3D Printers Create Edible Objects 72
MrShaggy writes "An engineering lab and a culinary school have teamed up to construct novel edible objects with 3D printers that use pureed foods in place of ink. From the article: '"It lets you do complex geometries with food that you could never do by hand," said Jeffrey Lipton, a researcher and graduate student at the lab. "So far, we've printed everything from chocolate, cheese and hummus to scallops, turkey, and celery," Lipton told CBC Radio's Spark in an interview that aired Sunday.'"
Printing out people (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, for this to be a reality, we need to get 3-D printing down to at least the cellular, if not molecular, level. (Would quantum uncertainty effects render this impossible?) But this is a nice idea, cleverer than the idea of a Star Trek style transporter [wikipedia.org]. It would be the 3-D equivalent of faxing a letter. Unlike "beaming", 3-D "faxing" does not imply the destruction and subsequent recreation of the original. A 3-D fax produces copies.
This raises a moral dilemma. If I fax myself, let's say, to Alpha Centauri, who then is the real Me, the spaceman or the one who stayed behind? Do I have the right to kill(switch) my other self (the one who stayed behind)? Would I be guilty of murder? Would it even count as suicide? Or could it simply be a form of hi-tech amputation or surgery, getting rid of an unnecessary body (part)?