A thought on Gold Pressed Latinum.

[T'Girl]

I never though of this before, but is it's possibly that latinum is a living organism? A chemically complex semi-gelatinous organic lifeform.

A small colonies of it lives inside the gold box that holds it, maybe it extremely slowly consumes tiny quanities of the gold, over the course of centuries. It reproduces (by division) only in a small natural environments locate upon the boggy Ferengi home world. No one has ever been able to duplicate this exact environment, scientists aren't sure why.

It's a popular theory that latinum can not be replicated. The replicator has been shown to have difficulty with producing living tissues and bodily organs.

Possible?

[Temis the Vorta]

Good theory! very creative.

[Jonas Grumby]

Interesting theory, T'Girl. A truly novel and exotic idea.

I could see something like this working in the world of TOS. However, I suspect our enlightened heroes of later Treks--where toasters are granted "sentient being" status and mass extinctions of whole civilizations are preferable to "interfering with the course of nature"--would probably be aghast at the idea of using living beings for something as declasse as actual commerce.

Then again, since latinum is primarily used by the disreputable Ferengi...

[EmperorTiberius]

Merry Christmas wrote:

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I never though of this before, but is it's possibly that latinum is a living organism? A chemically complex semi-gelatinous organic lifeform.

A small colonies of it lives inside the gold box that holds it, maybe it extremely slowly consumes tiny quanities of the gold, over the course of centuries. It reproduces (by division) only in a small natural environments locate upon the boggy Ferengi home world. No one has ever been able to duplicate this exact environment, scientists aren't sure why.

It's a popular theory that latinum can not be replicated. The replicator has been shown to have difficulty with producing living tissues and bodily organs.

Possible?

That body alchemy really expands your mind doesn't it?

[T'Girl]

^ Better living through chemistry.

[KamenRiderBlade]

Actually that would make perfect sense.

They've always stated that Latinum can't be replicated.

Replicators have the limitation that they can't create life, only inanimate objects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Stop
The ENT episode "Dead Stop" gave proof that replicators cannot create life itself, ergo the fake Mayweather body that was replicated by the Repair Station.

This would make sense since the organic creature lives in some sort of gelatinous goo.

The main problem would be keeping the organism alive and preventing it from growing.

However, I do see somebody eventually finding a way to forge latinum by making their own latinum farm.

Ergo inflation and counterfeiting

[JirinPanthosa]

I've always been curious as to why latinum is so valuable. Gold and silver are valuable because they can be made into jewelery. Money used to be valuable because it was tied to a gold standard, now it is valuable cause...well, cause we say it is.

Is latinum like gold or silver, something that can be made into a Giffen good, or is it tinkerbell money like dollars: Money that dies if we stop believing in it? I think in a few cases I've heard people refer to 'Latinum earrings', so I would guess the former.

That's one possible theory (Though it can't explain why the latinum didn't die in Morn's stomach, unless he swallowed a bunch of gold as well), but remember there are other things that can't be replicated as well. Dilithium, for example. And for some reason Deuterium, although that's stupid as it's just freaking hydrogen with a neutron (Come on Voyager writers, make up better fake science).

[Pavonis]

I'm going to be a broken record on this point, seeing as I've had to say it many times before, but no one ever said that latinum or dilithium, or anything else, couldn't be replicated. Even living cells were replicated. Worf's replacement spinal cord was replicated, was it not? Maybe it was a really advanced replicator modified for biomedical use.

[Timo]

The replicator has been shown to have difficulty with producing living tissues and bodily organs.

But only difficulty - it is possible to replicate organs and tissues in a cinch. Even the Voyager of the first season, with damaged replicators that couldn't even feed the crew without rationing, managed to replicate functioning neural tissue without much comment.

So this doesn't actually solve anything. It just takes us back to the square that reads "GPL can be replicated, but with difficulty", after which we can go on discussing how we today use symbolic money that can be replicated with difficulty and have very few problems with it.

The ENT episode "Dead Stop" gave proof that replicators cannot create life itself, ergo the fake Mayweather body that was replicated by the Repair Station.

That only applies to that one particular replicator, which wasn't of Federation manufacture or late 24th century interstellar standard.

There isn't any obvious reason why replicators couldn't replicate life. Life isn't all that exotic or complex, not in comparison with intricate things like taste or smell. But lots of life, glued together into a complex lifeform, might take a lot of replication effort, the same way lots of intricate containment fields took a lot of replication effort in TNG "The Child". And there might seldom be a motivation for that much effort.

I think in a few cases I've heard people refer to 'Latinum earrings'

Might be the same as paper earrings made out of a particular sort of paper - namely, thousand-dollar bills.

Timo Saloniemi

[Kytee]

JirinPanthosa wrote:

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Is latinum like gold or silver, something that can be made into a Giffen good, or is it tinkerbell money like dollars: Money that dies if we stop believing in it? I think in a few cases I've heard people refer to 'Latinum earrings', so I would guess the former.

In an episode of DS9 Quark and Rom discuss how the bathroom fixtures at the Nagus's palace are plated in Latinum. Quark even says he intend's to remove those and replace them with Solid Latinum ones. ( this is when he thinks he's going to be the next Nagus ) this makes me think its a crafting material.


-Kytee

[Agent Richard07]

Yeah, I've always figured that latinum was alive in some form.

[JirinPanthosa]

Was it never stated that dilithium couldn't be replicated? If it can be replicated it breaks the plots of about six episodes.

Wasn't it established in what's it called, the one with the war game in TNG? Wesley had to steal his science project from the Enterprise to get the dilithium.

[Pavonis]

They never said that dilithium couldn't be replicated. As for Wesley taking dilithium from Enterprise to power Hathaway, well, why replicate it when he only needed to retrieve it? Who knows how he got it in the first place.

[T'Girl]

Pavonis wrote:

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As for Wesley taking dilithium from Enterprise to power Hathaway ...

What this says is that there's something about dilithium that makes it difficult to obtain.

Could Wesley have replicate it? Sure, and the Enterprise has to sit motionless for a couple of days, it's major systems shut down, while the replicator makes one crystal.

[Timo]

Actually, we have no idea what Wesley retrieved in "Peak Performance". LaForge said the Hathaway already had some dilithium fragments, but there was zero antimatter aboard. It's therefore quite likely that Wesley went back to get either antimatter or then something that will make do as a replacement fuel for starships.

Replicating fuel makes no sense, unless the process is so efficient that it generates more fuel than it consumes (or at least as much), or creates a fuel type that cannot be used for powering the replication but is otherwise needed. It's difficult to see how antimatter could be replicated efficiently (although the TNG Tech Manual suggests there does exist a technology that can do it cheaper than E=mcc, by "flipping" normal matter), and it's good for drama that such "perpetual motion engines" are not indicated to be routine for the Star Trek universe. OTOH, replicators might well require antimatter power to be useful, meaning LaForge and pals would have to try out something else to reinvigorate the [i[Stargazer[/i].

The idea that everything can be replicated but many things shouldn't is still dramatically valid...

Timo Saloniemi