I find it very interesting that the vast majority of people saw a red ball. I did too.
::: spoiler
- red
- Indeterminate, mostly just an arm
- shoulder-length brown hair, androgenous body, hidden face
- Like a rubber bouncy ball you'd get in a party bag
- wooden, square
Mostly I already knew, but it felt like things were "filling in" as I tried to "remember" the image to answer the questions, especially around the person.
:::
The Laws of Thermodynamics say you will always lose some energy to heat when energy is used to affect a change. I have to imagine this would be particularly so when energy is converted to matter since that's very involved, but I'm not a physicist so I can't confirm that.
Come to think of it, this means that industrial replication plants and shipyards would likely be incredibly hot places, due to the inevitable loss to heat in replicating massive components.