We are able to capture moving images and sound. Why can’t we capture smells and broadcast them through a television or phone for example?
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Your body’s sensors are like locks that take very specific keys. They trigger a sensation when the correct “key” comes into contact with its corresponding “lock” attached to your body. If you want to fool one of these sensors, you need to be able to create its keys.
For vision, the “locks” in this case are special cells in the back of your eyes. In most people, there are four kinds of locks: three that sense color, and one that senses brightness. The “keys” for these locks are photons, little bits of light. If you want to fool this sensor, you need to be able to manufacture photons. This is actually quite easy to do. Any light source emits them. All you have to do is create a box that can recreate specific patterns of photons *very precisely*. i.e., a screen. That’s tech we have.
For sound, the “locks” are even simpler. The inside of your ear is coated with many tiny hair fibers. Their “keys” are simply vibrational patterns. Different hairs are sensitive to specific resonant vibrations. All you need to do to fake this kind of key is have some kind of machine that can vibrate any way you want it to. With electromagnets, we can do this extremely easily. That’s how speakers work.
Smell, though, that’s really tricky. There are *lots* of different locks for smell. Perhaps more than we could ever count. And all of those locks take extremely specifically-shaped molecules as keys. If you want to “fake” any arbitrary smell, you’re going to have to build a machine that can build all of these really specifically-shaped molecules and deliver them to the human nose in just the right proportions. That’s extremely hard. You’d need some kind of molecular 3D printer that can shovel out billions, trillions of nanoscopic little keys of arbitrary shapes and sizes made of all kinds of elements arranged in all sorts of ways. It simply can’t be done with any kind of technology we currently have.
The best thing you can do is make a machine that only creates one kind of key, to create one specific kind of smell. And it will never be *quite* right, either, since anything you smell in the normal world has a rich mix of many different keys in subtle ratios. Blasting the human nose with just one kind of key will certainly make you get a sensation *like* a certain thing that has a lot of that key in it, but it will be missing out on the countless tiny keys that make that subtle difference. It’s kind of the same story with taste, and why a lot of artificially-flaovred things taste, well, *artificial*.
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