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I wanna talk about replicators
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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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 that was my interpretation too. Replicated food is "soulless" in the same way as AI art is. It's missing all the little things that make something done by a human special.
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.
TNG episodes have touched on that very point. Data had played his music by duplicating famous musicians exactly, but, following Picard's advice, he began using variations of two or more combined, which Picard suggested was more like human creativity.
Excellent points!
Food uses all five senses. Besides taste and smell, we respond to the look of food, and also how it feels, it's texture. We even talk about "mouth feel." Crunchy, creamy, smooth, spicy, etc. are all a part of the sense of touch.
Hearing? When you are in a restaurant, and they rush a tray of hot fajitas past your table, don't you swivel your head to look toward it as soon as you hear that sizzle? How about the loud crunch of a Doritos, or a taco?
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.
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.