When will the first Star Trek-style ‘replicator’ be invented?

The Star Trek replicator is imagined to be a low-resolution version of the transporter, which disassembles bulk matter or waste material into energy and then uses this to rebuild molecules in whatever new pattern is required. Without some wholly exotic technology that subverts the laws of thermodynamics as we understand them, that’s probably impossible. Let’s say you try to create an egg. Even if you can take a stream of photons and form atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on, even if you could steer these into the long-chain molecules needed to make yolk, albumen, membranes and shell, you’d still need to do it fast enough to build your egg in its entirety before diffusion, gravity and chemical reactions blend the half-built egg into a sort of molecular scramble. And if you do it that fast, the amount of incidental energy released as heat will have hard-boiled the egg, if not vaporised it entirely. It’s just about conceivable that in another 20 years or so, we might be able to successively deposit layers of proteins or cells to gradually build up a solid structure, similar to the way that 3D prototyping tools today build plastic models. This might let you ‘print’ a steak or even something resembling a tomato, but it’s highly doubtful that the end result would be any more energy efficient than simply growing them on a cow or a tomato vine – and the process certainly won’t ever be instantaneous.

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