- #1
MonstersFromTheId
- 142
- 1
A real Star Trek "Replicator" 4 your home?
Check out this article:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/maney/2005-06-14-replicator_x.htm
This is still a long way from a Star Trek "replicator". Unlike Mr. Gershenfeld's "fabs", a Trek replicator does more than make parts, it'll also make you anything from a cup of hot "Earl Grey Tea" along with a dainty cup to hold it, to an entire meal served up just the way you like it sitting on dinnerware that you don't even have to clean.
No doing dishes or cooking pans! Halla-frigging-luya!
'Course nobody likes to talk about the idea that the input of a Trek style replicator system is usually hooked into the output of the 'ol "waste extraction system" (Ew!).
But that whole idea brings up an interesting question.
Suppose for a moment that things got to the point where most of the food we ate was manufactured at the molecular level by, well, whatever, "replicators", "fabs", whatever.
Suppose most of the power to run such systems was solar power.
At that point, would humanity still qualify, from the stand point of taxonomy, as a form of animal life, or would we at that point maybe qualify as something else? Suppose we get to the point where we can no longer survive without the technology required to make our own food using factories essentially powered by sunlight?
At that point are we still a form of animal life? Or maybe more accurately viewed as a form of cybernetic plant life?
We're all going to wind up bein vegetables! ;-)
Check out this article:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/maney/2005-06-14-replicator_x.htm
This is still a long way from a Star Trek "replicator". Unlike Mr. Gershenfeld's "fabs", a Trek replicator does more than make parts, it'll also make you anything from a cup of hot "Earl Grey Tea" along with a dainty cup to hold it, to an entire meal served up just the way you like it sitting on dinnerware that you don't even have to clean.
No doing dishes or cooking pans! Halla-frigging-luya!
'Course nobody likes to talk about the idea that the input of a Trek style replicator system is usually hooked into the output of the 'ol "waste extraction system" (Ew!).
But that whole idea brings up an interesting question.
Suppose for a moment that things got to the point where most of the food we ate was manufactured at the molecular level by, well, whatever, "replicators", "fabs", whatever.
Suppose most of the power to run such systems was solar power.
At that point, would humanity still qualify, from the stand point of taxonomy, as a form of animal life, or would we at that point maybe qualify as something else? Suppose we get to the point where we can no longer survive without the technology required to make our own food using factories essentially powered by sunlight?
At that point are we still a form of animal life? Or maybe more accurately viewed as a form of cybernetic plant life?
We're all going to wind up bein vegetables! ;-)
