Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Everything is
becoming science
iction
Place: Your life
Time: A few decades from now
. . .
even in the future, it's still hard to get up in the morning.
The smell of freshly baked whole wheat blueberry mufins wafts from the kitchen
fo o d pr inte r. The cartridges to make these organic, low-sugar mufins were mar-
keted as a luxury series. The recipes were downloaded from different featured
artisan bakers from famous restaurants and resorts.
The irst time you showed the food printer to your grandfather, he thought it
was an automated bread machine—an appliance from the 1980s that took foodie
kitchens by storm. He couldn't understand why you wanted to print processed food
until his anniversary came. To celebrate, you splurged on deluxe food cartridges
and printed him and your grandmother a celebratory dinner of fresh tuna steaks,
couscous and a wildly swirled chocolate-mocha-raspberry cream cake with a dif-
ferent picture within every slice.
Managing your diabetes has gotten easier since the health insurance company
upgraded your food printer to a high-grade medical model. New medical-grade
food printers for diabetics read streams of wireless signals from a tiny skin implant
that tracks your blood sugar. When you wake up in the morning, the FoodFabber
receives the irst reading of the morning and adapts the sugar content and nutri-
tional balance of your digitally cooked breakfast accordingly.
After breakfast, it's time to check the news. The top story is an update on a rescue
operation of several miners who have been trapped underground for a week. Their
mine shaft collapsed, stranding them deep underground. At irst rescue teams tried
to dig them out until their shovels nearly triggered a deadly rubble slide.
Fortunately, the mining company followed federal safety regulations and prop-
erly equipped its miners with regulation safety gear. 3D safety printers are a
standard tool that mining crews carry with them into deep mine shafts. Before they
