In the dome of Titan that the rebels from the Wheel have set up there's a disturbing machine. It's a waste recycler that changes human waste - human body waste - into food. Or, as Jamie puts it the machine turns human waste into "things like biscuits that weren't biscuits, bowls of stuff like mushroom soup that wasn't mushroom soup" (164).
The strangest part of this though, and the whole book, really, is that Baxter doesn't dwell on explaining the technology that he presents. He gives a quick run down of how it works in scientific terms, and then moves right along. This isn't a detriment. Instead, such a quick treatment makes the technology that he describes seem all the more real. As if it's so everyday and common that readers will already know the ins and outs of it.
What I do wonder, though, is whether or not such a recycler's output would suffer from diminishing returns. If the source of your nutrients is always your own waste, stuff that passes after your body's taken what it can, then wouldn't you eventually be making food that was nutrient neutral?
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