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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

At the speed shown on TV, thermodynamics is a problem.

Let's take water as an example. Say you've got a supply of all the atoms you need and a way to place them precisely enough to reliably get water rather than a mix of hydrogen peroxide and hydrogen gas.

When the atoms combine, they release as much energy as burning hydrogen in oxygen. Equivalent problems for virtually everything.

I'm not sure if it's provably impossible, but AFAIK there is no known way to cool this down fast enough to even be stable for the duration of the TV show's materialisation sequence.

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That's why Picard orders "tea, Earl Grey, hot". The "cold" option is still on the roadmap.

https://xkcd.com/2570/

Tea. Earl Gray. Loud.

The energy doesn't have to turn to heat in the first place. A fuel cell can do hydrogen + oxygen = water + electricity.

Although I wasn't specifically thinking of those, catalysts are a great example of why I am somewhat sceptical of anyone who says "this thing is theoretically impossible" unless they actually prove it.

However, for the specific, fuel cells have a lot of waste heat. And even if they didn't, what you're describing in this situation would cause a mixture of ohmic heating and electrolysis in the water while it's being replicated — you need to get the energy out without the last 10% flash-boiling your tea into steam (or even ice cube or icecream sandwich or whatever).

To rephrase what I said before, it might not be impossible, but AFAIK nobody has a solution yet.

IIRC Star Trek style replicators and transporters get around that limitation by freezing time inside the assembly field.

And don't forget about the Heisenberg compensator!

How does it work?

I can either tell you or you can know, but not both

It works very well, thank you.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Okuda#Work_in_Star_Tre... )

I've never heard that lore before.

But we can't freeze time, and even if we could I don't see how that would help get rid of the energy of combustion either.

Oh that's easy, if you freeze time with quad-phasic, flux-capacitance, dilithium crystal matrices, then when they break down from the heat, the excess energy is dissipated into the reversed output of a toroidal sub-space containment field.

Essentially, a bit like a miniature black hole created on demand to dispose of present-day physics.

Easier to just microwave a can of soup, no?

But is it _cooler_ than freezing time to make your cup of chicken noodle?

The United Federation of "hold my beer, I got this": https://imgur.io/gallery/wpZ4w

I half-remember a point in Deep Space Nine where they started using the replicator or transporter to do surgery and I thought "ok, so you have a machine that is Dr. Manhattan, it can literally do anything. Where do you go from here?"

Turns out the answer is genocide (DS9) and screwing around with VR and time travel (Voyager). Pretty realistic.

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