Atomic Cuisine

MACHINES promise to get ever smaller. Interest and expertise is growing in  nanotechology, the technology that will manipulate atoms. A recent Scientific American special issue devoted to this subject, described possible uses that ranged from invisibility cloaks, on-screen newspapers whose headlines change as news breaks, to buildings erected in hours by molecular clouds. But a vital use will be in space flight. (The science of micro-micro-miniaturisation has come far since the 1990s when Japanese researchers built a car the size of a rice grain that weighed less than a hundredth of a gram. It was less than two thirds of a centimetre long. It couldn't be driven, but it came complete with wheels, headlights, bumpers and a spare tire.) An important application of nanotechnology in the distant future will be feeding the crew of a starship. The journey may last years. The crew, that may number several hundred, will be utterly alone. They will be unable to forage from any passing planet or asteroid. No voyagers in the loneliest seas will ever have been so cut off from the rest of humanity. How will they eat? There can be no question of precooking and preserving food in packages as in an airliner. The total bulk of packaging and the machinery to retrieve it could weigh more than 1,000 tons, adding greatly to the cost of the mission. Far better to manufacture food out of carbon molecules using nanotechology. There would be a machine on board called an ``atomic food processor'' that would manufacture food, atom by atom, from the ship's refuse.

It might somewhat resemble in appearance a microwave oven. Anything can be fed into it so that its atoms can be rearranged and changed into new substances. As Ed Regis says in his book Nano: "You'd open the door of this machine, shove in grass clippings or tea leaves or old bicycle tires or whatever. Then you'd fiddle with the controls and two hours later out would roll a wad of fresh steak.'' It turns out that the four out of the five main requirements of nutrition–proteins, fats, carbohydrates and vitamins - are made from compounds of carbon. Even the fifth, minerals, depends on carbon for their existence in edible form. Refuse from other chemical elements will also go into the food processor. Iron, for example, which prevents anaemia and transports oxygen to the tissues, is found in aubergines, beans and other vegetables, as well as fruits such as prunes and raspberries. An essential output of the atomic food processor will therefore be Vitamin C, which prevents the debilitating disease of scurvy. The refuse needed for the food processor will not be hard to find. A starship will have woodlands - just as today, on a smaller scale, the first class cabins of some airlines sweeten the air with flowers. Its dead leaves and wood will be most useful. Nanotechnology will be as indispensable in the future as computing and rocketry are today. As its founder Richard Feynman said in 1959: "How many times when you are working on something frustratingly tiny, like your wife's wrist watch, have you said to yourself: If only I could train an ant to do this!'''