Energy and Replicators

This isn't a typical article but more just some explanation on a mindset. The replicators in Star Trek are one of the most wasteful scientific advances present on ships. These devices take massive amounts of energy and convert them into matter according to patterns stored in the replicators computer system. This is incredibly wasteful when there is a far more effective and efficient way to produce foods.

Matter / Energy Conversion

Einstein's famous equation gives the idea that matter and energy are interchangeable but it also gives an indicator of how much actual energy it would take to produce matter. But to the laws of the conservation of matter and energy, it is also known that you basically can't get something from nothing. If you've got a bunch of mass coming out you've got to put in the energy (or mass) to begin with.

Energy Requirements

Lets take a simple example: 1 cup of sugar.

Now bakers can say without reservation how much of the prepared foods we eat require 1 cup of sugar, or more. Some foods require a lot more than one cup, but we'll stick with one cup because it is so common. How much energy would be required to make this cup of sugar?

So, there it is, 17,890,000,000 Megajouls of energy. So how much energy is that? That is about equivalent to 4.296 Megatons of TNT. To put that into perspective, we measure nuclear bombs in the same way, so the bomb the was dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, so by comparison it would take the energy released by a little over 286 such detonations. For a single cup of sugar. To say nothing for the fact that in any system, there is energy loss (perfect energy transfer doesn't exist) something has to power the replicator and provide the energy to produce the mass. Thus, it would actually be more (how much more is impossible to figure, since the technology doesn't exist).

Growing Food

On most ships in the Trek universe we see references to emergency rations and pretty much everything else is replicated. The only exception to that is Voyager, where the writers realized (or it was just better thematically) that growing ones own food would save a whole ass-ton of power from the ships power systems. Since Voyager was all by itself it was probably a good idea, as it would reduce refueling by a lot.

So Voyager grows (or buys) the raw food supplies it'll need to get by, using replicators based on a rationing system of some kind. This was pretty smart, a ship that wasn't set up to have to converse energy is suddenly forced to. But lets put that into perspective to. A starship has enough energy to produce just, massive quantities of matter at will, how many glasses of water, ale, cakes, coffee, etc. are produced every single day? That much power being produced so liberally has to be a burden on the fuel source, thus it makes sense that Voyager created a hydroponics bay and converted the Captains Mess into a kitchen.

Of course, the question then becomes, is it really that much easier to design a ship - say the size of the Enterprise D, with around 1000+ people on board (capable of carrying many more as well) to not produce any of its own food to save power? The average human being consumes about 4 pounds of food a day, and a variable amount of water, but we'll just figure that is part of the 4 pounds. So lets do the same relativistic conversion, is around 39 Megatons of TNT worth of energy, so for every person, every day, one is talking about half-again (160%) of the energy the entire United States consumed in 2001 just to feed the crew every single day.

Fuel and Energy

That's obviously a lot of power. It doesn't, to me, take much brain power for designers to realize if they get some seeds (or better yet replicate seeds which are very low in mass) carry a bunch of dirt, have some really nice lights, and assign someone to tend crops, a crew could survive a lot longer on a lot less fuel. The fact that the United Federation of Planets has not figured this out yet, considering they use a not-so-common form of hydrogen called deuterium for fuel (and anti-deutarium in a Matter/Antimatter Reactor) which are both natural resources which must be collected and used (along with dilithium, again in a Matter/Antimatter reactor) it seems radically unsound to any environment to do something as wasteful as, not grow your own food.

Waste Recycling

Some of this might be compensated for by waste-recycling. After all if you can replicate it, in theory, you can re-replicate it and turn the matter back into energy. It is possible that some of this energy is made back by taking the bio-waste and converting it back into energy. That, again, causes another problem, energy like that would have to be stored and the process in and of itself would have to, again, follow the laws of the conservation of matter and the laws of thermodynamics which pretty much tell us that you would always be running at a net-loss when converting matter to energy or energy to matter. All systems of energy run at a net loss, which is why we don't have perpetual motion machines.

For just a moment lets assume that there is some system set up on starships which takes the biological waste products from all the people on board and turns it back into energy, stores that energy. There will further be energy loss when retrieving that energy from the storage system. There is still the problem that a lot of energy was spent to make all the food that now is converted to waste biologically, then converted back to energy, and then used up to create more food for the biological entities to eat, etc.. It would be far more efficient to use the natural foods as a primary source of food for a crew of any real size. This would also put the ship on a net-gain for energy at the end of the day, due to the same recycling of waste.

Meat vs Vegetables

Most of what I've written in this article pretty much talks about growing food, as in vegetables. However, meat is an important part of the diet. It is hard to develop the idea that in the 24th century, people still tend cattle for food. In many futures envisioned this practice is put a stop to as being cruel to animals. In fact, Patrick Stewart is noted as not even liking the fish in the ready room of Captain Picard, because he always felt that by that time people would not enslave animals for their own pleasure.

Growing food, in terms of meat, it a bit trickier on a political level, but not on a basic level. Only a true vegan (which are rare) can turn their nose up at the practice of enslaving animals to kill as food. Animal parts are used everywhere and I should note here, one doesn't have to treat animals cruelly to eat them. Factory farming is pretty spectacularly bad on the front of being cruel to animals, but free range animals have a much better life. For the purposes of this setting, I'm not going to get into the whole (and heated) debate over killing animals for food. In the Solas Tempus universe, the Federation has traded the massive quantities of energy they waste every day to be able to say they don't kill animals for food. This is pretty well documented in canon, that humans don't enslave animals, they replicate meat. In fact early in the TNG series, this is directly commented on, and one of the races finds it disgusting.

We're going to just set a few assumptions here.

The Federation is so happy-hippie about things that, they don't enslave animals for meat as a general rule.
Not all Federation races agree with this and some still do it anyway.
Non-Federation races, such as Klingons, would never give up hunting their prey (but probably wouldn't factory farm either).
It isn't difficult to find suppliers for real meat, but would be impractical to have livestock on a space station or space vessel.
- Though some livestock like chickens might be kept because they are compact, produce ongoing food supplies and can then be eaten themselves.
Thus, storage for actual meat would be used in places where livestock would be impractical.

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Defining a Mindset

There are other solutions, potentially, to this problem. However, in the case of the Solas Tempus universe, I prefer to look at the canon and then re-case the Federation in a different light. They really are just that wasteful. The Federation was based on America, and few countries can compete with America on sheer amount of waste produced for convenience. This adds a layer to the philosophy of the Federation that supports the idea that the Federation looks good on the surface but it doesn't take long to find a tone of darkness and exploitation within its ranks, even by well meaning officers. This is how they live, so it is hard to question that in a time of abundance of energy.

Botany - Not Just Flowers

In TNG and DS9, one of the semi-main characters is a botanist. Botany isn't just the study of flowers though the series portrays it like that at times. Botany and agriculture are important sciences, which in the Solas Tempus universe, have slipped from prominence in the Federation due to the wasteful use of raw energy to produce food. In my vision, this is particularly true of agriculture, with Federation citizens having a pension for just not understanding why someone wouldn't just use a replication. The disconnect of the populace from their planets and where life comes from. This explains why, in the Federation, people seem to be disgusted by the idea that people would eat real meat, not connecting where the idea of a steak (or chicken wing) came from.

Poverty

This also goes well to the idea that poverty could still be a real thing. In DS9, we see a comparison of the Federation's core to the DMZ worlds, where people at the Federation's core worlds don't understand what is going on there. While it is really nice to imagine an ideal environment where there is no poverty (canon says many times that poverty and war are gone - except there was the Earth Romulan War, the Dominion War, a Klingon-Federation War is hinted at several times). No world is perfect, there is always a darker element. In the vision of the Federation which is used here, poverty is still a thing but hidden, particularly by politicians who don't want to accept it is there. It isn't a pervasive problem, and a lot of organizations fight against poverty, but there is an undercurrent that the bulk of the Federation citizenry just doesn't understand how anyone could be poor.