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Your statement mostly ignores the Star trek replicator which is an alchemist's dream.


Yup. My first thought exactly.

Iff this laser trickery worked permanently, then you'd basically have a prototype Star Trek replicator right there. Feed garbage in, out comes something useful.

If the laser trickery worked temporarily (say, on the timescales of minutes), then perhaps this could be a small step towards creating Star Trek style holograms. Vent inert gas in, reshape it into interesting stuff, pulse it up from time to time to keep it from decaying.

Though I imagine sensory and computational requirements of such a thing would hit the limit of what's physically possible in our universe.


We just need to figure out how to convert poop back into food.


... in a simpler way than spreading it around and letting the ecosystem recycle it.




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