"Everything is on the Internet," said a character from El Roto, and another responded: "Let's see, give me a sandwich." The joke has an angle of criticism against technology, one of the brands of this extraordinary creator, it is true that the runaway technical advances are kicked in our time with the most scandalous miseries, straits and inequalities. But the vignette also has a more general and profound reading, relative to the insurmountable border between the virtual and the real, to the apparent impossibility of converting symbolic strings of zeros and ones into a sandwich, exactly.
The border of El Roto, however, may begin to dissipate in the near future. Take, for example, hamburgers made with stem cells. At the moment, it only publicly states the existence of one, presented in December 2011 with a large electrical device and the ostentatious presence of Ray Kurzweil, inventor, musician, businessman, computer scientist and Google's chief engineer. That hamburger was cut into two pieces and each half was offered to a renowned food critic. The two agreed that the texture was very similar to that of real meat, although the taste resented its complete lack of fat. The scientists hired by Kurzweil had started from muscle stem cells, with the predictable result of a more boring meat brick than a Sunday afternoon. This could be resolved by adding fat stem cells, although at the moment there is no news about it. But let's get back to our point.
As much as it's made from stem cells, the synthetic hamburger will still be an object of the real world, is not it? Yes, but let's introduce now another piece of vertiginous technology, the 3D printer. If this machine ejects mineral dust, it will build a geological object; if it ejects living cells, it will make a biological object. It's not fantasy: scientists are already using 3D printing to eject yeast cells and build small fermentors (beer, bread or drugs) much more efficient than conventional ones.
So, to satisfy the request of the sandwich, the character of El Roto would need a 3D printer with the cartridge well loaded with muscle stem cells, preferably fat stem cells and, of course, wheat and yeast to make the bread . Once equipped, the guy can download an Internet snack. It is far (perhaps fortunately), but there is no problem of principle
