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”?
Yeah I’ve always been frustrated with this trope. Somehow, we’re expected to believe that a technology capable to creating and assembling all the atoms in a chocolate sundae is incapable of modifying the recipe.
In my head cannon I’ve always understood this to mean that the replicated food is “too perfect” and lacks the human imperfection/variation you get with real cooking.
Yeah, food is like music, it’s just not enough to hit the right notes and there is infinite variations even with the same notes in the same order. Food also uses TWO senses so it’s even more complicated.
It’s probably difficult to program something to arrange atoms just the way your grandma used to.
Having been in close proximity to a number of engineering types, I can 100% believe this.
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.
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.