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”?
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.
😂 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.