Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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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)?

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.

Maybe nobody has to starve, work, or even die from anything besides a freak accident ever again, but not all the 100 billion humans who want to can possibly live in Neo-Manhattan (at least until the Mega Dome is finished in 50 years, but then not everyone can live on the Upper Rim). Not everybody can meet the coolest celebrity in the metaverse, or all have the same clever instagram handle. Not everyone can control who is allowed to visit and build on holy sites or nature preserves.

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.

It's true that some things are naturally scarce (like land, or celebrity exposure, or attention), and that people can make things scarce on purpose. It probably isn't possible to work around this - but this doesn't mean we couldn't have a post-scarcity society in spite of it.

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.

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[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".

> you don't need money for anything

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.

Yup. The current intellectual property regime pretty much shuts down any dream of replicator-driven utopia, even if a 24th century starship suddenly showed up in orbit and beamed down working replicators along with full specs.

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!

If that happened, people would just break intellectual property laws left and right until they became unenforceable.

When replicator will be ready to use, you will be able to replicate iphone XXX freely, because copyright for iphone XXX will expire at that time.

Unless the legislators go the Disney route and effectively extend copyright and patents indefinitely.

I'm not sure I follow. Private property exists right now to enable the accumulation of wealth. In a post-scarcity economy, what is the value of wealth accumulation?

“Post-scarcity” is a myth. There will always be some limited-supply thing humans will value.

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.

It's more complicated than that. People are dissatisfied with abundance today because they're being made dissatisfied, in several ways:

- 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.

Power and status. People want something to bargain with, to show off, and to control other people. If money is not an option, information will do (and possibly cryptocurrency, which in some way is both).

Sorry, still struggling to understand here. Today power and status is derived from scarcity. What is an example of power or status not derived from scarcity?

Energy is not free. Humans can always find something desirable/influential that requires more energy than is cheaply available.

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.

That's disappointing. I was more interested in deducing the implications of power assuming scarcity was eliminated.

I appreciate the interest, but see it as pure fantasy. Essence of supply is energy, and we can ALWAYS use however much energy we can get our hands on. Think of the casual interplanetary/interstellar travel depicted in sci-fi: huge energy use for petty purposes. Think of the huge energy use of median western lifestyle, relative to historical norm sustenance living.

Hate to pop the bubble. You are promoting me to further analyze/quantify modern vs sustenance living, in terms of sheer energy consumption.

> Wealth is a false proxy for social status anyway

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.

Real Estate! That'll be the only valuable thing in such an economy.

That's something that always bugged me. Why does Picard get to have an entire, private vineyard to himself?

Primogeniture, apparently. Great thread athttps://mobile.twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/12002306275...

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).

I really think this is right, it would be nice to have a Star Trek like sci fi series that actually tried to tackle the issues. As a series it's been a source of inspiration for decades. It's a shame modern Star Trek is just generic sci-fi drama.

That thread points out some interesting observations about typical Star Trek inconsistencies (another one would be to think about why someone should move to a colony in the first place or rather about why not everyone can simply travel between planets as they like). But the objection against desalination is pointless. We can manage that problem already today (e.g., by drying up the brine or by pumping it into old oil wells). There is absolutely no reason to assume water would be scarce in the 24th century of TNG.

They might have some sort of immigration quotas for the Earth, and if the population is approximately what it is now, then there's going to be a lot of open space, farmland, and wilderness still. That's assuming you have cities with a lot of people packed close together, and rural areas with sparse population. That seems much better than the alternative of turning the entire land-surface of the Earth into a uniform-density suburb.

Maybe when beaming down to earth they really beam down into a holodeck (or the Matrix).

There's plentiful space all over the universe if you're a multiplanetary species.

There's a pretty big difference between being able to colonize the universe and being able to colonize planets near to you. As an example, the Federation wasn't even able to map out a single galaxy nevermind colonize it.

we'll all have a pocket universe to design as we wish :D

I dream of a post scarcity world. Live long and prosper as they say.

We're already there, nearly. Calories are incredibly cheap and a modest dwelling can be produced very inexpensively as well. Humans will find scarcities to focus on, or barring that, make them. (Housing cartels come to mind).

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.

What do you mean you don’t need money? How will you pay for services where people must spend their time to serve you? Any time you start tracking who owes something to someone you have the beginnings of currency. The post-scarcity economy being free of money never really made sense.

If everyone's needs and even all non-extravagant desires can be met for free (or "too cheap to meter" free; this is the "post-scarcity" part), then the need for accurate tracking of value flow vanishes. Everything else can be mostly handled on a pay-it-forward basis, perhaps with a bit of "reputation economy" sprinkled in, and the remaining exceptions don't warrant a society-wide currency.

I would expect the remaining exceptions to be enraging examples of unfairness to any post-scarcity society, and for civilization to really test the boundaries of "too cheap to meter".

Perhaps, but then I would expect people in a post-scarcity society to be fine with the idea that life is not fair - that it's not possible for everyone to have equal access to everything at the same time. I'd expect them to not care that much, having a comfortable life all needs taken care of.

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.

> Perhaps, but then I would expect people in a post-scarcity society to be fine with the idea that life is not fair - that it's not possible for everyone to have equal access to everything at the same time.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

Poop, gentlemen. The bulk matter is poop.

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-tech...

Spoiler for S3 of Star Trek: Discovery - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIIYb04HGbQ

And red shirt corpses

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.

I've never read it. Thanks, I'm fast-tracking it to the top of my "to-read" pile!

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.

Unless, of course, you take speed out of the equation by folding space to transport things.

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.

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.

Like 3D printing.

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.

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.

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.)

Well, then just add an S and a Cl in there.

>> ... 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.

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