In the beginning, it was mostly about the basics. An illustrated instruction manual was distributed to employees, specifically detailing where every element was supposed to go, and in what order. Then they issued specially calibrated sauce guns to ensure the same amount of special sauce was applied to each sandwich with each pull of the trigger. As the operation expanded, it became harder to ensure that the ingredients for Big Macs would come from identical-tasting sources. Food chemicals were introduced to make flavors and textures uniform worldwide. Vegetables were precut and shipped in vacuum-sealed containers to guarantee freshness and consistency in size.
But still, perfection eluded the fast-food giant. For about a hundred years, the best McDonald’s could do to build an ideal Big Mac at every one of its locations was to combine tightly controlled sourcing and distribution with exacting instructions for sandwich architecture, preparation, and packaging.
Then, on January 16, 2048, McDonald’s solved for the consistency problem with cloning. Every Big Mac consumed henceforth would now be molecularly identical.
This, Moti continued, is where we run into something called the Theseus paradox, which is very important to burger construction, but even more important to my current existential dilemma. The gist of the Theseus paradox went like this:
Theseus and his squad of Athenians had a bunch of epic adventures aboard a big fancy wooden ship—most famously defeating the Minotaur in Crete. To honor their memory, Theseus’s legendary vessel was docked and preserved by the Athenians for several centuries. Long enough for all of the original wood to have rotted. Over the years, as each of the boat’s planks decayed, the Greeks put a new one in its place, so that by the age of Demetrius Phalereus several centuries later, every single original oar and plank of the vessel had been replaced.
The question is, if none of the original parts were still there, was it still the same ship of Theseus? Or was it now just a new ship that shared all of the original’s characteristics?
In the abstract, this alone is a big philosophical conundrum. But it quickly gets dicier.
Say you went to two different McDonald’s restaurants on polar opposite ends of the world, and ordered a Big Mac from each. Upon delivery of the second Big Mac, you unwrapped both sandwiches and placed them side by side in front of you. Then you swapped the bottom half of the one on the left with the one on the right. Were they both still the same Big Mac?
Prior to 2048, the subject would have been up for debate, thanks to the Theseus paradox. Some might have said that while you still had two Big Macs in front of you, neither of them was now the original sandwich, due to variations in the places they came from, the subtle differences in construction, and the people who made them.
After the cloning innovation, however, both Big Macs were pretty much the same. I say “pretty much” because there were still variables in the way each burger had been handled prior to delivery—environmental conditions associated with the point of origin, the impact of time on the final product, and so on. The fact that there could be more than one at a time didn’t quite solve for the Theseus paradox, but it was deemed close enough.
But then, in 2106, McDonald’s upped the consistency ante for the last time. You may have left the previous paragraph asking yourself, If we cloned the Big Mac and exchanged parts between the new “copy” and the original, would the original still be the original? Or you were not asking that, and that’s okay, I asked it for you, and, boy, aren’t you glad I did? No, you’re not, because in 2106 the question became irrelevant. Technology had finally caught up to our exacting laziness. Once McDonald’s solved for cloning, the only problem that remained was delivery—how to ensure that every Big Mac would be cooked and prepared in exactly the same way. The burgers might have been identical, but they could still taste different. To jump this last hurdle, McDonald’s-Huáng needed to go beyond cloning to true replication.
I’m really hoping you already know all of this and have skipped ahead. But if you don’t, or you didn’t, the difference between cloning and replication goes something like this:
In 2048, they managed to string molecules together in a preordained symphony, but the underlying atoms were free to dance to it in their own way. In 2106, not only were they printing out molds of well-behaved atoms, but each quark was swinging through, tangoing with, and leaping over Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, exactly as expected. Accomplishing this for one string of molecules was considered a feat; now the good scientists at Mickey D’s had to grapple with replicating the trillions of atoms that made up a Big Mac.
Ever hear of something called density functional theory (DFT)? If you think it sounds like something a physicist might do to predict the volume of their farts while sitting on the toilet, you’re not far off. DFT is a method for determining the electronic structure of matter.
Sylvia is fond of saying, “The biggest trick in quantum physics is figuring out what happens next.”18
As the cornerstone of computational physics, DFT has been a very popular way to figure out “what something does next” since as early as the 1970s. Once it became feasible to determine the electronic structure of matter, then reproducing said matter became an exercise in computational capacity: the more complex the object, the more computing power necessary to calculate its continuous quantum variables using DFT. This is important in the realm of replication because the computer doesn’t technically reproduce the things being replicated until after they have already arrived. A virtual version of the object arrives at its destination, the DFT algorithm analyzes it, compares it to the original object, and, if satisfied that the current state of the arriving object matches the next state of the original object, then it’s actually there—otherwise, it never arrived. Cool stuff.
It took a while for the necessary quantum computing capacity to develop so that we could perfectly calculate the future molecular state of something as complex as a Big Mac. But by 2106, we were there. The ability to scan and reproduce complex objects at scale simply became an exercise in cost reduction, consumer-oriented design, and fabrication. It also kicked off what quickly became known as the Quantum Age. A new era of human evolution, defined by a double cheeseburger. Sounds about right.
Within the next decade, replication printers became the essential gotta-have-it kitchen appliance. Why wait for water to freeze when you can simply point your cup at the printer, tell it the exact number of ice cubes along with whatever beverage you want them floating in, and presto! Coke on the rocks. Or bourbon and Coke on the rocks. Or just two fingers of bourbon, neat, forget the rocks, you lush.