Faster-Than-Light Pizza Delivery vs. Domino's On the Moon

September 26, 2011

The Japanese subsidiary of Domino's, in an apparent attempt to one-up international rival Pizza Hut's 2001 achievement of delivering the first pizzas to be eaten in space, recently unveiled plans to open the first pizza parlor on the moon. Via Adweek.com, here's the video announcement from Domino's Japan President and CEO Scott K. Oelkers:

 

Where No Fast Food Chain Has Gone Before

An article in the U.K.'s Telegraph newspaper provided a few more details about the blueprint, drawn up by Japanese construction firm Maeda Corp. Domino's lunar store would be built of concrete and covered by a protective dome 85 feet in diameter. The main floor would include a customer dining area wrapped around an atrium, while pizzas would be prepared in the two-story basement, where living quarters also would be provided for Domino's employees. The project would require 70 tons of construction materials to be transported to the moon, and although the company would try to keep costs down by utilizing lunar minerals, the estimated budget for the project would be 1.67 trillion yen, or about $21.9 billion.

Even for a pizza maker with $10 billion in worldwide sales, that's a lot of dough. Subsequently, Oelkers revealed in a similarly tongue-in-cheek video on Domino's Japanese website that he reluctantly had decided to postpone the project, after calculating that the expense of lunar construction and food preparation would raise the price of a Domino's deluxe pie to 218,540, 434 yen, or $2,849,249.90. Thus, for now, the Japanese Domino's has to confine itself to offering a special "memorial" pizza box depicting its future lunar ambitions.

Given the other outlandish and sometimes outright peculiar notions that I've championed in this blog over the years, you're probably expecting that I would be an enthusiastic supporter of the Domino's-on-the-Moon concept. The truth is, though, it seems kind of, well, passé to me. After all, the publicity gambit of proposing to open an outlet on the moon isn't exactly new. As I previously detailed in this blog post, Barron Hilton proposed building a lunar hotel back in 1967. A 1980s commercial depicted a lunar McDonald's, staffed by a spacesuit-clad Ronald McDonald (who, somewhat inexplicably, spoke in a British accent).

 

Cuisine Beyond Astronaut Ice Cream

But let's assume for a moment that Domino's isn't just concocting some deep-dish hype and actually someday hopes to expand into the cosmos. Is there really going to be that much of a market for fast-food pizza on the moon? While the early astronauts ate unappetizing baby-food-like goo squeezed from tubes, since then culinary researchers at NASA's Houston-based space food laboratory have developed a considerably more palatable menu of 200 different food and beverage items reengineered for cooking and consumption in space, including such delights as shrimp cocktail, barbecued beef brisket, chocolate pudding cake and apricot cobbler with bits of pie crust mixed in. That sounds like a lot tougher competition than KFC or Burger King. (Here's a good HowStuffWorks article on the evolution of space food.) What would do better on the moon, I think, would be a trendy restaurant chain like Chipotle, provided that someone builds hydroponic farms on the moon to produce the fresh, locally grown ingredients that are the restaurant's big selling point.

Additionally, as this 2001 paper by NASA food researchers details, baking fast-food pizzas in the moon's microgravity environment is going to be a lot trickier than it is on Earth, since heat transfer is slower, and the dough, cheese and sauce are likely to behave differently due to differences in fluid-gas transfer and other chemical processes that are part of cooking. (If it's any consolation, Starbucks might face even more bedeviling difficulties brewing coffee on the moon, due to boiling liquids' tendency to form one huge bubble in low gravity, as this article and video from NASA's web site illustrate.

But don't worry, because I have an even splashier idea for Domino's.

 Back in the day, as you fast-food aficionados may remember, the company offered a guarantee to customers that it would deliver pizzas in 30 minutes or less or else give them a discount. (As this Associated Press article details, the company's then-owner had to abandon this practice back in 1993, after being hit by a lawsuit by a motorist injured when a Domino's driver ran a red light.) Since then, technological advances, such as "Pizza Pilot" software that uses GPS data and computerized maps to guide drivers, and mobile pizza kitchens that receive orders via wireless Internet connections and then bake the pre made pies en route, have promised to shave minutes off hungry customers' wait times. But as far as I've been able to determine, the pizza delivery industry hasn't made any really dramatic, game-changing breakthroughs.

 

Faster-Than-Light Pizza Delivery

That's why I hope Domino's executives in Japan have picked up on the big announcement just out of Geneva, Switzerland, that scientists working for CERN, the European organization for nuclear research, claim to have clocked beams of massless subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. As this Reuters dispatch. elaborates, the particles beat light speed to a finish line 450 miles away. (Light photons cover that distance in .000000243 of a second, while the neutrinos were about .00000006 of a second faster.) True, some skeptics -- for example, the writer of Discover magazine's Bad Astronomy blog, -- are inclined to doubt the finding, which would seem to upend one of the core principles in Einsteinian physics.

But instead, perhaps we pizza lovers, who have become so open-minded that we can contemplate the possibility of pineapple, feta cheese and even barbecue sauce as toppings, should take this as an omen that faster-than-light travel may be possible. As New Scientist writer Lisa Grossman points out:

Some theories posit that there are extra, hidden dimensions beyond the familiar four (three of space, one of time). It's possible that the speedy neutrinos tunnel through these extra dimensions, reducing the distance they have to travel to get to the target.

Right now, of course, dimension hopping remains a fantasy confined to the sci- fi TV series Fringe. But look at it this way: It's not that much more outlandish than building a $21.9 billion pizza parlor on the moon, and a lot more zeitgeist-y. So if Domino's wants to make a really big publicity splash, maybe they should announce that in the future, contingent upon the development of faster-than-light, dimension-hopping delivery vehicles, they'll get your pizza to you in 2.42 milliseconds or less, or else you get a free order of breadsticks.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Image Credits: Thinkstock (2)

where no fast food chain has gone before