One of Star Trek’s neat little technologies includes the replicator, a device that can make almost anything with a known molecular structure “out of thin air.” This means that people in this universe can make theoretically anything that they want out of pure energy, which plays an important role in Star Trek’s moneyless economy. This is because if there’s anything that we want or need, all we have to do is ask (ST:TNG: “The Neutral Zone”).
Physicists today have a similar dream: to build a molecular assembler that can arrange atoms in a way that allows us to make almost anything that we want. It’s still a long way off, but we know it can work: biology is the perfect example. Organisms can convert food into new molecules, proteins, cells, tissues, and even new progeny. But even biology has to follow the rules of the universe, which I will touch on in a moment. As for a real molecular assembly as a technology, there is some debate between the physicist and the chemist whether or not factories of nano-sized molecular assemblers are possible (at least at the fantasy-level that is being envisioned), but I will save that debate for another post.
The goal of this post is two-fold: 1) to clear a common misconception that the replicator can just make anything “out of thin air,” and 2) to answer the question of whether a truly moneyless economy exist. First, let’s take a closer look at the replicator. Is a seemingly magical technology like the replicator feasible? Even if Roddenberry’s technology were freely available (to us), my instinct tells me that it wouldn’t be all that it seems. I suspect that a technology like a replicator would have a huge energy requirement – even to make something as simple as Picard’s tea.
In fact, let’s make some tea as an example – suppose that we wanted to create about 180 g of hot water (a typical amount of water for a coffee-sized cup). If we invoke Einstein’s famous theory, that translates to about 16,200,000,000,000,000 J. You might ask, ‘Well, how much energy is a Joule?’ Not much really, but it adds up. An electric heater in your living room will consume about 1500 J every second at the highest setting. The energy required to make Picard’s tea would be equivalent to running the electric heater constantly for nearly three-hundred and forty-three thousand years! Or equivalently, in the one second that it takes to replicate the tea, the energy is equivalent to about eleven trillion electric heaters. Seems like it would be easier to recycle your urine, stick it under a flame, and throw a teabag in it.
In the Star Trek universe, that kind of energy can come from two places: 1) the deconstructive conversion of other sources of matter; and 2) matter/antimatter collision. People on Star Trek recycle in the manner of 1), which means, in a way, people really are recycling their own urine to make the tea. But for a one-way conversion of energy to matter, we would need 2) to have enough energy to make even the simplest things, as I mentioned above.
So how would you make antimatter (in sufficient quantities)? Currently, CERN is only able to make several picograms of antimatter, but at a cost of $20 million (and picograms certainly isn’t enough to power warp drive). My instinct tells me that however Star Trek solves the problem of generating antimatter, there is a pesky little law known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics that tells me that it would require even more energy just to make the stuff then what you would get out of it. Any process is permissible only if the overall entropy of the universe increases, which means a loss of useful energy. This is true even of our own “biological molecular assemblers” – we need a lot of energy in the food that we eat just to make things like tissues and cells.
Allow me to elaborate on this point a little further, because it is important and touches on how Star Trek might recycle their ‘matter.’ Suppose you ate an apple with E amount of energy in it, and on its way down your digestive tract, you were able to extract x amount of useful energy from it. You are free to use x in any activity, like building muscles and cells, run a marathon, write a book, or have sex. Through the process of extracting the energy however, you have lost y amount of heat from the total available energy in the apple, and thus let’s say that E=x+y. This is very natural; all of the digestive processes and chemical reactions used in extracting energy from the apple were permissible because of an increase in the overall entropy of the universe, lost as heat.
Now, suppose you design an ingenious device that is able to take your waste (no need to get all graphic here), deconstruct its molecular structure and reassemble it back to an apple, i.e. a Star Trek replicator. In order to get back to energy E, you would need to recover the energy x that you extracted, as well as the energy y that was lost in the conversion process. But there’s another catch: the process of going backwards would also only be permissible if there was again an increase in the overall entropy in the universe (let’s call it z). Thus, you would need energy x+y+z just to get back to E.
The magnitude of z is dependent on the efficiency of your device. If it is remarkably efficient, then z could be very small, but we’re talking about a very difficult technological feat and I doubt it would be very efficient at all. So I think that z would have to be quite large, perhaps to the point of even making x and y negligible. So with this example I trust my point is clear: you would need to put in more energy into to the process of converting your waste back into food than you would get out of it. Molecular assembly is not as easy as just making something disappear in a fancy light show and magically making it appear into something else. Nothing ever comes just “out of thin air.”
That kind of energy could conceivably come from matter/antimatter. But if we were required to make antimatter, its synthesis must follow the same rules: more energy is needed to make the stuff than you would get out of it. This could only be feasible if the conversion can be efficiently powered by a different energy source (like the Sun).
If antimatter cannot not be efficiently synthesized, then we must find a natural source and harvest it. Antimatter is not easy to find; there isn’t a whole lot on Earth. Not too long ago, scientists have discovered a cloud of antimatter near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which could be a useful source. However, you would need active “collectors” and “antimatter harvesting plants” and ways to transport it back safely to Earth to be useful, all of which I imagine would be energy-intensive. Then there is the question of what happens when all of it is consumed (in other words, the Federation needs to know not only if there is enough antimatter to power their entire civilization in their current state, but whether or not there is enough of it to power them for generations and generations to come). And lastly, what would happen if the Klingons or the Borg decided to invade the antimatter source and secure it for themselves? If you cut off the supply, the Federation is dead.
This all brings me back to my main point: there are some things in Star Trek that are probably scarce. Or, at the very least, some things will have value. I think this would especially be the case after a brutal war, like the Dominion War. And hence, we’re back to having to deal with how to distribute resources, but the resources we are talking about in Star Trek are not the same resources that we are talking about today. We’re no longer talking about goods like food, clothing or PADD’s; we’re talking about things like antimatter, dilithium crystals, and elements that the replicator cannot synthesize. Not everybody can have everything.
So can we have a universe where goods like food and clothing are dirt cheap and available to everyone? Absolutely. Will everything be free? Not exactly. The cost of making goods cheaply will be transferred to the cost of powering the technology to do so; the key will be finding a naturally abundant source of antimatter that can be efficiently harvested, or discover a process that can convert energy from an abundant natural source with near 100% efficiency. If, as a civilization, we can find such a source or have the technology for efficient energy conversion, then I believe that a future like Star Trek is very possible.
What about a moneyless economy as in Roddenberry’s utopian vision? Is that possible? That’s a separate question and I suspect that the answer is no. If we briefly accept my argument that there have to be some resources that are scarce no matter what, then without money we’re back to a bartering system of exchanging goods, which has its limitations. We can tell that the writers of Star Trek recognize and understand this problem, as the term “credits” occasionaly pops up in certain episodes. In the ST:DS9 episode, “In the Cards,” we see that Jake ends up running around the whole station performing tasks for other people that wind him into eventual trouble. A bartering system rather than a monetary system seems like a step back, rather than a step forward, for a civilization.
After all, what would the 1951 Willie Mays card really be worth to Ben Sisko if Jake could just replicate it?
