There’s a reason this man is the one who writes cutting edge sci-fi, and I am the one who falls asleep drooling on it. From a transcription of Stross v. Krugman
CS: You’ll see something very different by then. Let me explain. One prediction that I have PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, did something very unwise earlier this year. Never mind demanding that everybody start referring to fish as “Sea Kittens” – that’s just an irrelevant publicity stunt. No, they went and offered a million dollars to the first inventor who could demonstrate a vat machine for basically delivering vat grown meat. And I don’t think they realize how close we are to this and which industry will develop this machine first because it just so happens that an awful lot of people in the biotech sector are working very hard to deliver machines that will generate bits of meat to order. Specifically, Long Pork. For the organ transplant business. One of the scenes in the next novel I’m working on set in about 15 years time will involve the ladies of leisure in Morningside a fairly posh part of Edinburgh who lunch together – they dine out on each other. From the point of view of a very, very disturbed police officer who’s trying to figure out what, if anything, to charge them with.
I’m pretty sure most of my readers will know instantly what ‘Long Pork’ is. And he’s right. We are working, feverishly, to vat-grow human body parts – for a noble reason, to be sure, but this technology is going to be easy enough fairly soon. It shouldn’t be hard to grow any muscle, once the basic technology is worked out and the process is robotized/factorized.
I mean, one company can even print blood vessels already. No imagine a steak printer in the kitchen. It is possible, it’s just a question of how badly we want this technology.
And once you have that steak printer – the perfect steak, every time? From an empty fridge to prize-winning Kobe beef at the push of a button?
The logistics and price will undoubtedly keep such technology literally out of your kitchen for a long time, but once the basics for growing organ and muscle tissue are down, skies the limit.
We’re going to need it if we want to colonize space (unless we choose robotization, then we’ll simulate printing beef in our simulated kitchens to comfort ourselves with the memories as we travel – I mean, what else are robots gonna do for MMORPGs in space, fly space ships?), and we want to colonize space. And we need to do that, to survive. One planet is finite, but life need not be.
Tags: high tech, nerd with a capital N, sci-fi, wild speculation, wow, yes please i'd like it now