No analogy is perfect. When the inevitable differences between the source and target of the analogy misrepresent essential features of the source, the analogy is fatally flawed.

In this case, the mysterious box is — mysterious. We can only speculate about its function. If that much food came out of a box the size of a breadbox, we could only describe it as a miracle. Given the size of the box, we might assume that all the food to come out of it is stored inside from the start. To suppose that such a box would provide nourishment indefinitely would indeed be comparable to “the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and says how great things are going so far as he passes the 10th floor.”

We might suppose that raw ingredients are stored, perhaps under considerable pressure, in some very efficient manner, and the tasty meals are synthesized by some ingenious mechanical mechanism. But a reputable engineer or chemist could estimate the maximum amount of raw food material that could be stored in a vessel that size, with a weight that can be supported by metal legs. Even the most generous estimations would merely postpone exhaustion of a supply that is measurably finite (say, in terms of kilograms or molecules) from the start.

Without the most basic understanding of what goes on inside the box, concern and uncertainty about the future is entirely appropriate.

Imagine that your skepticism about Julian’s assurances begins to disturb your sleep. One night, you go down to the basement to have another look at this strange black box upon which your lives depend. To your surprise, you find a number of caterers loading prepared foodstuffs into the box, via a cleverly hidden panel. You see the machine is nothing more than a complicated vending machine. You question the caterers, and find that they are paid by a university which is doing research on human psychology. You convince them to let you accompany them through a secret door behind a curtain you hadn’t noticed, through a long tunnel, to a research institution with a well-stocked kitchen.

You learn that there are twenty billion people living comfortably on Planet Earth, mostly in conurbations having a density of several thousand souls per square kilometer. You see wonders that make you feel like a scholar from the Renaissance suddenly transported to the computer age. Food technology, however, is pretty simple. Plants that have been known since the dawn of agriculture are grown in high-rise hydroponic greenhouses, then harvested and processed mechanically.

You ask where they get enough energy. Your hosts say it’s hard to explain, but mention that people used to consider boiled whale fat a good source of fuel, and later found it much easier and more efficient to leave the whales alone and pump hydrocarbons up from ten kilometers below the ocean surface. They made two or three more improvements in that direction.

Also, polymetallic nodules turned out to be a bit of an unexpected bonanza.

They have good people working on the heat death of the universe problem, but it’s a stubborn one. They figure they can get by for another Decade, their slang term for 10^10 years.

To escape the scenario in which the box must run out of food in something less than a decade you have to believe that, somehow, your ingenuity not only extracts the food but somehow brings it into being.

Thanks for a great article. I think I will order a pizza.