With transporter technology, why do starships even need a doctor and medical staff? If a person is sick or injured, couldn't their system dematerialize the person and rematerialize them without the medical problem? If one has the technology to destroy and perfectly re-create a human body at the quantum level like the transporters, wouldn't old-fashioned medical attention be archaic and redundant?
Probably an Ignorant Question About Transporters
- Thread starter Defiler-Of-Redshirts
- Start date
Only in episodes where they use the transporter as a cure-all can the transporter be used as a cure-all
Theoretically it can be used to create an army of duplicates, cure all illness, reset ageing, beam you pretty much anywhere in the galaxy, to other timelines and times using only software patches.
Oh yeah, and as per Nemesis they had a working transporter unit the size of a comm badge.
Oh yeah, and as per Nemesis they had a working transporter unit the size of a comm badge.
In Trek incarnations up till TAS in in-universe terms (in English, before the 2270s), the transporter demonstrated no capacity for manipulating that which it transported. All it could do was take the stuff on the platform and turn it into phased matter that then traveled to another place and popped back into the regular, unphased realm.
In TAS, there were two cases where the transporter was able to "restore factory settings" to the transportee. Basically, those involved reversing the effect of an anomaly of the week that had made universe weird at the spot containing the transportee, not curing something wrong with the transportee as such.
TNG did the restoring in one episode as well, this time curing a bona fide disease (albeit weird) - a century after the more limited era described in ENT, DSC, TOS and TAS. So your question is quite relevant for the 24th century and beyond. But the writers themselves wanted to forget all about that single TNG episode, it seems: no resetting of people after "Unnatural Selection". It really shouldn't work the way it was shown to work: if a person is restored to a previous state of existence, she shouldn't retain her memories of events that happened after that previous state, yet Pulaski seems to get up to speed on those events in seconds, implying actual recall.
Or then she's the same sort of awesome as Captain Pike in the recent adventures, taking six impossible things in the stride without breakfast, and the "transporter reset from hair follicle" cure actually kills the patient and replaces her with another, younger one. I could still see the heroes using that one on their important ones, so this remains a storytelling problem. But only if we remember that "Unnatural Selection" happened. It's not a common, integral or crucial property of the transporter as a machine, and the stories do fine without it.
Timo Saloniemi
In TAS, there were two cases where the transporter was able to "restore factory settings" to the transportee. Basically, those involved reversing the effect of an anomaly of the week that had made universe weird at the spot containing the transportee, not curing something wrong with the transportee as such.
TNG did the restoring in one episode as well, this time curing a bona fide disease (albeit weird) - a century after the more limited era described in ENT, DSC, TOS and TAS. So your question is quite relevant for the 24th century and beyond. But the writers themselves wanted to forget all about that single TNG episode, it seems: no resetting of people after "Unnatural Selection". It really shouldn't work the way it was shown to work: if a person is restored to a previous state of existence, she shouldn't retain her memories of events that happened after that previous state, yet Pulaski seems to get up to speed on those events in seconds, implying actual recall.
Or then she's the same sort of awesome as Captain Pike in the recent adventures, taking six impossible things in the stride without breakfast, and the "transporter reset from hair follicle" cure actually kills the patient and replaces her with another, younger one. I could still see the heroes using that one on their important ones, so this remains a storytelling problem. But only if we remember that "Unnatural Selection" happened. It's not a common, integral or crucial property of the transporter as a machine, and the stories do fine without it.
Timo Saloniemi
We're just gonna ignore the fact that they were able to merge two Kirks using the transporter less than ten eps into the run of TOS?
Umm, I guess so. 
The funny thing is, our heroes don't appear to be concerned with making the transporter merge two halves. What Scotty and Spock struggle with is the fact that the transporter is "inoperable", first due to dupicating everything, then due to being blasted to bits by Evil Kirk; when they find "an answer", it is called "a way to get the transporter working". After it does, merging the space dog is an action that requires no further effort or planning: merely "sending it through" is supposed to fix the problem... Which it does.
I'd put this in the "undoing the anomaly of the week" box, then, rather than the "curing an illness or countermanding a death or pulling a very-funny-now-beam-down-my-clothes-too-Mr-Scott prank" one. As far as we know, the transporter didn't do anything out of the ordinary, and just sorted out a slight wobble in the phased matter stream on the second try - not paying much heed to the fact that the wobble wasn't the usual 0.0002% but more like 200%.
Timo Saloniemi
The funny thing is, our heroes don't appear to be concerned with making the transporter merge two halves. What Scotty and Spock struggle with is the fact that the transporter is "inoperable", first due to dupicating everything, then due to being blasted to bits by Evil Kirk; when they find "an answer", it is called "a way to get the transporter working". After it does, merging the space dog is an action that requires no further effort or planning: merely "sending it through" is supposed to fix the problem... Which it does.
I'd put this in the "undoing the anomaly of the week" box, then, rather than the "curing an illness or countermanding a death or pulling a very-funny-now-beam-down-my-clothes-too-Mr-Scott prank" one. As far as we know, the transporter didn't do anything out of the ordinary, and just sorted out a slight wobble in the phased matter stream on the second try - not paying much heed to the fact that the wobble wasn't the usual 0.0002% but more like 200%.
Timo Saloniemi
From TNG on, the transporters were able to detect foreign items 'captured' by the transporter - for example, the bio filter was supposed to filter out pathogens (bacteria, parasites etc) from the beam; although it would not cure someone already infected with such a disease. It was also capable of disarming active weapons, or even removing them from the beam entirely (in DS9 "To The Death" a group of enemy soldiers are rescued sans-phasers before their ship blows, in TNG "The Most Toys" Data is firing a phaser when he is beamed back to the enterprise; the phaser is disabled mid-beam).
In Voyager, an episode has a rapidly mutating "macro virus" 'escape' the pattern buffer after being filtered out from a transport, and in a later episode two crew-members are accidentally merged during a transporter mishap.
For the most part, transporter accidents causing strange events to occur are fairly rare throughout, although TNG and Voyager seem to be the worst offenders.
In Voyager, an episode has a rapidly mutating "macro virus" 'escape' the pattern buffer after being filtered out from a transport, and in a later episode two crew-members are accidentally merged during a transporter mishap.
For the most part, transporter accidents causing strange events to occur are fairly rare throughout, although TNG and Voyager seem to be the worst offenders.
They're about as rare as airplane accidents. It's the safest form of transportation over vast ranges.
When getting onto a StarShip:
1) Would you rather, burn millions of tons of Fossil Fuels to get to your destination and risk a explosion?
2) Waste time & risk a shuttle accident to get onto a StarShip?
3) Or be directly transported there in seconds?
The Site to Site Transporters are just a specialized SubSpace Radio Transponder that triggers the local / nearby pre-programmed Transporter to beam something.
You obviously are misunderstanding the in-universe science of what a Transporter does.
Transporters cannot "Create New Matter", but just re-arrange what is already there. Only a freak storm allowed the creation of Thomas Riker, normally that can't occur because it just moves Matter by Disassembling it and Reassembling it.
If you have the previous scans of a person stored on record, you can set them back to some degree, they've shown the capability to do that in a few epsiodes. But the entire person needs to be there.
But if you lose a limb, you're not resetting that back.
In universe, it was a highly experimental standalone transporter unit. At that time, the Enterprise transporters were non-functional, as were the Scimitars.
In terms of overall technology as seen on the shows, it makes more sense to be a more advanced form of the transporter armbands seen in Best of Both Worlds, like you described, remotely activating a nearby transporter for a site-to-site transport. That's just headcanon though.
But, in TOS "The Enemy Within", many things are duplicated by the transporter (Kirk, dog-like animal, heating units, blankets etc.). None of these are replicated exactly but clearly there is more mass (roughly double) after each replication. The cause of this malfunction was related to that injured guy being beamed up with an unusual ore power on his body. This means that the technology can create new matter, or steal it from somewhere else, and this ability is normally not used for transportation.
What about the Enterprise's Shuttles? There are entire Shuttle Bay's worth of Shuttle's that have working Transporters that can be remotely activated.
From what I can tell, the tiny Pin sized Site-to-Site Transporter that data placed on Picard at the end of Nemesis was basically the miniaturized Emergency Transporter Arm-Band.
Enough power to activate the Phase Discriminator and send a clear signal to the nearby Transporter Pad of choice for a emergency beam out.
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Nope, it's explicitly a miniaturized escape transporter unit. And of course, it was used in the finale of Nemesis after the Enterprise's transporter went down.
If that's the case, in the future, every officer can be equipped with an Emergency Site-to-Site Transporter should they get into trouble.
Presumably, yes. And with the right software patches they can beam at least 150 light years, or into another universe and cure all illness with each beam.
I'd love a future Trek production to embrace all this stuff and show humanity moving towards a technologically-assisted Q-like existence.
150 ly is a bit too much energy for that tiny little pin. Let's at least have some conservation of energy here.
When Picard was beamed over, he crossed a distance of hundreds of meters, not 150 ly.
When Picard was beamed over, he crossed a distance of hundreds of meters, not 150 ly.
As a one-off movie device, it was fine; in terms of what feels more consistent with trek development it's 'an emergency transporter beacon that can tap into any nearby transporter.'
Nemesis was not particularly consistent or logical overall.
Thanks for the explanations everyone; even as a Trek fan since childhood I admit was never completely clear on what the exact limits of the transporter system was.
