OrionWorks wrote:
I believe the esteemed Mr. Clark also suggested we should stop
burning petroleum and learn how to eat it as well. ;-)
He did, and it is a darned good idea. Actually, for the most part we
do this already, since we use petroleum-based fertilizer.
Oil consumed as food also ends up as carbon dioxide, of course, but
overall oil consumption would fall if we eat the stuff because cars
eat 10 times more fuel than people do.
Eventually we need cold fusion-based recycling of sewage, that
produces sterile, bacteria free, odor free fertilizer and plastic,
with something like a thermal depolymerization plant.
Regarding futuristic replicators that produce any kind of food you
want, I touched on them briefly in chapter 16. In the upcoming
Japanese edition of the book I added some interesting details,
including image #1 from IBM's STM Image Gallery, "Atom":
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/atomo.html
I do not know whether the publisher can use that image or not, but
anyway, in the text I say that this kind of technology may be the
first primitive step toward atomic level manufacturing, in which a
single machine can assemble any object, atom by atom, molecule by
molecule. The input will be from an array of elements. Or, if
small-scale nucleosynthesis can be perfected so that we can make any
element we want, perhaps the raw material will be one large chunk of
a single element. It would be something inert and dense that does not
take up much space or cause a health hazard. My guess is: either
water or gold. Needless to say, Clarke and others predicted this
decades ago, and Clarke described it in detail in "Profiles of the Future."
For a food synthesizer, basically all you need are hydrogen, oxygen,
carbon, and pinch of salts (sodium and potassium). The hoppers for
other elements would run out infrequently, like a little-used color
in a multi-cartridge high-end inkjet printer. (A professional artwork
inkjet printer such as the Epson 2200 has seven color cartridges.)
I should probably translate that section from Japanese into English
and issue a new version of the book, but I am heartily sick of
translating. Sergio Bacchi is translating the book into Portuguese,
and I promised him I would replace the Introduction with a less
prolix version based on the Japanese edition, but I do not have the
moxie to deal with it now.
- Jed
