Its a space of 1meter×1meterx1meter, basically a cubic meter where the matter replicator works on. (So, no replicating cars, since its too big)
How do you min-max this?
I suspect a lot of guns, explosives, body armor and anti-armor munitions due to the immediate civil war that would break out in most countries as the wealthy elite tells the government to confiscate everyones matter replicators.
Your view is very dystopian. And also correct.
Day 1: create 264 gallons of water (probably enough for a month)
Day 2: create a cubic meter of food (also probably enough for a month)
Day 3 to next rationing: spend thinking of all the awesome things I could create but end up getting overwhelmed and doing nothing instead
overwhelmed and doing nothing instead
I’m in this comment and I don’t like it
Additional day 3: be overjoyed that you can just replicate your basic needs, so you now can work less (or not at all). All that free time! Think of all the projects xou could do!
Start by replicating junk food and beer and sloth around until the evening of Day 29, panic, make plans for some way to big Project for Day 30. Day 30 replicate stuff you need for the project. Before properly starting, realize you forgot to
buyreplicate some crucial stuff buthome depot is now closedyou’ve already used the replicas quota, be discouraged, overwhelmed, give up, promise “next month is going to be different!”.Day 2: create a cubic meter of food (also probably enough for a month)
Now I’m just imagining a cubic meter of spam.
A few people could easily coordinate to have one person ceeate food, another clothing and essentials, and another could create charged batteries or other energy producing objects. Hell, with a little planning you wouldn’t even need to coordinate really.
At that point the world is basically post scarcity and anyone can do anything, kinda like star trek.
Assuming no limitations on what it can make we will also be at the stage of mutually assured destruction since everyone can make a mini nuke each day they don’t need something else. This will either discourage violence or wipe out large areas of the planet depending on how fast the technology is distributed, as everyone getting it overnightbwill absolutely lead to a lot of damage in areas where conflict is happening. Not to mention oppressive governments trying to control the populations replicators.
I’d use it to make more replicators. Essentially have exponential replicators
I was busy thinking about that. Why not make a replicator without limits if possible? No downsides because then you’d be able to create what you want when you want. Anyone dumb enough not to think of that would be stuck using it once a day while you are able to create all you want.
Wouldn’t you need two replicators? One to be replicated and one to do the replicating? And if the replicator itself is a box (assumption since it was not specifies) the replicator would have to be larger than the max size.
Because then you can use those replicators to replicate anything you want
You mean after gold and diamonds essentially become worthless? A lot of people would definitely use it for medications.
Me getting a cubic meter of each ADHD drugs see if any works better than mine… Except on sunday, I get my weekly supply of coca cola
- Make a nuclear bomb. You don’t need a whole ICBM, a single MIRV warhead can fit in the available space.
- Threaten to set it off if everyone in the area doesn’t give me their fabricator.
- Expand operations/nuke delivery range.
- Have a monopoly on the means of production again.
This is how people brainwashed by capitalism would use it to deprive us all of the post-scarcity future. We can only hope some more reasonable people also think of making nukes first so we can at least have some mutually assured destruction to preserve the fully automated luxury gay space communism.
This is how people brainwashed by capitalism would use it to deprive us all of the post-scarcity future.
That doesn’t work out. Unfortunately.
Reason:
When it was politicians who fought the Cold War, they were few who had actually a say, and these few got some minimum brain, at least.
But in your scenario, it is random jerks who execute that scheme everywhere. There will be some who pull the trigger just for … all kinds of stupid shit that has triggered them. So you’d have nukes going off somewhere, at least every few days, and then nobody can really rule the world anymore with them. The power of the threat will be gone.
Politicians didn’t fight the Cold War. It wasn’t pasty fat men in their 60s training the Mujahideen in Afghanistan or on the front lines of Korea or any of a dozen other proxy wars. Politicians, as a rule, tend to avoid things that pose a serious risk to their health (which makes it kind of ironic that they tend to spend their careers putting other people in proximity to those things instead, doesn’t it?)
Eh… maybe one or two. But most people (like the politicians above, funnily enough) tend to have a pretty strong survival instinct. I agree it would absolutely be chaos, but most people wouldn’t think of making a nuke, much less know what kind of nuke they should make, or even how to make one in a 1m3 box, they would just get regular guns and chemical weapons and shit. Still lots of chaos. Just less radiation.
Mujahideen in Afghanistan or on the front lines of Korea or any of a dozen other proxy wars.
I do not count these as the Cold War.
Proxy wars have their special funding and maybe false motives, but they are hot wars. Real wars.
The Cold War consisted of threats. Piling up weapons, bombs, nukes, and counting and comparing who’s got more of them. These threats were made mainly by politicians. Maybe I was wrong in saying they “fought” it.
…okay. Historians do, though, so I hope you understand if I go with them on this one. Also those were just examples, if you don’t like them there are plenty of other proxy wars you can pick from to see my point illustrated pretty much everywhere.
That’s fair though, it was more than just one thing, and like most things in life it’s far more complex than it seems on the surface. I just take particular exception to any suggestion that politicians in any way risked their neck for literally anything ever.
Why do you go for a MIRV if your warhead doesn’t even leave the atmosphere?
Not MIRV, a MIRV warhead - as in a single warhead from the payload of a MIRV missile. And the reason is because regular warheads wouldn’t fit in the 1m3 space.
It only takes one person to make 1 cubic meter of black hole to destroy the biosphere by ripping Earth into an acretion disc.
So you would have to replicate a percent of the mass of the sun. Seems feasible. The electricity bill would be nuts, but the world is ending anyway.
Use the replicator to make power duh
I like the concept of destroying the biosphere by shredding the entire fucking planet, lol.
Using a calculator I referenced further down in the thread, a back hole with a 0.5m radius so that the event horizon would fit within the cubic meter would have a mass of over 56 earths. We’d be proper fucked!
Talk about giving power to the masses, governments beware or we go boom
It’s a matter replicator, I don’t think a black hole is matter?
A black hole is nothing other than extremely condensed matter.
Ah, i thought it was a hole in space or something like that, so the absence of anything, and even space was something, but not matter specifically.
It is worthwhile to note that the above is highly reductive. A “black hole” is the sort of “hole” in spacetime you’re thinking of. It is caused, however, by gravitational dilation of spacetime by an incredibly high energy density. If you stuff enough matter and energy into a tiny enough space, the gravitational force will be strong enough that no other force in the universe can keep it from getting closer, and closer. Even the forces which keep neutrons and protons from combining with each other will be surmounted, as the energy density increases asymptotically toward infinity. This tiny point of effectively infinite density is the black hole’s “singularity”. Surrounding this singularity is a region where anything (matter, light, space itself) that gets within that range cannot escape. This is because objects have escape velocities based on their masses. If you’re going fast enough, you’ll fly away from the earth never to return. If you’re not going that fast, eventually you’ll fall back down. The further you are from the earth, the easier it is to escape it. The “black” part of the black hole, called the “event horizon”, is the distance from the singularity at which the black hole’s escape velocity is equal to the speed of light, meaning that, closer than that, nothing can escape it. Hence why it’s “black”, because no light is escaping from it. Technically, a black hole is not perfectly black due to hawking radiation,
and a black hole with a 0.5 meter schwarzchild radius would probably be small enough to visibly glow (just a bit).(probably not, see below)According to a random black hole calculator I found, a black hole with a 0.5m radius would be over 56 earth masses and the temperature would only be 0.000364 K. So, still orders of magnitude less than the cosmic microwave background.
I know smaller black holes evaporate faster, but even that little thing (according to the calculator) would have a lifetime of a gargantuan multiple of the age of the universe. Like roughly a number followed by 45 zeros, times the age of the universe.
The calculator: https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiation-calculator
Thank you! I didn’t feel like checking with the difference in masses, and based my assumption on Stephen Hawking’s statement that an earth-mass black hole (with an event horizon the size of a pea) would glow from Into The Universe: The Story of Everything. It seems he exaggerated, assuming this calculator is accurate and my understanding of its values is fair. Such an exaggeration is disappointing, if not entirely surprising.
super dense matter
A cubic meter of the core of a neutron star would still count as matter. While it probably wouldn’t literally destroy the Earth, I wouldn’t want to be on the same…continent…when that thing went off.
First I’m gonna move out of my apartment since there will sure be plenty of geniuses who’s gonna produce 1 cubic meter of solid gold, and the building might not be happy about 20-ton blocks appearing out of thin air.
Day 1, I replicate a replicator kit and put it together. I also contact a realtor and let them know I’m interested in buying some land. Off grid, far from cities, doesn’t matter.
Day 2, I replicate two replicator kits and put them together.
Day 3, I replicate four replicator kits. I’ve now got eight of them. I’m not sure I’ll need sixteen, at least not right away, and my basement is starting to get a bit crowded. So I’ll leave it at that for the moment, but the moment I think I need more replicator capacity I can have it.
Thanks for the input von Neumann.
Plot twist: every replicated replicator degrades slightly in subtle ways, like making glass less smooth, or making food taste a little bit stale. After the fourth cycle, bananas taste a bit like warm mayo.
One cubic meter of it.
Classic prank at the Academy - never play it on a Nausicaan.
The AI summons an extremely attractive and buff version of Charles Grey. He is holding a cup of tea and wearing absolutely nothing.
Damn these AIs are getting good at understanding exactly what I want.
Obviously everybody now has high end computers, cameras, a variety of lenses, phones, etc. Foldable Ebikes like the aipas would fit in the space.
1 meter solar panels are a hit but since most batteries and capacitors require materials difficult to handle it becomes highly demanded.
Every political building now has thick blastproof exteriors as making bombs has never been easier, judges live in the courthouse now.
The vast majority of people would make as much money as they could. Quickly, the economy implodes. People soon realize they can exchange their matter replicator for eggs. A new billionaire class arises, using their millions of matter replicators to make basic necessities for the worker class. The modern assembly line is now just row upon row upon row of matter replicators. One man per warehouse, just moving from matter replicator to matter replicator.
A few smarter people used their matter replicators to make more matter replicators. Lobbyists quickly pass “safety regulations”, and these “black market” replicators are outlawed. Soon local police start advertising “amnesty”, where you can bring in your illegal matter replicator and exchange it, no questions asked, for a gun.
A few unlucky people used their matter replicators to make drugs. The purity of replicated drugs quickly renders these people unable to continue using their replicators. These replicators are collected by next-of-kin, stolen by the people that exchanged their own replicator for eggs, or accidentally destroyed.
