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Comment by tlbsofware | Hacker News Reader

This would be an awesome application towards waste disposal and recycling! Take a huge hunk of garbage, and try and rearrange all the atoms of it into something that can be reused as opposed to us leaving these in landfills. However it does make you wonder, would movie aliens really invade earth for water if they could just use a laser to create water from any other substance using its atoms and molecules?

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Our science fiction us based on what we know and what we can dream. I think our modern dismissal of ancient alchemy has probably discouraged scifi writers away from scenarios where any other conceivable alchemy prevents the necessity of hunting resources across the cosmos. Sure, you can write anything in fiction, but you do things For Plot.

To answer your question: no.

Your statement mostly ignores the Star trek replicator which is an alchemist's dream.

Yup. My first thought exactly.

Iff this laser trickery worked permanently, then you'd basically have a prototype Star Trek replicator right there. Feed garbage in, out comes something useful.

If the laser trickery worked temporarily (say, on the timescales of minutes), then perhaps this could be a small step towards creating Star Trek style holograms. Vent inert gas in, reshape it into interesting stuff, pulse it up from time to time to keep it from decaying.

Though I imagine sensory and computational requirements of such a thing would hit the limit of what's physically possible in our universe.

We just need to figure out how to convert poop back into food.

... in a simpler way than spreading it around and letting the ecosystem recycle it.

Huge caveat if you read the article: “And no matter how successful the strategy is, these altered properties will persist only as long as you apply the control pulse.”

As long as you keep your garbage under billions on constantly active perfectly timed lasers, it works!

Wouldnt the energy required to do so just generate more waste / greenhouse gas?

Just laser burst the smog leaving the factories into clean air!

> Take a huge hunk of garbage, and try and rearrange all the atoms of it into something that can be reused as opposed to us leaving these in landfills.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics would like to see you after class.

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