If you had replicator technology, would you still cook? (and other replicator oddities)

[Timo]

One has to mind that Quark originally worked for the Cardassians. There would probably have been plenty of limits to what he could do - and plenty of things the Cardassian bosses would have expected him to do in breach of those limits. To the surface, he must have looked squeaky-clean to pass military muster. On the balance, his dark affairs back then may have been darker, though. But he couldn't exactly sell pricey food to the troops that had their own replicators in their own mess halls and quarters, and apparently ("Necessary Evil") he didn't sell high-end replication products to the occupation elite exclusively, either.

Again, it wouldn't be difficult to make profit on free food, as even Quark gets his power needs satisfied from the massively overflowing pool of the station; it would be difficult to imagine Sisko charging him top credit for something so "worthless". And Quark, too, has cheap access to top notch maintenance, even if he doesn't quite realize it at first.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

He has those bottles behind the bar and gets shipments of "real, non-replicated" product in for some reason. Unless said products are replicated at a big factory (mostly) that can handle a larger volume of output than the station's replicators could.

Replicator ration credits are a way to control raw material usage, so somebody doesn't replicate tons of useless food or drink more than they actually need.

 

[Jedi Marso]

I'd probably do some cooking just for fun and variety, but when it came to the simple stuff (like my chicken sammich and coffee) the replicator would be A-OK. No tribbles added, please.

 

[Tomalak]

Replicator ration credits are a way to control raw material usage, so somebody doesn't replicate tons of useless food or drink more than they actually need.

The beauty of the replicator is that everything goes back at the end of the meal, and all the dishes, utensils and uneaten food simply get broken down again and reused.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Plus it helps with weight restrictions. Don't need to carry a whole ton of silverware and dishes (which are apt to be among the first things lost in a heavy battle.)

Would you rather leave behind the fine china, or put the whole crew on a diet so you can keep your Blue willow ware onboard?

Which raises another interesting question; is there any kind of weight restriction regarding souvenirs and bric-a-brac in your quarters?

 

[Spot261]

Given that the D apparently had several decks fitted out as an aquatic environment for whale crew members (which we simply never saw on screen), I'm sure you can bring a few souvenirs home...

 

[Timo]

He has those bottles behind the bar and gets shipments of "real, non-replicated" product in for some reason. Unless said products are replicated at a big factory (mostly) that can handle a larger volume of output than the station's replicators could.

Yes, the fact that Quark has a problem dumping the old kanar heavily suggests the stuff has value beyond, and conceptually separate from, its replicated worth, or else Quark would just hit "recycle", turning it into profitable bloodwine or even just a fresher batch of kanar.

Why Quark doesn't just replicate the well-selling bloodwine is not an issue: for all we know, he indeed does (and then possibly pretends it's this "real" stuff that carries the abstract extra value, since his customers really couldn't tell the difference). The only issue here is that Quark indeed finds abstract extra value in "real" vs. freshly replicated kanar - making us wonder what "real" means in this context. Perhaps Quark laments that a truly discerning Cardassian customer somehow could sense the "realness" of his batch, so pouring it down the drain or recycling it through the replicator really means profits lost.

Replicator ration credits are a way to control raw material usage, so somebody doesn't replicate tons of useless food or drink more than they actually need.

The only appearance of such credits was in VOY, where they appeared to address the twofold problem of energy shortage and damage to replicator machinery. Raw material supply status did not stop Janeway from getting her morning coffee: a cloud that promised an "additional antimatter reserve", i.e. pure energy, would have given her that cup.

This may reflect raw material issues, though. Nowhere else does the replication of a simple beverage involve energies our heroes should worry about; energy consumption in replication is a total non-issue outside VOY (except in the single case of "The Child" where a very special forcefield containment mechanism takes lots of energy to replicate). Perhaps this is because coffee can be trivially replicated by converting suitable raw material stock, but is energy-intensive to replicate if one has to transmute it from unsuitable stock, or from pure energy? Janeway may have been forced to replicate out of pure energy, uniquely among all our replicator-using heroes, and chiefly because her replicators were broken and could not make use of raw materials (which as such should have been trivially easy to restock).

We do know that transmuting / doing the m=E/cc trick is possible: the E-D is credited with the ability to "create elements" in "Night Terrors", even though we don't learn which of these two tricks is the preferred method.

Beyond this, the unique replicator credits of VOY were chiefly a means of maintaining discipline. It's not as if the ship ever suffered of shortages of any sort after leaving the primitive and hostile Kazon space. That is, until "Demon" where the shortage again was explicitly of the energy sort, and of a magnitude that already affected propulsion.

It cannot be emphasized enough that aboard standard starships, there aren't any restrictions. Not until the CO decides to invent some out of whole cloth. A ship capable of flying between stars won't mind a few million extra cups of coffee replicated, a few trillion extra games of Pac-Man played, a few hundred tons of souvenirs per cabin, etc. Yet the skipper can decide that one earring is one earring too many...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tomalak]

Replicator rations seemed like a big deal initially, just like photon torpedoes. As time went on, the crew seem to have more or less resolved this, as they fire significantly more than 40 torpedoes, and build dozens of shuttles, plus two Delta Flyers.

Worth noting that the fresh food cooked by Neelix still seems to feed the bulk of the crew. With the lions share of food provided in bulk, energy savings would presumably be worthwhile.

They rarely have any real shortages throughout the seven years, and evidently don't forsee any over the next 65. Clearly the ship is pretty self-sustaining!

 

[Kor]

I'm sure there is a reason, and I'm sure it probably has to do with fitness. Grilling a steak in a pad of butter might make for a tasty sear, but I'm sure it's somewhat incompatible with healthy officers. Perhaps the health requirements of replicated meals only enable the technology to get close without ever truly replicating the meal exactly. Perhaps food replicators should have been called approximators.

I think such imposed strictness would be questionable. Steak cooked in butter is one of my go-to foods to accompany my intense weight training sessions. Different foods will be beneficial in different ways, depending on a person's preferred fitness modality and specific goals. And they will still be debated.
http://www.bicycling.com/food/nutrition/which-diet-better-cyclists-high-fat-or-high-carb

And in the Trek universe, other species with different body chemistries and metabolisms will need foods radically different from ours.

Kor

 

[Deks]

Replicator rations seemed like a big deal initially, just like photon torpedoes. As time went on, the crew seem to have more or less resolved this, as they fire significantly more than 40 torpedoes, and build dozens of shuttles, plus two Delta Flyers.

Worth noting that the fresh food cooked by Neelix still seems to feed the bulk of the crew. With the lions share of food provided in bulk, energy savings would presumably be worthwhile.

They rarely have any real shortages throughout the seven years, and evidently don't forsee any over the next 65. Clearly the ship is pretty self-sustaining!

They didn't build dozens of shuttles. They certainly trashed a great deal, but most were retrievable and salvageable.
With the resources the crew likely traded off screen with other races, it is likely they managed to repair/rebuild the destroyed shuttles and make more photon torpedoes (or at least, replacing the ones that were used during battles without making extras).

 

[Timo]

We know from several sources that making torpedoes is nontrival. The Maquis were framed for the crime of stealing torpedo warheads in "Tribunal" even though they were known to possess replicators and skilled engineers. And not only the tiny Defiant ("What You Leave Behind") but also the mighty Enterprise (ST:NEM) could run out of torpedoes in battle, despite having replicators aboard. Yet we know of no true showstoppers in the replicating of torpedoes as such. It probably just takes time and computing power as well as the raw simple sort of power to replicate objects that feature complicated forcefields (see "The Child"), so replenishment in the middle of combat is not instantaneous. And if your replicators have taken damage, you probably need to reach a friendly port in which to repair those first - and we know the Voyager reached none till the second season, but plenty thereafter.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Go-Captain]

1. Same meal every time?
2. Why Sisko cooks?
   
3. Why eat at Quark's if the replimat is free? Social?
4. Why does Quark import food? Does his replicator make booze?
   
5. Do repilcators only prepare pre-programmed meals?
6. Are they stand alone, or networked?
7. Freezers and microwaves?

1. We had a deep discussion on how replicators work and it was determined that they do indeed create matter straight from energy, and vice versa, but that they also inaccuracy in chemical recreation. The chemical inaccuracy stems from the fact that there are unreplicatable drugs and a particular mineral water which cannot be replicated. We also know dilithium must not be replicatable and latinum is famous for not being replicatable. Yet, dilithium and latinum can be transported.

What this tells us is replicated food may not be chemically perfect and that is supported by the statement that cooked food tastes better. However, when the 21st century cryofrozen man in TNG, I think "The Neutral Zone" drinks what he thinks is an alcoholic beverage from the replicator, he declares it to be excellent. He is presented as a long time and abusive drinker. In contrast, Scotty spots the replicated stuff right off, disdains it, and insists on real stuff.

That means flavors may actually be imperceptibly random, as apposed to the mechanical sameness we might expect. Also consider that perfect sameness is the hallmark of food branding, different brands have signature flavors which they aim to replicate time and again. Even high end Scotch aims for this, as does every brand of coffee from high to low, as does any burger joint worth its salt. If replicators are a crap shoot which experienced users can notice, it may create a desire for the supposed superiority of hand crafted food.

That desire for the hand crafted is an age old sign of status due to the conspicuous consumption of greater labor. That should not factor into human thought in Starfleet but it is a desire built into us at a somewhat basic level. This consideration that hand crafted equals superior is easily exemplified by some people also believing hand crafted items should be somewhat rough, rather than perfect, and some craftsmen knowing this will purposefully do slightly inferior work to take advantage of that desire.

2. Sisko likely cooks because his father cooks and his father instilled in him the concept that cooked food is of a higher status and quality. As a result, Sisko believes his own food is superior. However, he likely has plenty of experience with replicated food, and as the son of a chef he likely has some talent for cookery to back that opinion.

I agree with those who believe cooking is a 24th century hobby, although it could be a consciously chosen life style of sorts too. The thinking probably does not go much further than that, however there is an element of excitement and exploration for a good enough chef when trying to figure out how to use new ingredients. That plays into the hobby aspect.

Over all though it is the experience. Sisko cooking turns a mundane activity of refueling the body into an experience which enlivens the mind.

3. I agree with everyone that eating at Quark's is for social reasons, as is going to the replimat. I am fairly certain the replimat is overtly free, while Quark's is overtly a paid service. Sisko threatened charging Quark rent, to pay that rent requires income. Starfleet likely covers Starfleet personnel expenses at Quark's, and non-Starfleet customers likely pay as we would today.

I believe it is more than just social reasons to go to Quarks, there is also the experience. High end restaurants and places like T.G.I. Fridays or Chillies aim for a particular customer experience. Some want to provide a one time story you will remember for years, other just want you comfortable enough to come back. Quark aims for excitement thanks to seemingly risky activities and attractive hosts.

In contrast, the replimat is Starbucks. It is a place to socialize, or vicariously socialize by proximity rather than being a hermit and eating in your cell through your private replicator.

4. Goods which are not replicated have the real or imagined superiority. Due to shipping costs, Quark can charge more for such items. Replicators also tend to make synthohol rather than alcohol, by having no replicated alcohol Quark can charge a greater premium on "the real stuff." He could likely scan real booze if he likes but it would cut into his bottom line, unless he passed off the replicated stuff as the non-replicated. But, if he were ever found out it might break the public trust. There is also a possible legal aspect.

Quark imported root beer rather than replicating it, but why? Either he is going for the higher cost due to import and sourcing, or there may be yet another angle. There may be the weight of law behind groups who decide they do not want their products replicated. This would protect wine vintages and it forces genuineness for things like the root beer. Perhaps they have replicator allowed versions, but their main product might be the high end non-replicated stuff.

Ferengi replicators might also have DRM, or their products might have impossible to replicate chemicals included, which when replicated create a useless or dangerous result. Though, Quark has a Cardassian replicator, so the latter might be true for Ferengi products. Being under Starfleet jurisdiction and possible loss of trust might be the only thing stopping him from replicating those root beer bottles.

5. Replicators are supposed to only prepare preprogrammed food items but we know they can do variations. For instance, I expect no one to believe someone scanned cups of Earl Grey into the replicator at different temperatures, temperature differences must be something done on the fly. Also, we have seen a cup overflow in a replicator, in my mind that means the liquid is handled separately from the cup. Taken one step further, it is not much of a leap to think that if Picard orders his tea with sugar, where sugar was programmed separately, this would be a trivial combination. In that case, having your steak inside an apple pie should be possible even though both were programmed separately.

However, we know as fact that the replicator cannot create something for which the chemical makeup is an unknown. It is possible to download the chemical makeup, or even recite the makeup. It should also be possible to scan a food item by letting a replicator break the item down, but we have not seen that, even if it is reasonable.

6. The replicators on DS9 seemed like stand alone items, in that Quark's replicator had some special features, I think. However, he also hacked all of the replicators on DS9 to produce Quark's themed mugs. Those mugs replaced all mugs for all drinks, which is additional evidence for on the fly combining of materials not initially combined in a single pattern.

The Enterprise-D's replicators are similarly networked, as evidence by the sun and moon god virus thing effecting all replicators to turn the ship into a temple story.

All replicators on one network should have access to all replicators.

Someone mentioned the gift replimat on the Enterprise-D. I believe what makes it special is the open air design of those replicators. They might have more room to create objects of unusual shapes.

7. Freezers and microwaves as respective food preserver and leftover food warmer would be pointless. A cooked meal could be scanned into the replicator for later retrieval. The cooked meal is also about the experience, and left overs might be about prolonging that experience, but it is more about not being wasteful. Replicators make that aspect unimportant as they create limitless food. However a freezer and microwave as part of food prep is different.

Modern high end ovens combine microwave, convection, and steam heating. Something of that caliber can reheat, but a chicken could be roasted, bread baked, ribs broiled and so on. Some food requires a rest in a fridge, so have some sort of cold box would make sense in that regard.

 

[Tenacity]

As time went on, the crew seem to have more or less resolved this, as they fire significantly more than 40 torpedoes

The ship was shown to have stopped and traded several time, it's possible that they had the new torpedoes manufactured for them on one of the worlds with the capacity to do so.

Why eat at Quark's if the replimat is free?

The station is Bajoran, they do use money, I've always assumed that the customers do pay for what they order at the replimat.

Why does Quark import food? Does his replicator make booze?

What if one of Quark's patrons wanted bourbon, and not just whiskey? In order to be bourbon it would have to be imported.

Freezers and microwaves?

We know that replicator can't make certain drugs, so refrigeration would be needed there.

For leftovers, the replicator eats power, power to make the item, then power to recycle the uneaten portion, then more power to make it again. I could see putting the uneaten leftovers in the fridge (or stasis) for the next day.

 

[USS Triumphant]

Except for a few personal recipes that my wife and I would want to cook a "perfect or close enough" version to scan into the replicator, I can't see us cooking with that technology available. What I *can* see us doing is occasionally eating out at restaurants where *they* cook, and then scanning anything we like for future use with our home replicator. Maybe. More than likely, there would be a gazillion such scan patterns on the Federation equivalent of the Internet and no need to actually go places to try those, and we'd experiment with some of those. Maybe some people would try our recipes once we shared them on the 'net. Maybe there would be some sort of rating system for those shares, so that if I did a search for "Korean BBQ Chicken", I'd see the ten most preferred recipes for that on the initial page and could go on down the list from there or dictate modifications to my replicator or refine my search if still not happy.

If the matter is coming from my septic tank, I'm not using a food replicator.

Everything atom in everything you eat - and in every part of you, for that matter - has, at one point, almost certainly been part of biological waste we would find distasteful*. They've also all been a part of stardust. How long ago really doesn't matter much, so long as they aren't composing either one when you want them to be part of a fruit salad.

*As opposed to biological wastes that we seem to find tasteful, like pearls, and musk in perfumes. But those atoms may have been part of those, too.

I think such imposed strictness would be questionable. Steak cooked in butter is one of my go-to foods to accompany my intense weight training sessions. Different foods will be beneficial in different ways, depending on a person's preferred fitness modality and specific goals. And they will still be debated.
http://www.bicycling.com/food/nutrition/which-diet-better-cyclists-high-fat-or-high-carb

And in the Trek universe, other species with different body chemistries and metabolisms will need foods radically different from ours.

Also, with replicator technology, all sorts of little "tricks" of food structure will be possible: food with flavor molecules distributed in such a way as to allow us the same enjoyment, but with the minimum actual content of unhealthy materials included.

If you're trying to figure out how that would work, imagine, for example, salt crystals that you can shake on your food that are only salt on the very outer molecular layers, and then inside are something either healthy or that will pass through your body harmlessly, but flavorless. You could reduce your sodium intake without changing the flavor at all, if you got the balance right. (And btw, this isn't something I'm just pulling out of my tailpipe - it's a concept that food scientists in our world have been working with for a while.)

And *that* may be the main difference between replicated and non-replicated foods: the replicators use all of those tricks to optimize the nutritional content and other healthiness of the foods they produce - and not all of the tricks work *perfectly*, so there are little changes to the food/drink from how they would be prepared fresh. That might even be enforced for replicators on various military or semi-military (Starfleet) ships. If so, though, that really seems like something that could be "corrected" fairly easily for private or commercial replicators. Little third-party firmware upgrade, and you can replicate all the lard you want.

 

[Timo]

1. We had a deep discussion on how replicators work and it was determined that they do indeed create matter straight from energy, and vice versa, but that they also inaccuracy in chemical recreation. The chemical inaccuracy stems from the fact that there are unreplicatable drugs and a particular mineral water which cannot be replicated. We also know dilithium must not be replicatable and latinum is famous for not being replicatable. Yet, dilithium and latinum can be transported.

Naah. We have never heard it stated that dilithium or GPL could not be replicated. And we have no reason to think they could not. Hundred-dollar bills can be replicated today (which follows trivially from the fact that they can be created in the first place - if an authorized maker can do it, so can an equally resourceful forger). Does that make them worthless? No, because replicating a bill is hard work, and not worth the effort. For one-dollar bills, it would be even worse. But we don't have million-dollar bills, because it would be worth the while to forge those.

Replication is well established to come in different levels of difficulty. It ranges from the utterly trivial (a category that includes edibles, the thing where the tiniest error would be the most dangerous - replicating a "working" hamburger would be zillions of times more demanding than replicating a working laptop) to the highly involved (the containers from "The Child" require warp core power and hours upon hours of replicator time). But there's no hard limit either way. You can explicitly replicate stuff as trivial as hydrogen if you bother to. And you can replicate living tissue (for all we know, live puppies and Ops Officers) if you bother to. It just generally isn't worth the hassle, because other sources successfully compete.

Which is why whenever we hear that some stuff can't be replicated, we can just add "here and now". Even a starship may be lacking in means; we don't know if the E-D had any of those famed "industrial" replicators aboard.

What this tells us is replicated food may not be chemically perfect and that is supported by the statement that cooked food tastes better.

But the food has to be perfect or it would be lethal. And people can't taste, not really - it's not a human ability, despite the delusions of some.

However, when the 21st century cryofrozen man in TNG, I think "The Neutral Zone" drinks what he thinks is an alcoholic beverage from the replicator, he declares it to be excellent. He is presented as a long time and abusive drinker. In contrast, Scotty spots the replicated stuff right off, disdains it, and insists on real stuff.

And? Scotty insists on a certain type of drink. He wasn't offered that type, but its future "equivalent". A connoisseur of fine champagne today couldn't stomach fine champagne from two hundred years back, because the definition has changed radically.

Synthehol-based scotch has nothing to do with replication anyway. It's simply a different type of drink, not to Scotty's liking. Real, that is, non-synthehol alcohol is readily available as well (from replicators), and has drawn no complaints.

That means flavors may actually be imperceptibly random, as apposed to the mechanical sameness we might expect.

Why should we expect mechanical sameness? Computer games today deliberately avoid mechanical sameness because it's known to put off the users. Replicators would no doubt do that, too. And we know they do, because every individual portion of the same food looks different in practice despite being replicated (that's Hollywood practical limitations for ya).

That desire for the hand crafted is an age old sign of status due to the conspicuous consumption of greater labor. That should not factor into human thought in Starfleet but it is a desire built into us at a somewhat basic level.

Or then not. After all, there are no polls to support it - merely marketing that begins from the assumption. Nobody has asked 99% of mankind whether it likes the mark of somebody's greasy hand over that of a robot on its pizza.

This consideration that hand crafted equals superior is easily exemplified by some people also believing hand crafted items should be somewhat rough, rather than perfect, and some craftsmen knowing this will purposefully do slightly inferior work to take advantage of that desire.

So why would replicators not do the same? It's cheating in either case.

3. I agree with everyone that eating at Quark's is for social reasons, as is going to the replimat. I am fairly certain the replimat is overtly free, while Quark's is overtly a paid service. Sisko threatened charging Quark rent, to pay that rent requires income. Starfleet likely covers Starfleet personnel expenses at Quark's, and non-Starfleet customers likely pay as we would today.

But pay for what? We never see anybody pay for drinks at Quark's. Wealth only changes hands for abstract entertainment, bets and services.

Quark imported root beer rather than replicating it, but why? Either he is going for the higher cost due to import and sourcing, or there may be yet another angle. There may be the weight of law behind groups who decide they do not want their products replicated. This would protect wine vintages and it forces genuineness for things like the root beer. Perhaps they have replicator allowed versions, but their main product might be the high end non-replicated stuff.

Or then Quark just imports a template, which doubles as a test batch. If it's any good, Quark has a million liters of it at the push of a button (although he will artifically make it "rare" anyway). If it isn't, that's replicator time saved for better profits.

Ferengi replicators might also have DRM, or their products might have impossible to replicate chemicals included, which when replicated create a useless or dangerous result. Though, Quark has a Cardassian replicator, so the latter might be true for Ferengi products.

Or then Cardassians get their replicators from the Ferengi. Either way, Quark's replicators are known to be free of any and all limiters, as Martus in "Rivals" is able to insert a random alien gadget well beyond 24th century science and get it not just copied but also scaled up. (Okay, Martus didn't use a replicator belonging to Quark, but that just makes it worse - any random food replicator in Joe Average's cabin can make super-secret transporter rifles or be turned into a covert ops transporter with sufficient skill and without a shred of authority.)

Being under Starfleet jurisdiction and possible loss of trust might be the only thing stopping him from replicating those root beer bottles.

What should make us think he's stopping? This isn't even a case of him lamenting the fact that he can't dump the poorly selling product or otherwise indicating that the bottles at hand would have value for him.

5. Replicators are supposed to only prepare preprogrammed food items but we know they can do variations.

Eve better, we can see that they only do variations (because the props people can't prepare truly identical dishes no matter how hard they try).

However, we know as fact that the replicator cannot create something for which the chemical makeup is an unknown.

Sure they can - see "Rivals". Or, as you put it,

It should also be possible to scan a food item by letting a replicator break the item down, but we have not seen that, even if it is reasonable.

There's also this:

All replicators on one network should have access to all replicators.

Or then there would be safeguards in place. But all heroes and villains can bypass those, and they aren't limited to fooling with interconnected replicators: they can access a random panel and affect a different random system through it. Possibly not even physically separate systems aren't safe, because the characters can just command the ship's self-repairing functions to make those physically connected first...

But the tampering issue is relevant in a more general sense, because we know users can tamper with their own replicators. They love to tamper with the settings of their holosimulations, and pay hard money for settings carefully created by outside artists (unless those donate them to the characters out of friendship or perhaps for ulterior motivations). Tampering with replicator settings might well be at least as popular, and would take the place of hands-on cooking as the high-end hipster hobby for those with too much spare time. It's just an aspect missing from the onscreen canon of replicator culture so far.

Someone mentioned the gift replimat on the Enterprise-D. I believe what makes it special is the open air design of those replicators. They might have more room to create objects of unusual shapes.

Quite possible. Although one would assume such things would be needed in cabins, too, to create that adult pheasant on a vegetable bed...

Replicators make that aspect unimportant as they create limitless food.

Also, they do it in a fashion that makes it look dirt cheap or indeed completely free of costs. Plus they act as garbage bins, again being used as such with complete abandon and disregard of cost.

It might be fun to go to a restaurant today and try out food that is ten or fifty times more expensive than the regular variety, just to see if it's as much better as the cost suggests. Would anybody do that when a meal prepared at a cost, any cost, would automatically be infinitely more expensive than the regular variety, though?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Guy Gardener]

They're all accidentally vegan?

Until this...

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Hmmm?

Pulaski talking about Kyle Riker, without hinting that she's seem him naked?

Wikipedia reminds me that Kate doesn't drop that bomb for another week.

 

[Go-Captain]

Naah. We have never heard it stated that dilithium or GPL could not be replicated.

This appears to be from the Technical Manuals, however it bears strong consideration. If dilithium and latinum were replicatable then setting up replicator factory facilities linked to mega structure power facilities would be easy and sensible. Dilithium would lose its strategic importance before the development of dilithium regeneration. On the up side it would turn latinum into fiat currency rather than commodity currency.

And we have no reason to think they could not. Hundred-dollar bills can be replicated today (which follows trivially from the fact that they can be created in the first place - if an authorized maker can do it, so can an equally resourceful forger). Does that make them worthless? No, because replicating a bill is hard work, and not worth the effort. For one-dollar bills, it would be even worse. But we don't have million-dollar bills, because it would be worth the while to forge those.

Counterfeit bills are worthless as they lack the backing of the US government as tender and are a crime to produce and crime to use. There are almost always detectable flaws, except perhaps with North Korean counterfeits. When made by either method they cost about 10 cents on the dollar or less, making them highly profitable if they can be used for goods and services or laundered for genuine bills.

In the case of the Star Trek replicators, they can produce perfect modern bills because the entire note is of a level which can be replicated. The major difference though is, replicated bills would cost more than those produced by modern factories because replication requires at least, if not more, an amount of energy equal to the mass of the note.

All US notes weigh 1 gram. That's 90,000,000,000 kj. US power is 300 kj per cent.
90,000,000,000 / 300 = 300,000,000 c
300,000,000 c / 100 c = $3,000,000 for a Star Trek counterfeit.

However, there is no telling how valuable electricity is in the Federation since they can generate antimatter on their ships, never run out of it, and only ever need hydrogen.

Replication is well established to come in different levels of difficulty. It ranges from the utterly trivial (a category that includes edibles, the thing where the tiniest error would be the most dangerous - replicating a "working" hamburger would be zillions of times more demanding than replicating a working laptop) to the highly involved (the containers from "The Child" require warp core power and hours upon hours of replicator time). But there's no hard limit either way. You can explicitly replicate stuff as trivial as hydrogen if you bother to. And you can replicate living tissue (for all we know, live puppies and Ops Officers) if you bother to. It just generally isn't worth the hassle, because other sources successfully compete.

But the food has to be perfect or it would be lethal.

We do have the hard limits on drugs. Given the medical replicator which made Worf's spine, drugs of all sorts should have been easy, yet we must assume even medical replicators lack the resolution to make certain complex chemicals. If it were just a matter of power then we would have seen another instance of dedicating the ship's total power supply to the task.

Yes, certain randomness could endanger lives in replicated food, however there is a difference between random and impossible. I imagine the drugs which must be delivered have impossibly complex proteins or chemicals for then modern replicators. But, for foods, any dangerous random chemicals and such are just de-replicated for another shot. Since the chemical is not impossible to get right it will eventually get it right given enough tries.

And people can't taste, not really - it's not a human ability, despite the delusions of some.

You might as well claim people cannot see either.

We don't know if the E-D had any of those famed "industrial" replicators aboard.

We don't know the features or capabilities of industrial replicators. We might assume far greater output but it could easily be nothing more than greater size for larger single replications, or a built in replicator for automated delivery or assembly. There is no reason to assume greater ability to replicate complex chemicals than the other possibilities.

And? Scotty insists on a certain type of drink. He wasn't offered that type, but its future "equivalent". A connoisseur of fine champagne today couldn't stomach fine champagne from two hundred years back, because the definition has changed radically.

Synthehol-based scotch has nothing to do with replication anyway. It's simply a different type of drink, not to Scotty's liking. Real, that is, non-synthehol alcohol is readily available as well (from replicators), and has drawn no complaints.

When have we seen regular alcohol from replicators? Synthehol is noted as having the same taste and flavor to mos individuals, Scotty's response is a distinct outlier among drinkers in Star Trek. Actually, Picard's brother agrees. This fits with developing a taste for things with greater exposure.

Why should we expect mechanical sameness? Computer games today deliberately avoid mechanical sameness because it's known to put off the users. Replicators would no doubt do that, too. And we know they do, because every individual portion of the same food looks different in practice despite being replicated (that's Hollywood practical limitations for ya).

As I described, consistency is a selling point, therefore desirable. Games are not food, it is a false equivalence. Even the best restaurants aim for consistency within the same dishes. Regular menu rotation and redesign is a different matter.

Common restaurants like McDonalds get around needing to create new menus by way of artificial scarcity (the McRib, pumpkin spice everything) and vast menus.

Or then not. After all, there are no polls to support it - merely marketing that begins from the assumption. Nobody has asked 99% of mankind whether it likes the mark of somebody's greasy hand over that of a robot on its pizza.

Sales support it, items stated as hand crafted sell for a premium. People buy these things and those companies survive despite equivilant goods of supposedly inferior, fully automated, quality.

So why would replicators not do the same? It's cheating in either case.

Everyone knows the product is straight from a machine and therefore inferior. Only the hand crafted "imperfection" counts as a sign of superiority due to greater personal labor and as a way to show the item as overtly unique and therefore more representative of one's individuality.

But pay for what? We never see anybody pay for drinks at Quark's. Wealth only changes hands for abstract entertainment, bets and services.

Quark had a synthehol sale in "House of Quark." That would be pointless unless money is exchanging. We just don't see the transactions. It's not plot relevant, we can just assume small sales like that are somehow automatically tallied, similar to Dr. Crusher telling the fabric seller to charge her ship's account, but no name, or account number is given.

Or then Quark just imports a template, which doubles as a test batch. If it's any good, Quark has a million liters of it at the push of a button (although he will artifically make it "rare" anyway). If it isn't, that's replicator time saved for better profits.

Certainly, testing a product out makes sense, but it still lacks the special characteristic, real or imagined, which the so called real thing possesses.

Keep in mind that he and Guinan both keep the so called real thing behind the counter and Guinan isn't even profit driven, while Quark is. The former shows us there is something up and the latter shows us there is definite value in non-replicated booze.

Or then Cardassians get their replicators from the Ferengi. Either way, Quark's replicators are known to be free of any and all limiters, as Martus in "Rivals" is able to insert a random alien gadget well beyond 24th century science and get it not just copied but also scaled up. (Okay, Martus didn't use a replicator belonging to Quark, but that just makes it worse - any random food replicator in Joe Average's cabin can make super-secret transporter rifles or be turned into a covert ops transporter with sufficient skill and without a shred of authority.)

I don't now about turning a replicator into a life form ready transporter, but we do know they can make rifles and phasers. However, they are also blocked from making phasers and rifles. I am not sure how wide ranging that block is.

What should make us think he's stopping? This isn't even a case of him lamenting the fact that he can't dump the poorly selling product or otherwise indicating that the bottles at hand would have value for him.

If he is found out passing off replicated goods as so called genuine goods he will lose the trust of his customers. That would be a significant motivator for him. If he is upfront about the goods being replicated copies then he is safe.

Eve better, we can see that they only do variations (because the props people can't prepare truly identical dishes no matter how hard they try).

How many times have we seen the same exact replicated food item?

Sure they can - see "Rivals". Or, as you put it,

Not knowing the chemical makeup as in not having it in digital form, not having a physical item to copy, and not knowing it off the top of one's head.

Also, they do it in a fashion that makes it look dirt cheap or indeed completely free of costs. Plus they act as garbage bins, again being used as such with complete abandon and disregard of cost.

Indeed, the cornucopia and cleanliness offered by replicators is integral in my mind to what TNG is, as is trivial means of travel due to transporters.

It might be fun to go to a restaurant today and try out food that is ten or fifty times more expensive than the regular variety, just to see if it's as much better as the cost suggests. Would anybody do that when a meal prepared at a cost, any cost, would automatically be infinitely more expensive than the regular variety, though?

Timo Saloniemi

At three times more expensive there are notable differences, as long as the place is actually good and as long as you really like food. There are bad expensive places which are a waste of money; as they say, "all sizzle, no steak." Once you hit ten times I figure it is just for showing off to clients.

I was looking online for a place to eat once and I saw a menu with crab bisque for $100 and I just "lol nope" at that, it is asinine. That wasn't even a whole meal, just an appetizer, and the place doesn't even have a Michelin star. It's like those $1000 dollar burgers, they're just for showing off how rich you are, or so you can tell people a curious story, it is not actually about eating good food.

 

[psCargile]

Everything atom in everything you eat - and in every part of you, for that matter - has, at one point, almost certainly been part of biological waste we would find distasteful*. They've also all been a part of stardust. How long ago really doesn't matter much, so long as they aren't composing either one when you want them to be part of a fruit salad.

Yeah, I know.

 

[Timo]

This appears to be from the Technical Manuals, however it bears strong consideration. If dilithium and latinum were replicatable then setting up replicator factory facilities linked to mega structure power facilities would be easy and sensible. Dilithium would lose its strategic importance before the development of dilithium regeneration.

Yet replication takes power first and foremost (when the tiny plastic trinkets in "The Child" pose a problem, it is one of power allocation, calling for the warp core to be dedicated to the task), and dilithium is supposed to be key to the production of power. "Let's build a giant oil-burning plant that creates coal" only works economically for a certain set of parameters, and dilithium probably just doesn't meet those. "Let's build a giant oil-burning plant that creates this ideal catalyst that turns all organic waste into oil" is probably both a more accurate analogy and a likelier approach to succeed, but again we can trivially assume that the numbers just won't crunch.

On the up side it would turn latinum into fiat currency rather than commodity currency.

Surely it must be that already? That is, a bar of GPL is not something you can peel little chips off for feeding your kids, but rather an abstract token for great wealth, essentially a very thick and heavy (and most importantly pretty) million-dollar bill.

It's just that it's not coded with something trivially forgeable such as patterns, but chemically (Quark can taste it for the lower units of currency). You can forge that with replicators, but two bars each bearing the same code are only worth one bar, and if you can hack into the system that governs the codes, you don't need to fool around with replicators.

Counterfeit bills are worthless as they lack the backing of the US government as tender and are a crime to produce and crime to use.

Nope - they are perfectly good tender as long as nobody tells the US government. Their value isn't affected by them being illegal, because nobody cares about the law, unless one gets caught. And whether attempting to pass one on is worth the risk or not depends chiefly on the value of the bill.

In the case of the Star Trek replicators, they can produce perfect modern bills because the entire note is of a level which can be replicated.

And those would be worthwhile if they can be slipped to people who don't care about the one thing that establishes whether they have value - the serial number. With small bills, there's no point in caring: you can always dump them forward since nobody else cares, either. But the point of a million dollar bill is that it gets checked, not for imperfections, but for the abstraction of agreed-upon worth you quoted above - the one nobody really cares about because there are no million dollar bills.

The major difference though is, replicated bills would cost more than those produced by modern factories because replication requires at least, if not more, an amount of energy equal to the mass of the note.

Nonsense. The mass or substance of the bill is of interest to nobody, either in the scenario where dollars get replicated (because that doesn't involve replicators) or the one where Trek money gets replicated (because in terms or mass, it's free: if and when you can and do use the machine for your morning coffee, then replicating a fortune in, say, GPL will only cost you a week's worth of coffee.)

We do have the hard limits on drugs.

What hard limit? Some stuff is difficult to replicate in time and in sufficient quantity with the available resources (hytritium to purify the Beta Agni water supply), so field medics won't get it in time and thus won't rush to their replicators. They rush to existing stores instead.

Other stuff is illegal (biomimetic gel) so doctors won't rush to their replicators there, either; when villains do, they get caught somehow, much like the guy who replicated the rifle in "Field of Fire" was supposed to. Or then don't, if they are clever enough, much like the "Field of Fire" guy.

Given the medical replicator which made Worf's spine, drugs of all sorts should have been easy, yet we must assume even medical replicators lack the resolution to make certain complex chemicals.

Or just the patience. Worf's spine did get made, as did a bit of replacement brain in VOY "Emanations". It took time. When our heroes need drugs, they need them there and then.

If it were just a matter of power then we would have seen another instance of dedicating the ship's total power supply to the task.

...And waiting for X hours, X depending on the plot needs. Always assume X exceeds available time and you get clear of the contradiction that some stuff should be unreplicable when certain fantastically difficult things clearly are not.

Yes, certain randomness could endanger lives in replicated food, however there is a difference between random and impossible. I imagine the drugs which must be delivered have impossibly complex proteins or chemicals for then modern replicators. But, for foods, any dangerous random chemicals and such are just de-replicated for another shot. Since the chemical is not impossible to get right it will eventually get it right given enough tries.

Such a method should produce any molecule, given time - including all sorts of molecules no method whatsoever could ever produce. Just wait for the impossible to happen (it always eventually does) and then repeat on that.

You might as well claim people cannot see either.

Nobody can, in a blind test, which is what is relevant here.

We don't know the features or capabilities of industrial replicators. We might assume far greater output but it could easily be nothing more than greater size for larger single replications, or a built in replicator for automated delivery or assembly. There is no reason to assume greater ability to replicate complex chemicals than the other possibilities.

No reason to assume industrial replicators are the specific machines that achieve this greater ability. But no reason to assume there wouldn't be machines that do - after all, the existence of "special" replicators is well established, such as of the machine that gave Worf his new spine.

We do know there are competing methods of acquiring materials (they still mine and refine in TNG). We hear of no competing method of manufacture, though...

When have we seen regular alcohol from replicators?

"Up the Long Ladder". Unless Worf was lying, of course.

Synthehol is noted as having the same taste and flavor to mos individuals, Scotty's response is a distinct outlier among drinkers in Star Trek. Actually, Picard's brother agrees. This fits with developing a taste for things with greater exposure.

Or just a snobby attitude. But it's not a replicator-related issue in the slightest, but a simple synthehol vs. real stuff blind test competition here. Those two are distinct products, potentially as distinct as today's champagne is of that produced in the 1700s (it's not as non-alcoholic beer today would fail to sell because it tastes completely different from alcoholic beer, or that there would be products striving to taste less different). Scotty got synthehol but wanted alcohol - both bottles were replicated for all we know. Or then neither was, but that would go against the concept of everybody everywhere (and especially on starships because you get fewer freaks there, or at least fewer culinary freaks) replicating everything that goes into their mouths.

As I described, consistency is a selling point, therefore desirable. Games are not food, it is a false equivalence.

You can have consistency and you can have variety subtle and gross. There's nothing stopping you there as far as replicators are concerned; the games industry just goes to show how trivial it is to program an arbitrary level of complexity into the product - in this case, food.

Sales support it, items stated as hand crafted sell for a premium. People buy these things and those companies survive despite equivilant goods of supposedly inferior, fully automated, quality.

The customer buys an impression. It doesn't follow the customer understands what he's buying - if the opposite product were marketed as superior, we don't know whether it would sell better or not, but we can surmise it would because marketing apparently seldom fails.

Everyone knows the product is straight from a machine and therefore inferior. Only the hand crafted "imperfection" counts as a sign of superiority due to greater personal labor and as a way to show the item as overtly unique and therefore more representative of one's individuality.

Yet all it takes to turn a machine imperfection to a hand crafted one is mislabeling of the product. It's certainly not a practice the Ferengi came up with. (See artificial flies in artificial amber for a vast industry based on the concept!)

Quark had a synthehol sale in "House of Quark." That would be pointless unless money is exchanging.

The fake Picard in "Allegiance" also offered free drinks to his crew. The words might have lost some of their significance on the way... Although none of their luster, as Picard's gesture raises a cheer. What Quark is doing may well be a gesture as well - after all, giving out free booze would boost his reputation, but giving out free booze at a very special price also helps him recoup! (This is they guy who sells used parts of himself for a profit, mind you.)

We just don't see the transactions.

Which is the odd thing, because while abstract, invisible money should probably otherwise be expected, Quark not only insists on cash in other connections (even at the risk of his life, such as when he's dragging crates of cash to safety) - he is also the type not to suffer a tab!

Certainly, testing a product out makes sense, but it still lacks the special characteristic, real or imagined, which the so called real thing possesses.

Hard to tell whether the latter would have been a factor on the root beer market.

Keep in mind that he and Guinan both keep the so called real thing behind the counter

The value of "real" is different from what you think, though - Guinan keeps hard drugs under the counter and soft ones above, but neither is indicated to be nonreplicated. It's just the synthehol vs. alcohol difference again.

I don't now about turning a replicator into a life form ready transporter, but we do know they can make rifles and phasers. However, they are also blocked from making phasers and rifles. I am not sure how wide ranging that block is.

And of course the one time it is plot-relevant, we see a resourceful villain who gets his gun anyway. Probably the best the system can do to enforce artificial (rather than performance-based) limits is to set up red flags when a villain gets his way with the machine.

If he is found out passing off replicated goods as so called genuine goods he will lose the trust of his customers. That would be a significant motivator for him. If he is upfront about the goods being replicated copies then he is safe.

Quark has soiled his reputation more often than he has his pants over the thought of losing his reputation. It's just caveat emptor - on a frontier outpost, he's ideally situated to swindle without fear of retribution.

How many times have we seen the same exact replicated food item?

The most trivial cases make for the best tests: they never manage to fill up Picard's teacup to the same exact level.

...It's the O'Brien family meals that offer us good glimpses on (non)identical portions.

Not knowing the chemical makeup as in not having it in digital form, not having a physical item to copy, and not knowing it off the top of one's head.

I don't quite understand the scenario. You ask the replicator to produce "Something, you know, stuff, I think it's called asphapha or bespephe or something, and it might be green"?

If this "stuff" exists at all, surely accessing its chemical formula should be trivial. If it doesn't exist or cannot be identified, the replicator will just draw a blank - but won't be uniquely handicapped there.

At three times more expensive there are notable differences, as long as the place is actually good and as long as you really like food. There are bad expensive places which are a waste of money; as they say, "all sizzle, no steak." Once you hit ten times I figure it is just for showing off to clients.

Plus you have to eat somewhere beforehand lest you starve.

I was looking online for a place to eat once and I saw a menu with crab bisque for $100 and I just "lol nope" at that, it is asinine. That wasn't even a whole meal, just an appetizer, and the place doesn't even have a Michelin star. It's like those $1000 dollar burgers, they're just for showing off how rich you are, or so you can tell people a curious story, it is not actually about eating good food.

I gather latinum jewelry might be similar: it's not especially pretty, you can't even peddle it for much, but it's made of money!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[soornge]

my issue is the replicator draw from the bio mass generatd from waste how come it never bothers anyo e they are basically eating yesterdays poo?