You make an interesting point but I think the difference between the replicator and the microwave is pretty great, as we recently learned from our worldwide supply train issues.
The can of soup had a whole factory, with robotic and human workers, management, metals, fossil fuels, storage containers, inspectors, transportation devices, highways, warehouses and retailers that it needed to get to your microwave. When any of those are bottlenecked there's a huge problem. It will likely forever be a fantasy but a Star Trek type replicator would streamline that process by a fair margin and have far fewer critical links.
A real-world example would be the difference between a old-fashioned printed newspaper with no digital distribution and an online only paper. The print version might seem superior in some respects but by the time it would get to McMurdo, the news would already be pretty old, vs up to the minute currency for a web browser. And once we start talking Shackleton or beyond, the difference only gets worse. In fact a good use case for an autonomous robotic presence is extraterrestrial exploration or labor. They could endure higher g acceleration, long periods in cold storage, don't need atmosphere, and don't experience existential terror -- as far as we know!
Important downside of replicator technology that it's not likely to be physically possible outside of TV. Otherwise I agree it's superior to microwaves (though curious about its techno-economics).
At the speed shown on TV, thermodynamics is a problem.
Let's take water as an example. Say you've got a supply of all the atoms you need and a way to place them precisely enough to reliably get water rather than a mix of hydrogen peroxide and hydrogen gas.
When the atoms combine, they release as much energy as burning hydrogen in oxygen. Equivalent problems for virtually everything.
I'm not sure if it's provably impossible, but AFAIK there is no known way to cool this down fast enough to even be stable for the duration of the TV show's materialisation sequence.
Although I wasn't specifically thinking of those, catalysts are a great example of why I am somewhat sceptical of anyone who says "this thing is theoretically impossible" unless they actually prove it.
However, for the specific, fuel cells have a lot of waste heat. And even if they didn't, what you're describing in this situation would cause a mixture of ohmic heating and electrolysis in the water while it's being replicated — you need to get the energy out without the last 10% flash-boiling your tea into steam (or even ice cube or icecream sandwich or whatever).
To rephrase what I said before, it might not be impossible, but AFAIK nobody has a solution yet.
Oh that's easy, if you freeze time with quad-phasic, flux-capacitance, dilithium crystal matrices, then when they break down from the heat, the excess energy is dissipated into the reversed output of a toroidal sub-space containment field.
Essentially, a bit like a miniature black hole created on demand to dispose of present-day physics.
I half-remember a point in Deep Space Nine where they started using the replicator or transporter to do surgery and I thought "ok, so you have a machine that is Dr. Manhattan, it can literally do anything. Where do you go from here?"
Turns out the answer is genocide (DS9) and screwing around with VR and time travel (Voyager). Pretty realistic.
"a Star Trek type replicator would streamline that process by a fair margin and have far fewer critical links."
Would it? We're never really shown how replicators work or much else about the logistics of the Federation but I've always assumed the support machinery and network behind the replicators must be pretty enormous. Not only the manufacture and maintenance of them but just ensuring all the energy, fuel and raw elements are available and can get from A to B would be complex.
You’re absolutely right about the implementation details of Star Trek tech in the real world. But in the same way “The Lower Decks” is my favorite Star Trek series because we don’t know how much planning and logistics went into supplying the replicators on an Enterprise.
What’s the difference between storing massed of feed elements for replicators or storing canned goods? It’s really a matter of perception.
Once you eat the soup, your waste can be fed back into the replicator to be disassembled into constituent atoms and reassembled into more soup.
It would be very possible to live entirely isolated on a planet with nothing but a basic replicator and a way to power it. That's been explored a couple of times in the Trek universe
The can of soup had a whole factory, with robotic and human workers, management, metals, fossil fuels, storage containers, inspectors, transportation devices, highways, warehouses and retailers that it needed to get to your microwave. When any of those are bottlenecked there's a huge problem. It will likely forever be a fantasy but a Star Trek type replicator would streamline that process by a fair margin and have far fewer critical links.
A real-world example would be the difference between a old-fashioned printed newspaper with no digital distribution and an online only paper. The print version might seem superior in some respects but by the time it would get to McMurdo, the news would already be pretty old, vs up to the minute currency for a web browser. And once we start talking Shackleton or beyond, the difference only gets worse. In fact a good use case for an autonomous robotic presence is extraterrestrial exploration or labor. They could endure higher g acceleration, long periods in cold storage, don't need atmosphere, and don't experience existential terror -- as far as we know!