Both episodes are a bit foggy to me, not seeing them both for years, but I was kinda joking about the brothers being parents.
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What happened to Lore?
- Thread starter Terok Nor
- Start date
Well can't fault you for that! 
Speaking of foggy, didn't Data kill Lore? I thought that was the end of it.
Speaking of foggy, didn't Data kill Lore? I thought that was the end of it.
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With androids, death isn't a clear-cut issue. Indeed, even very clear cutting can only achieve so much...
Data supposedly killed Lore in "Datalore" already, or at least attempted to. Why he didn't make sure, we don't know. Perhaps Lore's story about floating in space until found by the Pakleds was bogus (even though we now know that positronic-brain signals can be detected quite easily across considerable range, in some cases at least)? Perhaps Lore immediately after his "Datalore" beam-out pulled some stunt that left him looking more dead than "android floating serenely in space", then made good his escape?
Timo Saloniemi
Data supposedly killed Lore in "Datalore" already, or at least attempted to. Why he didn't make sure, we don't know. Perhaps Lore's story about floating in space until found by the Pakleds was bogus (even though we now know that positronic-brain signals can be detected quite easily across considerable range, in some cases at least)? Perhaps Lore immediately after his "Datalore" beam-out pulled some stunt that left him looking more dead than "android floating serenely in space", then made good his escape?
Timo Saloniemi
B-Tray ...
Number 5 was Johnny. He was good.
they didn't too. They already had B4 at the end of Nemesis. Lore could possibly have been destroyed when the Enterprise-D crashed on Veridian III in "Generations" so that would more than likely have been the end of him. But who knows?
Given the existence of replicators, I doubt anything aboard the E-D was unique, or remained unique for long. Well, the people, perhaps, due to ancient angst about duplication, but not the inanimate artifacts.
So Moriarty's hard drive universe, Lore's butt module and the Kurlan naiskos should safely continue existing at Memory Alpha, the Smithsonian, and Bobby Joe Brown's basement for all we know. (That Commander Maddox couldn't obtain a replica of Data for his studies would have been due to the very same thing that prevented him from obtaining the original: as long as Data was considered a person, duplication taboos would apply.)
Timo Saloniemi
So Moriarty's hard drive universe, Lore's butt module and the Kurlan naiskos should safely continue existing at Memory Alpha, the Smithsonian, and Bobby Joe Brown's basement for all we know. (That Commander Maddox couldn't obtain a replica of Data for his studies would have been due to the very same thing that prevented him from obtaining the original: as long as Data was considered a person, duplication taboos would apply.)
Timo Saloniemi
Or, some things can't be replicated. (you can replicate the phaser but not the power in it, it still needs a charge.) including people, and complex patterns need better replicators and the pattern has to be stored somewhere. (the data files for an Ai like lore or Moriarty would be huge, and inert, therefore dead and not them anymore.)
Also, people can tell the difference on replicated food and drink, so an archaeological artefact or something so unique or complex would not work that way. (going by on screen stuff, the tech manuals and whotnot)
For some reason I always thought lore has been dissipated into atoms at the end of descent, but I suppose he was just in data's creepy collection of deactivated relatives.
Duplication of complex things in trek has always relied on unreproduceable accidents...Tom Riker for instance. Or the duplicates themselves have been flawed.
(the books recently followed up on all this of course)
Lore was probably given to Bruce Maddox for study. I doubt he was interested in 'fixing' him so much as creating another Soong type android.
Might be - but we never really hear this happening. So probably replication is considered too cumbersome and resources-consuming in those cases where heroes and villains go to different types of trouble to obtain the product. But one would no doubt make an exception in really important cases, dedicating whatever resources are needed.
Never stated. And why would power be difficult to replicate? Picard can order his tea hot; a charged phaser would be no different.
We have seen entire people kept in abstract longterm storage: transporters can do it, and holodeck computers can do it. Supposedly starship computers, of which the above are mere subsets, would have little trouble with the pattern of Lore.
People probably are wrong, though... At least we've never seen anybody recognize replicated food without being told it's replicated.
He should have been dissipated into atoms at the conclusion of "Datalore", as he supposedly was beamed through shields. And by using a cargo transporter, which backstage sources claim lacks the resolution of personnel transporters (but that's demonstrably false, not only because Lore survives, but because all sorts of stowaways can make it through a cargo transport).
True enough - but those are unwanted duplications. We know little about deliberate duplication.
Timo Saloniemi
@Timo, I don't think transporters (or replicators) can store* and copy people** (or Soong type androids.) If they could, it would have huge setting changing implications.
There obviously are things replicators cannot reproduce, such as dilithium, ketracel-white and living beings. I'd imagine they'd also have problems with really complex machines. I believe that it is mistake to think that anything that can be transported, can also be replicated, this does not appear to be so.
Also, Lore could have been transported outside the ship, yet inside the shield bubble.
Anyway, I was always uncomfortable with the idea that Lore was permanently disassembled. You just cannot sentence sentient beings to death like that. I'd like to think that he is held in some super secure Federation facility (and is probably studied by people like Maddox.)
* What Scotty did was unusual.
** What happened to Riker was a freak accident that cannot be duplicated.
There obviously are things replicators cannot reproduce, such as dilithium, ketracel-white and living beings. I'd imagine they'd also have problems with really complex machines. I believe that it is mistake to think that anything that can be transported, can also be replicated, this does not appear to be so.
Also, Lore could have been transported outside the ship, yet inside the shield bubble.
Anyway, I was always uncomfortable with the idea that Lore was permanently disassembled. You just cannot sentence sentient beings to death like that. I'd like to think that he is held in some super secure Federation facility (and is probably studied by people like Maddox.)
* What Scotty did was unusual.
** What happened to Riker was a freak accident that cannot be duplicated.
I have long felt Nemesis should have featured Lore, instead of B4. It would have been better symmetry to the story of the two brothers, when Data did his brain dump into Lore instead of B4. Also it would have given Lore a legit path to redemption, and at the end instead of a dull-witted B4 singing Blue Skies, we could have had Lore say "I finally get it," and finally try to live up to the example Data set, especially after Data sacrifices himself.
Such implications are already preempted by our heroes' disgust towards the idea of duplication. Under UFP law and Starfleet rules, they are permitted to murder their duplicates. Neither UFP nor Starfleet would be interested in using its machinery to create such duplicates, then, as there are far cheaper ways to provide target practice!
Nothing obvious about any of that. Indeed, it's a major mystery why ketracel white wasn't replicated in "The Abandoned" - because in other episodes, it's shown that you can simply drop any unknown sample into the replicator and push not just "copy" but also "enlarge" (see "Rivals")! The replicator doesn't need to know what it is doing in order to get it done...
Living beings are just living tissue. And replicators can produce living tissue just fine, including tricky parts such as neural stuff ("Ethics" and "Emanations").
Yet no doubt completely repeatable. And "Counterpoint" shows our heroes quite routinely storing great numbers of people in their transporter for hours upon hours at an end.
And what happened to Kirk was quite different and again probably difficult to duplicate. But our heroes didn't want either of these incidents to happen. This tells us nothing about situations where they would want duplication to happen (although they give good indication that such wanting would be really unlikely, considering how much the duplication was hated and feared!).
Quite possibly. Why he wouldn't then be transported back is difficult to explain. Even if Data or Wesley failed to look at the transporter settings before erasing them, the ship's sensors ought to show one active android floating and screaming nearby. I mean, why wouldn't our heroes be looking, and quite actively at that, unless they were in the solid belief that Lore had ceased to physically exist?
What the settings of the transporter were is another issue. Lore set the machine; Wesley had no time or interest in resetting it. Lore claimed he was going to lower the shields, beam out a tree and then have Picard phaser it to bits to show off. Lore's only interest was in getting the shields lowered; he had no tree! Picard in turn was at that point perfectly aware that Lore was pretending to be Data and up to no good. (Indeed, Picard had probably known all along, hence his "Shut up, Wesley!" when the kid was about to accuse Lore and throw away the advantage.) Certainly Picard would not voluntarily drop shields himself, nor allow Lore to do it by remote.
So, had Lore managed to set the console to drop shields and then perform a meaningless, harmless transport? Had he not been exposed, this setting would make sense, as it would look good to the heroes (including the transport part). But now he was exposed, so there was no need for subterfuge. Hence there shouldn't be a connection between transporting and shield-dropping, and Lore shouldn't even manage the latter.
Death penalty is common enough in human history, including Star Trek. TOS Starfleet had at least one crime for which the penalty was death, although it appeared to change from time to time ("The Menagerie", "Turnabout Intruder"); TOS UFP might have had more of those, and at one point Kirk claimed that murder carried a death penalty ("The Ultimate Computer").
Also, our Starfleet heroes quite often killed criminals, supposedly because it was their mandate to do so. Killing was apparently sanctioned in cases where the criminal did not pose immediate danger to others, but where she, he or it did pose a continuing danger that would not go away until the criminal was killed. Yuta in "Vengeance Factor" would have been as difficult to contain as Lore after "Descent" unless their lives were put on complete and hopefully permanent hold; with Yuta, that meant death, while with Lore, the sentence could be trivially reversible.
That'd be a completely different movie, then, as Lore would be an active villain rather than a passive tool, leaving little for "Picard's villain" to do...
Timo Saloniemi
@Timo, so you're seriously claiming that only reason to not have backup copies of people and bring them back in the case of death is that people in Federation don't want to do that? Yeah, not buying that for a moment.
Furthermore, it is clear that not everything can be replicated. They mine Dilithium and Latinum is used as currency as it cannot be replicated. Ketracel is obviously the same, there's no mystery.
As for death penalty, even if we believed that 24th century Federation would have such a punishment (I don't), it would still need a trial.
Furthermore, it is clear that not everything can be replicated. They mine Dilithium and Latinum is used as currency as it cannot be replicated. Ketracel is obviously the same, there's no mystery.
As for death penalty, even if we believed that 24th century Federation would have such a punishment (I don't), it would still need a trial.
Where would they keep them? In the freezer? That's way too weird for our conservative and uptight heroes.
After death occurs, it's too late to use duplication: you'd only duplicate a corpse. But before death, it's clearly "inhuman" by the standards of our heroes. Who reputedly think that being afraid of death is an antiquated concept ("The Neutral Zone")!
If it's possible to replicate probability-skewing machines in "Rivals", it would be really mysterious that anything at all would remain unreplicable.
Furthermore, currency vs. replication is a non-issue. Cash can be replicated today (if it can be produced to start with, it can automatically be produced later on as well!) - why it isn't done more commonly is simple enough, as replicating costs more than the forgeries would yield. GPL could be a similar issue, and indeed it's difficult to think why it wouldn't be.
That doesn't stop our heroes from killing criminals. It's not "death penalty", it's simply a mechanism by which the criminal forfeits his, her or its life.
Timo Saloniemi
They'd keep them in the computer's memory. You suggest this is possible. I don't believe it is.
Not really. We have no idea how those machines worked. It may seem arbitrary that some things can be replicated and some not, but this nevertheless seems to be the case.
I think it has been stated on screen that Latinum cannot be replicated. Memory Alpha lists 'Who Mourns Morn?' as source for that. (I'm not going to check.)
Because Lore is an exact copy of Data, only with sadistic tendencies. Even Data believed Lore to be his twin. So the Federation should at least put that into consideration when defining if Lore has legal rights.
I don't suggest, I point out. People can be stored in "cmoputer memory" or "transporter buffer" or other such media and then retrieved, after hours, days or decades. It's a Star Trek fact that we're supposed to take for granted, regardless of it being an "astounding" Trek fact that makes our heroes gasp in awe on occasion. Disbelief would require belief in a web of lies, in a conspiracy theory of some sort.
This is of course possible, but then you have no basis for arguing that Lore or Picard would be unreplicable per se.
Don't worry, you don't have to - there is no such quote, in that episode or any other. Nor is there such a quote for dilithium, or people, or androids.
Absolutely so. But this is also a case of looks potentially deceiving: it would require significant in-depth investigation to actually establish that Lore is an exact copy. Indeed, Lore might insist on such an investigation to save his skin, since if judged by Data standards he'd have to follow the legal precedent of having to be good or face the music. If Data did what Lore did, Data might be killed as a punishment; if Lore could prove he's a different lifeform incapable of not being evil, new rights and obligations would have to be formulated for him.
Although the UFP no doubt has to formulate such things as a matter of course whenever encountering new life and civilizations anyway. There'd be ample precedent for having to deal with things as exotic as Data. I guess we just have to accept that the accumulated precedent establishes that everything must be examined on a species-by-species basis, anew every time, lest exotic forms of existence be done injustice.
Timo Saloniemi
Yes, but this does not mean it can be duplicated. Maybe it is quantum data and cannot be duplicated as per no-cloning theorem; I don't know how it works and it doesn't really matter. That they (the Federation or anyone) do not just replicate dead people from transporter's memory is proof enough that they cannot do it.
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They have the knowhow...
Plus
... It's just the ethics stopping them to allow people to live forever.
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@bbjeg, not buying that. The Riker thing was a freak accident (maybe there's a parallel universe somewhere in which Riker went missing in that accident) and I have no idea what the Picard as kid has to do with this, no one was duplicated in that episode.
I am willing to believe all that self betterment stuff in TNG, but I will not believe that people would not bring back dead if were possible. It would totally undermine every death in the series. Hell, think the lengths Kirk went to bring Spock back.
I am willing to believe all that self betterment stuff in TNG, but I will not believe that people would not bring back dead if were possible. It would totally undermine every death in the series. Hell, think the lengths Kirk went to bring Spock back.
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