - ta988 5y ago
    I would prefer a cup of dark matter please.
    - airstrike 5y ago
      Joseph Mallozzi has you covered, then
  - Retric 5y ago
    Not everything that produces mater also produces antimatter otherwise the universe would be a 50:50 mix of each. Why Baryon asymmetry exists is unknown, but as long as we’re talking magic tech we might as well make it efficient.
    - 5y ago

simion314 5y ago

Star Trek will use existing matter to replicate stuff(but maybe not all the time) , otherwise it would cost a lot of energy.

newpavlov 5y ago

You forget about one smaaaal issue: disposal of created antimatter. Also why bother creating matter from energy when even today we are able to create stockpiles of raw elements (although quite inefficiently and with almost no control over isotopic composition). Assuming that waste will be converted back to those elements, you don't need those stockpiles be too big and energy consumption will be modest when compared to creation of matter directly from energy.

csunbird 5y ago
What about using the antimatter as engine fuel?

Khoth 5y ago

Much like how we can turn lead into gold but don't, this process isn't remotely cost-effective. There's plenty matter lying around that you can have for probably 20 orders of magnitude cheaper.