Warning: Warren Ellis is not one to mince his words (especially early in the morning). This is his first of a weekly column for Vice UK:
3D printing’s been around for a little while now, and it’s improving in leaps and bounds. On one end of the scale, I was talking to someone from a very famous special effects studio the other week, who was telling me they now have the facility to print cars. One of their wizards took a current-day standard 3D printer (which tend to look like dodgy breadmakers), took it apart to see how it worked, and then used it to print the parts to make a massively larger 3D printer, which he then used to print off a car. Street-furniture set-dressing for movies.
On the other end of the scale, home 3D printers like the Makerbot Replicator now cost twelve hundred quid and can crank out several thousand different objects. It’s a start. (A cheaper machine, the Stratasys, was recently used to print off a gun, after all.)
A start that led to a lot of other people thinking about what else could be printed. NASA have been developing something they call a “bioreactor” since the 1980s, wanting to supply long-haul astronauts with the onboard ability to perform skin and bone grafts by cloning and growing tissue. This has been developed into the idea of printing meat. Printed meat would be ethical meat, as nothing has to die in order to make it. The one drawback being that cultured meats of any kind tend to have textural issues: they’ve not been stuck to anything alive that can flex and secrete into it, so they’re kind of limp and nasty and may have to be artificially “exercised” by mechanical systems or electroshock therapy. A fine printed steak would have convulsed under electrical torture many hundreds of times before it reached your plate.
I don’t actually have a problem with that, but I am a full-on omnivore who is looking forward to being able to print off dolphin-and-mastodon sandwiches. You can, however, understand the reticence of those who gave up meat for ethical reasons being served a pork chop that’s been worked on a rack and then electrocuted for your pleasure.
