Hey yall! I’m stoned af and watching star trek on a weekend, naturally. I lost my place since last weekend in TNG season 3, but I knew that I wasn’t far in so I just watched all the intros until I found where I left off. Episode 8 “the price”, Troi gets frustrated with the replicator for wanting a “real” chocolate sundae. This raised a question for me, wouldn’t food replicators be intelligent enough to simulate the process of “the standard” ingredients being processed into the recipe? Like I thought that was the point of being able to say “Earl grey tea, hot”. Like wouldn’t she just have to say “betazoid chocolate sundae” or whatever?
EDIT: SECOND QUESTION: Say you have a family recipe cookbook or whatever and the comfort food is in that cookbook, couldn’t you just say “simulate the process of making the recipe from this cookbook”?
Yea, that’s what I always thought too. BUT then that raises another question. Say you have a family recipe cookbook or whatever and the comfort food is in that cookbook, couldn’t you just say “simulate the process of making the recipe from this cookbook”?
Replicators don’t simulate cooking though, they rearrange atoms. It’s an entirely different process and I have to imagine that translating between them is more of an art than a science.
Yea, they rearrange atoms but like that’s part of my point. It’s a highly sophisticated computer made to recreate food. A recipe has exact measurements like “500g of flour, mix with 1.5g yeast, 3.7g salt, 340g water”, I would think they would be able to replicate that process
I know we’re debating a fictional tool (I’m here for it) but I’m saying I don’t think it replicates “the process” it replicates the end result.
Now that I think about it, it’s odd that the replicators never (or at least infrequently) produce absolute slop. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it essentially a specific form of transporter? Somewhere they must have a supply of whatever the atoms waiting to be combined into “food” are (recycling the ship’s waste??) so that when you say “cherry pie” it knows you need X amount of whatever atoms arranged in whichever format the data instructed. Given that transporters can malfunction, there should be some instances where the replicator grossly malfunctions and instead of an off-tasting slice of pie you get a mutant horror that looks like it crawled out of Seth Brundle’s lab.
In Discovery it’s said out loud: it’s waste recycled, including shit.
I had a feeling it was, it makes the most sense. An endless supply of organic compounds just speed running the cycle. Sometimes though the mushrooms are just straight out of the bins, not replication. Rinse before your eat.
It’s the same process nature does, just in a tighter space.
@bufalo1973 @backalleycoyote They already say so on Enterprise. In one of the early episodes the crew answers the question of a school class and Trip has to explain that part.
😂 I’m with you 100%. After I left my previous comment I had almost the exact same thought process. Why aren’t replicators producing more slop?? It doesn’t know what chicken soup tastes like. Chicken soup might be molecularly-speaking very similar to chicken shit soup.
I do think there are some episodes that have the characters fucking around with the replicator to try and get something more personalized to their tastes. So this could play into it a bit.
I imagine it’d be a case of: “scan this food that I just made by hand, store its structure, and replicate that exactly later”.
So the replicator could make Grandma’s soup for you, but it would always be exactly how Grandma made it that one time.