Say there was this machine that could form any kind food out of virtually thin air? What consequences could there be that would keep this machine from ending world hunger? I'm having trouble finding a way to even out the pros and cons of this machine. I want to have this machine in my world, but I don't want it to impact society so much that I would have to stand hours reimagining the world without hunger. I'm fairly new to world building, so any pointers from veteran world builders would help.
I'm a bit new to world building also, but I'd be happy to try and help! Obviously using a machine like this in your world means you can change the ramifications of it. Perhaps it can only handle creating very small portions of food at a time? Or the fuel needed for it can be expensive or a rare resource in poorer/ developing countries and civilizations. Perhaps different chemicals or temperatures can cause it to overheat or break. Hope this helped at all!
Yes, thank you for the ideas! This helped a lot indeed.
Glad to be of service! Good luck with your story!
A machine that can create food from thin air would likely be expensive to purchase, and then add on cost for high energy consumption. Perhaps only the really wealthy could afford them?
Another interesting approach might be to make the fuel required to produce the food also a scarce resource those countries need, like needing a ton of clean water for fission. In other words, you could produce a ton of food for a country, but then they'd have a water shortage instead. :)
Something else to consider is that although you have a machine to create food out of thin air, you would still have to distribute the food to all of the world, and that takes a lot of bureaucracy. It's difficult to gauge how much food a country needs, so if the government low-balled the number, or got too much cheese, there would be hungry people or a country with more cheese than they know what to do with.
perhaps it's fragile and breaks easy. And finding the one small piece that stopped production is hard. Replacing parts is hard and when you put it back together everything must be perfectly calibrated and clean.
perhaps it's fragile and breaks easy. And finding the one small piece that stopped production is hard. Replacing parts is hard and when you put it back together everything must be perfectly calibrated and clean.
I like that Idea as well. The possible outcome, though, is creating a religion based off a cheese maker, with devoted sons of the food machine in charge of it's maintenance.
maybe it takes organic matter like trees and plants and instantly spits out some kind of food by rearranging DNA, but it consumes more than it puts out, and has a high risk of food poisoning?
Maybe eating the food can cause some kind of mutation in the humans or animals. To avoid crossing out the idea of the machine right away, it doesn't affect you immediately and only infects certain people
Have it powered by human blood. Yes, you can have all the food you want, but you have to basically kill people to make it work. Provides an interesting moral dilemma to contemplate.
Well, you wouldn't have to kill people because blood donors are already a thing, but you would have to have a lot of donated blood
