Time Fridge?
You know what would be a cool invention? A Time Fridge.
A box anywhere from the size of a thermos to an entire pantry. With the door closed, no time would pass for anything inside it. Hot items would remain hot, cold items cold, and nothing would ever rot or sour.
You could put meat in it for years, and it would come out at the same temperature it went in, ready to be used. You could cook or buy anything, eat some, put the rest in the Time Fridge and have it for dinner - a year from now. And it wouldn't need reheating, or reconstituting, or anything added to it in order to be instantly servable.
You could buy perishable ingredients when they were plentiful, and come back to them when they were scarce. Large corporate versions could store any kind of food on the market to avoid hills and dips in supply.
You could stock up on components of a grand feast, making each dish on its own days or weeks apart and then serving them all freshly prepared.
It could replace large sections of the refrigeration industry - especially commercial storage, transport and supermarket display, and downgrade the home refrigerator to purely a cooling device rather than a food storage area.
Heck, combine it with an oven and you'd get an appliance which could cook a meal and then hold it in timeless suspension until you opened the door, maybe hours later.
For developed countries, food preparation could be timeshifted on the short- and long-term scales, and freezing-sensitive perishables could be shipped around the world. Order takeout from Hong Kong, Paris and New York and have it delivered to the middle of the Australian desert, ready to eat.
For developing countries, food supplies could be boosted as nothing would be lost to distance, rot, or even bureaucratic delays.
If the process worked on living things, you could ship stock all around the world without the need for food or water and suffering no losses. Or bung a Time Fridge in a horse trailer and transport horses with ease. Install them in ambulances and medicopters and there would not only be no rush to transport the patient, but almost no need for much of the emergency equipment currently in there, as the patient could not die or deteriorate. Heck, it would make for much easier shuffling of patients even between medical centres, allowing patients to be moved to a location with available staff and facilities, or in an emergency snap-suspended until a specialist could attend to them.
Endless uses! (Including the nastier ones, starting with police holding cells and going on to making political prisoners 'disappear' or become much easier to move around without detection.)
Thoughts?
A box anywhere from the size of a thermos to an entire pantry. With the door closed, no time would pass for anything inside it. Hot items would remain hot, cold items cold, and nothing would ever rot or sour.
You could put meat in it for years, and it would come out at the same temperature it went in, ready to be used. You could cook or buy anything, eat some, put the rest in the Time Fridge and have it for dinner - a year from now. And it wouldn't need reheating, or reconstituting, or anything added to it in order to be instantly servable.
You could buy perishable ingredients when they were plentiful, and come back to them when they were scarce. Large corporate versions could store any kind of food on the market to avoid hills and dips in supply.
You could stock up on components of a grand feast, making each dish on its own days or weeks apart and then serving them all freshly prepared.
It could replace large sections of the refrigeration industry - especially commercial storage, transport and supermarket display, and downgrade the home refrigerator to purely a cooling device rather than a food storage area.
Heck, combine it with an oven and you'd get an appliance which could cook a meal and then hold it in timeless suspension until you opened the door, maybe hours later.
For developed countries, food preparation could be timeshifted on the short- and long-term scales, and freezing-sensitive perishables could be shipped around the world. Order takeout from Hong Kong, Paris and New York and have it delivered to the middle of the Australian desert, ready to eat.
For developing countries, food supplies could be boosted as nothing would be lost to distance, rot, or even bureaucratic delays.
If the process worked on living things, you could ship stock all around the world without the need for food or water and suffering no losses. Or bung a Time Fridge in a horse trailer and transport horses with ease. Install them in ambulances and medicopters and there would not only be no rush to transport the patient, but almost no need for much of the emergency equipment currently in there, as the patient could not die or deteriorate. Heck, it would make for much easier shuffling of patients even between medical centres, allowing patients to be moved to a location with available staff and facilities, or in an emergency snap-suspended until a specialist could attend to them.
Endless uses! (Including the nastier ones, starting with police holding cells and going on to making political prisoners 'disappear' or become much easier to move around without detection.)
Thoughts?