transporter army

[jaime]

But if it takes you apart then how does it know how to put you back together? It has to follow a blueprint of some kind otherwise all you have is matter, not living matter. So before it takes you apart it must make a complete recording of your molecular structure. If that recording is then used more than once then you end up with copies of yourself.

Unless some intrinsically part of that matter stream is what amounts to your soul. That spark of life. Trek implies they can move that about even without knowing what it actually is, and they definitely refer to its definitive existence (Katra, the various but relatively few NDEs, the times characters spontaneously evolve, including VGer. Vger manages to copy it without even meaning to, because it's beyond its understanding, in the Ilia probe. Ira Graves may even have housed it in Data, and various androids seem to have developed something like one.)

 

[locutus101]

The problem with immortality through the transporter would be the inability to retain your memory, right? Since your old brainwaves would be saved with your old pattern? It could definitely be used as a type of sleeper ship (ala scotty) or as a bootleg form of time travel (same concept) lol.

You'd lose the memory between now and the last time you used the transporter, which is no big deal. People who get in a coma after an accident often lose the last couple of days preceding the accident. It has something to do with long term memory storage which takes some time.

 

[jaime]

You'd lose the memory between now and the last time you used the transporter, which is no big deal. People who get in a coma after an accident often lose the last couple of days preceding the accident. It has something to do with long term memory storage which takes some time.

Which may in part cover Scotty on the Jenolan...he forgot the enterprise B and Kirks death...though oddly not his planned retirement.

 

[locutus101]

Which may in part cover Scotty on the Jenolan...he forgot the enterprise B and Kirks death...though oddly not his planned retirement.

I think the problem is that Scotty never got that memo telling him to retcon his memory of the events. However, this is a good example of how a transporter could be used to duplicate people ad infinitum.

 

[at Quark's]

That's not what happens, once you've been dismantled at the atomic level it is impossible to tell say an atom of hydrogen from your foot, from one from your head. You can only build the body from scratch following the precise blueprint that you've previously recorded. So you've effectively killed the person and rebuilt a new one. The new person is only a copy of the original who's lost forever.

But how does this account for what we see in Realm of Fear, Barclay -the very same man that claims in transport one is deconstructed molecule by molecule- being conscious during transport ? Is that his 'soul'? Or is it not really during the 'transport' phase, but immediately before or after that ?

 

[jaime]

But how does this account for what we see in Realm of Fears, Barclay -the very same man that claims in transport one is deconstructed molecule by molecule- being conscious during transport ? Is that his 'soul'? Or is it not really during the 'transport' phase, but immediately before or after that ?

That episode is crazy stuff TBH, and a bit of failure as a result, however, given that telepathy exists in many species, and latently in humans, and Barclay has been modified genetically by alien influences, it's possible that what we see in the beam is just a representation of some kind of telepathic or telekinetic event.....erm...best I can do. It's a Braga episode isn't it? It must be, it has weird stuff and psychosexual symbology whilst flying in the face of even Trek based common sense. And ultimately it's a bit of a boring episode.
Being conscious during transport works fine though, it even explains the contiguous nature of a person being transported. Slightly awkward for Scotty though...he would have gone mad or at minimum had a very very long dream.

 

[Phoenix219]

You'd lose the memory between now and the last time you used the transporter, which is no big deal. People who get in a coma after an accident often lose the last couple of days preceding the accident. It has something to do with long term memory storage which takes some time.

But then it wouldn't be immortality; Depending on how long between transporter backups, both your body and mind would be reverted to what you were; It would only give you an impression of a slightly longer lifespan by adding the few weeks or months skipped when reloaded, but you wouldn't have any extra memory of living any longer. It would be at most, a slightly stretched out lifespan with some memory gaps.

But how does this account for what we see in Realm of Fear, Barclay -the very same man that claims in transport one is deconstructed molecule by molecule- being conscious during transport ? Is that his 'soul'? Or is it not really during the 'transport' phase, but immediately before or after that ?

Maybe that is during the "scanning and saving into pattern" phase?

 

[locutus101]

That episode is crazy stuff TBH, and a bit of failure as a result, however, given that telepathy exists in many species, and latently in humans, and Barclay has been modified genetically by alien influences, it's possible that what we see in the beam is just a representation of some kind of telepathic or telekinetic event.....erm...best I can do. It's a Braga episode isn't it? It must be, it has weird stuff and psychosexual symbology whilst flying in the face of even Trek based common sense. And ultimately it's a bit of a boring episode.
Being conscious during transport works fine though, it even explains the contiguous nature of a person being transported. Slightly awkward for Scotty though...he would have gone mad or at minimum had a very very long dream.

That episode though entertaining because of dwight schultz' excellent acting is pure nonsense from stem to stern and I can't take any of it seriously. It's also overloaded with insipid technobabble that makes it hard to sit through at times.

 

[UnknownSample]

We have no business being certain about copy vs. not-a-copy, because Trek itself doesn't know, the makers don't, the characters don't, 24th century civilization doesn't know.

The first Trek novel, Spock Must Die by James Blish, had some debate in it over this. It's something people apparently seldom stop to think about, but when they do, it's disturbing and unresolveable.
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I'm going to come down on the side of not-a-copy. Why? Because if it was ever determined that originals died and that the transporter just made excellent copies, the whole thing would be shut down overnight. Society would go into shock. It would be this way even with just a significant possibility that they were just copies.
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I know a lot of viewers take the idea in stride, apparently thinking if it's a perfect copy, what the hell, but that's only to an outside observer. I don't care about some copy of me going on, when my existence is about to be snuffed out for the sake of making a little trip.
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They try to have it both ways. Well, if light can be a wave or a particle or both, maybe a transporter can have two different natures at once too. Not totally kidding.

 

[locutus101]

... I don't care about some copy of me going on, when my existence is about to be snuffed out for the sake of making a little trip....

I believe there are many, including me, that feel that way.

But if your copy thinks it is you then they'll never be any means for the public at large to find out. It's like the lemmings, the ones that haven't drowned yet don't know that they will and the ones that have, can't tell anyone.

Everyone who's ever used the transporter is dead and that includes fetuses in the bellies of their moms. But none of the copies currently alive know that they aren't the initial one.

 

[JoeCabby]

None of that matters. Canon trumps all of that stuff. And in the canon -- aka, the shows -- transporters most definitely destroy and create duplicates, and have the power to create multiple copies, de-age people, recreate people from a previous transport, and all other kinds of silliness along those lines.

Most people in the show just don't let it bother them, because in their heads, it's no different than buying a car, completely dismantling it, shipping the parts somewhere else, and then rebuilding it (even if you needed to replace/repair parts that were lost/broken during the shipping). It's still the same car, ergo, you're still the same person. Even if it/you were completely destroyed in the process. At no point does it mean it/you weren't destroyed in the process, however. Only that most people don't seem to care in this fictional universe.

It certainly explains why McCoy and those like him absolutely hated the idea, however.

Canon still shows that it doesn't destroy the original. As someone said before, it's the same matter, it's just converted to energy, sent to another location and put back together again. It's still the same matter. It's like a glass of water freezing and melting again. It's still the exact same matter.

People de-aging is just simply removing certain parts of the matter that cause them to age. Same with the idea of removing weapons or filtering out certain biomatter. It's removing part of the buffer so that the original matter that's unwanted is not put back together again. The rest of it is exactly the same matter.

More in canon explanations are shields that prevent transportation. Shields prevent matter from passing through, if it was only data and that a new separate person was created on the other side, then transporting through shields shouldn't be a problem. After all they can have video chats with other ships through shields without a problem. To further this, think about voyager, the doctor was able to transport back to the alpha quadrant because he was simply data, code and binary, he goes to the alpha quadrant does his thing and is sent back to the delta quadrant. If we were just sending copies of people through the transporter, then they should have been able to send the transporter buffer data and just transport everyone on voyager back to the alpha quadrant and be done with it.

 

[locutus101]

Canon still shows that it doesn't destroy the original. As someone said before, it's the same matter, it's just converted to energy, sent to another location and put back together again. It's still the same matter. It's like a glass of water freezing and melting again. It's still the exact same matter.

People de-aging is just simply removing certain parts of the matter that cause them to age. Same with the idea of removing weapons or filtering out certain biomatter. It's removing part of the buffer so that the original matter that's unwanted is not put back together again. The rest of it is exactly the same matter.

More in canon explanations are shields that prevent transportation. Shields prevent matter from passing through, if it was only data and that a new separate person was created on the other side, then transporting through shields shouldn't be a problem. After all they can have video chats with other ships through shields without a problem. To further this, think about voyager, the doctor was able to transport back to the alpha quadrant because he was simply data, code and binary, he goes to the alpha quadrant does his thing and is sent back to the delta quadrant. If we were just sending copies of people through the transporter, then they should have been able to send the transporter buffer data and just transport everyone on voyager back to the alpha quadrant and be done with it.

It doesn't matter if it's the same matter. When Riker was duplicated, there was at least one of them that was not made with the same matter yet it was impossible to tell which one it was.

Hell, we're not made of the same matter we were made only a few years ago. We constantly shed dead skin and cells in our bodies grow old and die and are then excreted.

 

[Jedi_Master]

No I'm still not convinced that it destroyed the original. I believe it is stated to be a matter/energy converter. Meaning it doesn't destroy the original and create another from new material. It converts the particles of the original to energy and that energy is converted back into the original particles at a different location.

So I don't think it's like a fax machine where it kills you and makes a copy. I think it works as stated that it takes you apart and puts you back together again.

Now it certainly can destroy and create copies as evidenced on screen. But that doesn't mean it does do that every time it is used.

Right... through some magical science mumbo jumbo - a person's cells are turned into energy arranged in specific and distinct "patterns" which are then held in a "buffer" and then reconverted from energy to matter at a set location. It's all nonsense, but in the scope of the show there is a logic to it.

 

[jaime]

It doesn't matter if it's the same matter. When Riker was duplicated, there was at least one of them that was not made with the same matter yet it was impossible to tell which one it was.

Hell, we're not made of the same matter we were made only a few years ago. We constantly shed dead skin and cells in our bodies grow old and die and are then excreted.

They get round that by having some of the Rikers being the original matter and some be added in...water accounts for a chunk of the human body after all. Everything else is like shining a light through a half silvered mirror, or bouncing it off of glass. They pretty much explain it that way in the episode. It's definitely a bit of a hand wave, with the mysterious energy field of the week (TM) but they definitely made it clear that they went through this. It's all bit like Voyager and it's quantum duplicates (which in retrospect makes even more sense of the Tom Riker situation. He's arguably a parallel universe Riker, with multiverse conserving energy by not bothering with the rest of the universe around him, so he stayed in the same universe.)
Admittedly they hand wave the kids episode even worse, and in a similar manner, but Rascals definitely has a lot of charm in its performances and writing thank god.

Even it is horrifying to realise that if I once looked a fair chunk like young Picard, there's a horrible possibility I will one day resemble old Picard. But that's a personal thing, and I think of myself as being in my young shatner/ Robbie McNeil stage. Delusion is grand.

 

[jaime]

Right... through some magical science mumbo jumbo - a person's cells are turned into energy arranged in specific and distinct "patterns" which are then held in a "buffer" and then reconverted from energy to matter at a set location. It's all nonsense, but in the scope of the show there is a logic to it.

It works like TV itself. Willy Wonka science, but plausible. We save data as energy all the time, in buffers, and turn it back, all the time. Sound...light...now mass and volume....it's a logical, if far fetched, extrapolation.

 

[Jedi_Master]

It works like TV itself. Willy Wonka science, but plausible. We save data as energy all the time, in buffers, and turn it back, all the time. Sound...light...now mass and volume....it's a logical, if far fetched, extrapolation.

Indeed. The biggest flaw I see is data storage. The amount of data that would be generated by just one cell would be enormous, much less an entire person or group of persons.

 

[jaime]

Indeed. The biggest flaw I see is data storage. The amount of data that would be generated by just one cell would be enormous, much less an entire person or group of persons.

They seem to have a bit of a way around that by talking about things like pattern degradation...they appear to only need to store the data for a while before transmitting, and indeed are only able to, storing indefinitely seems impossible. What they actually do is stream the energy....like a live broadcast or internet stream...rather than store it all and then transmit. Silly story points, but ones that add to the plausibility rather than take away. Maybe the consciousness in particular is the near impossible bit to store, and that's precisely why they can do all the other stuff with bodies, but consciousness is hard...that's even supported by the Kirk being split in two business as well as the pattern degradation that killed Scottys friend on the Jenolan.

 

[locutus101]

Indeed. The biggest flaw I see is data storage. The amount of data that would be generated by just one cell would be enormous, much less an entire person or group of persons.

Yes, there is no way you could store the information about say one pound of flesh into one pound of computer. It would likely necessitate thousands of times as much computer mass to store that one pound info and that means that the transporter buffer for six people should weigh thousands of tons.

 

[jaime]

Yes, there is no way you could store the information about say one pound of flesh into one pound of computer. It would likely necessitate thousands of times as much computer mass to store that one pound info and that means that the transporter buffer for six people should weigh thousands of tons.

Data compression.

 

[Draculasaurus]

In the TNG episode Unnatural Selection (where they fix up Pulaski using the transporter), they don't explicitly say it, but the way they talk about it makes me think they could create someone from just a pattern, but it would just be a lifeless body.
That seems to be basically what Picard says to Holo-Moriarty as well about why he can't live outside of the holodeck.