"Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
You may recall the clipped tones of Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise ordering his tea from the ship's replicator, a device that could reconstitute raw matter into any substance and shape desired. And as the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation is upon us, so, too, is real replicator technology. We call it 3D printing.
While industrial 3D printers have been used for rapid prototyping and research purposes since the '80s, this technology is swiftly advancing and now used to generate replicated car parts, dental ware, bicycle chains and more, as layer upon layer of resin or polymer build these objects.
But what's truly remarkable is that now for under $1,000, you can buy your own desktop replicator and make 3D objects in the privacy of your own home. An adjustable wrench to fix the leaky faucet? Replacement knobs for appliances? A bottle opener for an afternoon beverage? Done. It's a do-it-yourselfer's dream. And we've only just begun.
Imagine the day when you can go to Amazon or an app store and buy the digital model, download it to your 3D printer and create the desired object yourself. It doesn't seem possible. But the day is coming. Which leads me to ponder the implications of this new supply-and-supply marketplace and how our society will handle it. It's something that the U.S. Postal Service and certain brick and mortar retailers ought to be contemplating.
While the main purpose of the Star Trek replicator was to provide food, the concept of it meant that anyone could have anything at any time. If there is no material scarcity, then what possessions does one value? In fact, material possessions would lose their value. It would not matter what kind of clothes you wear, car you drive or how much you get paid. No one lacks the latest fashions or ever goes hungry. As long as they can afford a replicator and the supplies to operate it.
In short, needs are met without money exchanging hands.
How would society react if material possessions lost their value? In a world with replicators, real value would have to be found in who you are as a person and not in the status you derive from your wealth or possessions.
Could we evolve to consider thoughts and ideas among the most valued things? And could people's behaviors, such as replicating for those less fortunate, become what we admire, as opposed to the car someone drives?
If you didn't have to work to live or eat, farmers could grow what they fancied or stop farming at all. Artists would create with abandon. Scientists would innovate ad infinitum. Monetary barriers to higher education would be removed. Gas could be replicated and end our dependency on fossil fuels.
In short, as our unfettered sense of altruism grew, real value would be found in our humanity. That's my vision of the future.
Of course, the world is filled with people driven by money and power -- the kind that might use a replicator to fuel their hate and destruction. We can likely anticipate an era of chaos -- a darkness before the dawn -- as technology takes us to places we haven't been. But we've survived it before. When gunpowder replaced bows and arrows. When Einstein split the atom and his miraculous new energy source was turned into a bomb. When the Internet proffered recipes for homemade drugs and suicide bombs.
Is it possible that history won't keep repeating itself?
Clearly we need to evolve as a species before we can successfully live in a world with replicators. But it starts with redefining what we value. And then we must continue to educate ourselves. To embrace diversity. To seek peace. There's time... but is our technological clock ticking faster than our evolutionary one?
So im sure this is the start of the 'wish machine' future that Gene Rodenbury wrote about.
However, how will this generation of greedy finance orientate humans deal with this financial disaster waiting to happen.
*Veggi cell is a substance produced on mass that is basically plant cells that can be used to help create the texture, feel and basic structure of any vegtable of fruit based foods.
Joe from Earth
The idea of a transporter was that your matter was converted to energy but the pattern of the matter was stored in the transporter. The energy then was beamed to a new location and using the stored pattern re-assembled. A replicator did something similar except it used raw material that was assembled according to standard, stored patterns. So a little bit of some dense material, like lead, is converted to energy, beamed to the replicator and assembled into the standard, stored pattern of a china tea cup with early gray tea, hot, in it. It's just a transporter with a memory card.
But I also always figured that this transporter technology required lots of energy, the kind of energy that could only be produced by a matter-antimatter engine. In any other system it would be easier and cheaper to just wash china tea cups and brew tea in a teapot after heating regular water in a kettle over a low energy heat source. Only in a starship with hordes of energy from it's matter-antimatter engines would it make sense to replicate the item.
So the idea that replicator technology makes products cost free is not really accurate. It requires ENERGY. Oh well.
Without the motivation of survival, society would rapidly collapse. If people don't have to work to survive, who are you going to find to do all the millions of necessary yet somewhat unpalatable tasks that keep a country running? Without the threat of starvation, who is going to take away garbage, maintain roads, keep power plants running or provide healthcare? Nobody wants to do these jobs, they do them because they don't have a choice.
A perfect example would be the early establishment of communism in China; rural peasants were guaranteed food regardless of how much they produced themselves. As a consequence, they left the fields untended, eventually resulting in a nationwide food shortage. And who exactly is going to be producing the vast quantities of raw materials required to operate this replicator society?
Given the chance, most of us will take greed and laziness to fatal extremes, it's just how we're built - look at the rampant consumerism and obesity present in America and some other developed countries.
As replicator technology improves we will become voluntarily communist. And as a libertarian I mean this in good way not the kind we have had so far with the mass murders. This is because the central problem with involuntary communism is how to allocate resources. Replicators will eliminate much of these problems and people will share willingly because there is no cost to them.
That there seemingly inscrutable comment is absolutely true, directly bearing on the title and article, and will bear any degree of scrutiny.