Hand-held replicators come to be. Maybe Musk invents one.
Here's what it can do: Make five things: Potato, corn, wheat, milk, yeast, water and anything derived from those. Pizza, beer, vodka, etc.
And itself. Click a button and you've got another one.
What happens next?
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Everyone gets fat...
ReplyDeleteThe goverment regulates potato, corn, wheat, milk, yeast, water, and anything derived from those.
ReplyDelete... Can you modify the genome of the yeast? Because if you can, I'm changing career tracks to microbiology and taking over the goddamn world.
ReplyDeleteTell me more, Kimberley Lam!
ReplyDeleteYeast is easy to grow and has a pretty straightforward genome. It is the single-celled eukaryote of choice for study in biology. It's a bit of a minor pain to grow large cultures of it and you have to worry a lot about culture death with long-lived cultures. But you can hijack the genome to do about anything, and if major die-off isn't a problem because you can just replicate more....
ReplyDeleteAnd, hell, if I can modify the yeast genome, it's trivial to produce viruses, even if I'm limited to viral sequences which currently exist in the yeast genome (this is a silly and arbitrary gate - there is no purity of genome). At which point, I have the tools to genetically modify anything.
ReplyDeleteSo with your replicator, I bring on transhumanism.
Alright, Kimberley Lam... and here I thought the milk would be the key to changing the future.
ReplyDeleteWhat if you can't change what comes out? So, there's five yeast strains.
Do I get to pick them? Tell you what, I'll just pick two:
ReplyDelete1. Yarrowia lipolytica: shows a lot of promise in bioremediation, including hydrocarbon breakdown and heavy metal absorption.
2. A modified S. cerevisiae that can roll together the steps for bioethanol production. You gave me unlimited corn, so that's not a problem.
With those two, I remake the combustion energy industry and clean up the ecosystem.
Nice, and I was primarily thinking about champagne yeast. What happens if I add in steel to this mix? Five varietes, you choose two.
ReplyDeleteOh, gosh, I'm a bio girl, so don't know much about metallurgy. If you made me choose, though, I'd probably pick whatever gets used in magnetic cores and whatever gets used most commonly in architecture. Then I'd grab my physicist buddies and tell them to hack the world with me.
ReplyDeleteActually, heck: Between steel and infinite corn? We've got all the spaceships we could ever want.
ReplyDeleteYou know what structural stuff I want? Sand.
ReplyDeleteEat the corn, toss the sand out the back of the spaceship as propellant?
ReplyDeleteNah. Sand means concrete and glass. Cheap housing. And lenses have about a million uses.
ReplyDelete(I totally get space travel as awesome. But someone needs to stay home to tend the garden and take care of the kids.)
ReplyDelete(Kids can grow up on spaceships, but I dig.)
ReplyDeleteThe glass for sure. But, once you have cheap unlimited steel material, do you need concrete?
ReplyDeleteYou can 3D print with concrete.
ReplyDeleteHuh. And steel reinforced concrete is especially strong....
ReplyDeleteYup. Steel is all very well and good, but you still need to shape it. Rebar + 3D concrete printer is much easier for housing. Plus, concrete buildings are more energy efficient than steel, I imagine.
ReplyDeleteThe replicator is hacked to make a virus that can destroy potato, corn, wheat, millk, and yeast (if not more foods), which in turn destroys the replicators people bank their lives on (because the replicators are clearly made of those components themselves). This in a desperate attempt to save wealth and capitalism.
ReplyDeleteHuh, I imagine the opposite -- I figure its one of the reasons leed buildings are steel frame.
ReplyDeleteSteel also lets you have GIANT windows.
Gosh, Jay Treat, that's cynical and probably true.
ReplyDeleteKimberley Lam you can also 3d print steel gizmodo.com - The First 3D-Printed Steel Bridge Looks Like It Broke Off an Alien Mothership
ReplyDeleteOoooh!
ReplyDeleteSo we CAN 3d print steel. Nice!
ReplyDelete