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To vegetarians and vegans: Would you eat Star Trek style replicated meat? Is it considered "vegan"?

To flip the premise on its head, and speak as a carnivore, I would have no problem switching to replicated meat, as long as it tasted like the real thing. I can't speak for every vegetarian out there (my wife doesn't like the taste of meat and my daughter doesn't like the texture), but I imagine for those whose tastes are based on ethical choices, replicators give them an opportunity to enjoy 'meat' guilt-free?

I hope most meat-eaters would agree with you. Even aside from the ethics of killing animals, livestock agriculture is tremendously inefficient and bad for the environment, and switching to vat-grown meat would have great environmental and economic benefits. Not only would it use up far less land, water, and resources, but if meat could be manufactured in cities, then it wouldn't have to be shipped as far to get to customers, so that would reduce costs and pollution as well.

And of course the same would go for replicated meat if such a thing could exist -- though then you get to the question of how much power a replicator demands, since they'd be processing massive amounts of data and might be comparable to AI data centers in their power needs and environmental impact. But then, the Federation seems to have some futuristic way of dealing with waste heat, since their starships never seem to need large heat radiator fins. (Maybe they dump it into subspace? Subspace solves everything...)
 
would replicator cannibalism be wrong if you replicated yourself and ate dead replicated flesh?
 
would replicator cannibalism be wrong if you replicated yourself and ate dead replicated flesh?
A replica of flesh isn't real human so it's not technically cannibalism.
But if you cloned yourself however...
 
Yes, as DS9 reminded us all, killing your own clone is still murder.
Just in case anybody out there was plotting to do such a deed. :shifty:

Kor
 
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