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
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)?
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.
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).
Except for intellectual property, and possibly information in general. Which probably means that protecting it would become even more of a focus than it is now.
It's not really a theoretical consideration - as we get better at turning information into matter, intellectual property laws literally centralize the means of production away from the people!
Ex.: the Star Trek replicator requires staggering amount of energy. Owning one, and affording the fuel, would provide power and status. Were energy cheap enough to give everybody one would enable something next level scarce and desirable/influential.
Hate to pop the bubble. You are promoting me to further analyze/quantify modern vs sustenance living, in terms of sheer energy consumption.
Consider how utterly dissatisfied people are with abundant cheap food, clothing, water, fuel, housing, etc. today vs not all that long ago, having integrated new norms into mundane sustenance making abundance seem unattainable. An hour’s minimum wage today buys medieval luxury but for regulations demanding even better.
- Creating fake dissatisfaction is literally the cornerstone of sales and marketing. To get someone to buy stuff where they otherwise wouldn't, you have to create in them the state of being dissatisfied with what they already have (e.g. make them desire something else, or make them afraid of something). I'm not sure we can blame regular folks for being whiny if the richest industry on the planet is making them whiny on purpose.
- Value engineering means things that were good and cheap, like food and clothing, keep getting worse over time, as companies keep trying to squeeze extra margins. Besides competitive pressure, this is also driven by inflation. Overall result: things that were good before are barely usable today, despite being abundant.
- Related, some people recognize this abundance is being turned into a play to chain and exploit people. The more things are becoming services instead of products, the more people become dependent on providers. It's becoming clearly visible in developed countries: to make use of abundance, you need to keep running the rat race to exhaustion. We're reaching a ridiculous point that, in order to have the good fruits of our civilization, you have to be busy working so hard you that don't have time to enjoy them.
- We're barely few generations into a subset of population having some sort of decent life. Call it being biased by time and place of birth, but frankly, I consider the average quality of life before late 20th century West to be tragic and unacceptable, and current one to be barely scratching the surface of how people should live.
I see no reason to assume that people wouldn't stop consuming obsessively in a post-scarcity economy, if said economy would be able to guarantee actual high-quality goods to meet everyone's needs, without bullshit strings attached (no "X as a Service"!), and without marketers constantly trying to ruin everyone's mood.
Access to healthcare remains genuinely scarce, admittedly, and Baumol's cost disease is a real problem when you need to buy someone else's time.
I'd also expect post-scarcity people to not even stress the "too cheap to meter" boundaries that hard - when comparing with people of today, it's worth remembering that most consumption of non-essentials is driven by artificial needs created by advertising, and advertising is predicated on scarcity. Post-scarcity people wouldn't be brainwashed to consume so much.
Are you kidding??? Life today is better than it has been at any time in history with more opportunities and luxuries more accessible than ever and people still complain.
I think the complaints can be divided into two parts:
- Complaining about how their life is still full of pain and problems;
- Complaining about how the world sucks, is unjust, discriminating, etc.
Humans have infinite capacity for that second type of complaints, but I posit that the first type should go away once life gets good enough.
And note that even for most Westerners, "with more opportunities and luxuries more accessible than ever", the life isn't good because they don't get to make much use of those opportunities and luxuries. They spend almost all their life working in bad physical or mental (or both) conditions, having little time to enjoy those luxuries and opportunities, because they need to keep making money to pay for access. Rents, mortgages and everything-as-a-service are mostly cancelling out the quality-of-life increase from better products and healthcare.
Wealth is just the current proxy. I suspect you'll never be able to fully eliminate a social hierarchy. Many animals compete physically, humans compete socially, and without money we'll find new ways to socially standout. The game just changes, it's not going to go away.
I think people can always invent or discover new things that are functionally finite, and their claims on these kinds of things and the way they decide to distribute it can always theoretically be quantized into something we can understand as currency or wealth. Even if it's not done explicitly, it will simply be done in something like an extremely advanced algorithm or even an opaque shadow economy of networks of favors and patronages.
The way I see it, if "nobody has to starve, work, or even die from anything besides a freak accident ever again", if everyone has free access to as much varied, healthy and tasty food as they want, if they can pursue almost arbitrary hobby[0], or do interesting and challenging service adjacent to their interests - then the bits that remain fundamentally scarce (like land or attention) won't be enough to justify having a money-based economy, and without it, people will lose the reason for creating artificial scarcity. Some people may end up trading IOUs over trivialities like clever Instagram handle - something that, on a global scale, nobody cares about. But there would be no need to e.g. DRM movies or games anymore - the producers aren't getting paid for it, they do it for fun/reputation/self-actualization - so what's the point of making infinitely-copyable good artificially scarce?
Post-scarcity doesn't have to be absolute for it to be a money-less utopia - it's enough to make enough goods too cheap to meter that money becomes irrelevant for everyday life of average citizen.
--
[0] - There will always be limits to what individuals can do - post-scarcity is a practical concept, not an absolute one. Even Star Trek societies wouldn't be able to afford people having a hobby of "detonating warp cores to use the gamma ray flash for interplanetary Morse code".
The implications of this in a world with both mass->energy and energy->mass conversion are left as an exercise for the reader.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[...]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-tech...
Just do E=mc^2 on the mass of your cup of tea.
That's not known. It's also possible that the initial stuff of the universe, before inflation happened, had more particles than antiparticles. Since we have no physics for what happened before inflation started, this wouldn't break any theory at all. It's a bit unsatisfactory as theories go, but it is absolutely compatible with all physical observations so far.
As such, it is possible that the processes of the Big Bang (or whatever came before) somehow created more matter than anti-matter, but all of the physics that comes after is symmetrical with respect to charge. So, we have no reason to expect that we'll ever find a theory explaining why there is more matter than antimatter, just like we don't have any reason to expect to ever find a theory that explains why there are two kinds of electrical charge and not 5. So, it's not a promising avenue for research, and not a promising assumption.
In contrast, there are reasons to expect we will some day find a theory of quantum gravity, since we know for sure matter does interact gravitationally and QM doesn't account for that.
As to impossibilities, we already figured out how to break conservation of energy due to the expansion of the universe. Arguing about what is in isn’t possible for some process we don’t know about seems silly.
Of course, it is possible that one exists, just like expansion of space (which probably does exist, though apparently there are starting to be reasons to doubt that [0]) turns out to be a way to break conservation of energy or the speed of light.
[0] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/09/new-evidence-agains...
Ahh... the YOLO days of nuclear physics...