Let’s say you’re hungry. Wouldn’t it be great to walk up to an appliance, tell it what food you want and have that food appear magically in front of your eyes? In the TV franchise Star Trek, this is possible with a piece of technology known as a “replicator.” Getting to a future where this tech exists, though, might take a bit of imagination and invention.
The Star Trek replicator is used to make all kinds of objects, from a hot cup of Earl Grey tea to spare parts for spaceships. Biowaste and other recycled material is broken down into basic parts: water, carbon and other molecules, explains Erin Macdonald. She’s an astrophysicist and science advisor for the Star Trek franchise. Those molecules are then fed into the replicator. When a person asks for an item, lasers reassemble the bits according to a recipe in the computer until it looks like that cup of tea, a dish of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream or a piece of a warp coil.
What, exactly, is the biowaste that goes into the machine? It will probably include poop, says Macdonald. “We don’t want to think about that too much.”
The replicator’s superfast lasers convert incoming matter into energy. Then, they change it back into matter. “On a fundamental level, there is nothing that prevents you from building a replicator-like machine,” says Gianluca Sarri. He’s a quantum physicist who works with lasers at Queen’s University Belfast in the United Kingdom.
But a replicator is just not a top priority at the moment, he says. All that conversion of matter to energy back to matter again would require a lot of energy. Plus, there’s no way to currently make an object appear within seconds. What’s more: Right now food can be generated in a much simpler way — by cooking.
Let’s print a meal
For now, astronauts eat food sent up from Earth. To make sure they get the food they need, future space tourists and crews might rely on hydroponics — growing plants without soil….
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