I wrote: "In the future, if one egg in one store anywhere in the solar system has salmonella, it will be on the front page of every newspaper, like the crash of a 747 today. Heads will roll. Congress will investigate."
I am not exaggerating. I think people will react the way we would if someone added cyanide to the hamburgers at MacDonald's. That would be major news in every country. Steven V Johnson wrote: *) Some will long for the good-old-days. They will pack their bags, > migrate to "primitive" planet and eventually destroy the space ship > they arrived on, including all the toasters and dishwashers a few > might have secretly squirreled away in the bulkheads. It's a clear > indicator to off-worlders that visitors are not welcome. . . . As a rule of thumb, people "going back to nature" go back roughly 100 years, to their grandfather's technology. I read groups in Alaska and the Pacific northwest. They live in cabins and use woodstoves, pumped kerosene lamps with mantles, automobiles and snowmobiles, and multi-shot rifles. That's circa 1900 equipment. In the 1950s "simple lifers" would use horses, single-shot or perhaps muzzle-loading guns, and kerosene lamps with wicks (which are less bright and tend to blow out when used outdoors). These people never actually go back to nature in the sense of living like Australian aborigines did in the 19th century, or using bronze age or stone age technology. For one thing, they would not know how, and for another, people would say they are crazy. Even if they did learn, that is not actually going back to nature, because ancient people were utterly dependent upon stone tools to survive, just as we are dependent on our tools & machines. They were incapable of living in "natural" conditions without fire, man-made tools, clothing and so on. This was true long before Homo sapiens appeared. See the book "Catching Fire." Stone age tools were also not part of a "simple life" because they were not simple. They required a great deal of expertise and skill to fabricate and use, and some specialization and trading. Anyway, getting back to future, I agree that the replicator may cause a spiritual crisis for some people because it will eliminate the need for work. Some of them may well seek a return to the simple life of manual labor, as people do today in response to our technology. They may migrate to other planets. However, the replicator and the end of all human labor will probably not come for hundreds of years in the future, possibly thousands. So these people will not be secreting "toasters and dishwashers" in the bulkheads (or force-fields, or whatever keeps outer space out). That would be like the wife of a 21st century back to nature family secreting a flint spear or dried fungus kindling. (She might sneak in a handheld video game or "People" magazine.) These people will have no idea what a toaster or dishwasher is, because by the end of the 21st century robots will do all the cooking and washing of dishes, and by the time the replicator is common, dishes and cooked food will be created out raw materials instantly as needed, and then tossed back into the raw material pile after the meal. The version of "primitive" or "back to nature" people use in the future will seem so futuristic it will be "indistinguishable from magic" to us, the way today's back-to-nature he-man guy roughing it with a rifle would seem to a stone-age man. See A. C. Clarke's description of camping in the far distant future in "The City and the Stars" chapter 11, in which Alvin and Hilvar go roughing it, backpacking up a mountain. The backpack, "looked very formidable, but though it was bulky it weighed practically nothing. It was all packed in gravity-polarized containers that neutralized its weight, leaving only inertia to be contended with . . ." If you were suggest to these people "why not carry the whole weight up the mountain? Don't be dependent on anti-gravity technology!" they would stare at you and think you are crazy. They would react the way 21st century back to nature person would if you were to suggest he live for a season hunting with a flint spear instead of a firearm. That's much too far back. He would say: "You're crazy. I would starve to death!" - Jed
