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Why all the focus on B4 for Picard series? What about using Lore?

If you're talking about during the series, my recollection is that replicating the physical hardware was easy, but creating a complex neural net - the "consciousness" - and keeping it stable was incredibly difficult.

That's what made Lal so special. Data was able to keep a new neural net functional in that android much longer than anyone since Dr. Soong. So the technobabble answer is that yes they can create a body, and probably even transfer Data to it temporarily, but keeping that android stable enough for those memories to stay intact long term was unlikely to succeed.

Of course, IMO, this in-universe theory I think breaks down pretty easily. How is it that literally for decades, after intensive study of the androids, no cyberneticist anywhere is able to reproduce Soong's work? The man left no notes? Wrote no papers? If no one was able to reproduce it, doesn't it make the whole work somewhat suspect? They simply wanted Data to be unique and irreplaceable, and in the process twisted themselves into a bit of an illogical corner of an explanation. Then, partially undid that by creating first one, then two duplicates.
IIRC, they covered this in “The Measure if a Man”...studying Data’s brain required a procedure that involved dismantling him and storing his memories in a way that didn’t guarantee he’d still be the same being when they were put back.
 
Maybe everyone is afraid Data will turn evil if they put him in Lore's body. It's not like Lore didn't turn him evil before:lol:

Imagine if there are two Borg factions. One devoted to Data and the other to Lore.
 
So did I. But I’ve read that he’s in Picard. And there are stills of him. That combined with the Countdown comic(ST2009 prequel) has him commanding the Enterprise. And I think that is considered canon by the studio
Stills? There's video of him at the very end of the Picard trailer!

Countdown is already contradicted by what we know of Picard. In Countdown, Data became captain of the Enterprise and Picard became Ambassador to Vulcan. The Picard trailer and Picard exhibit at SDCC implies Data's been dead since Nemesis and Picard became an Admiral, led a historic rescue mission and then retired to his vineyard.
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The trailer I originally saw did not have the end part with Data. But I just saw that. And Countdown is contradicted. So we don't know for certain how Data shows up. Could be just a hologram or a hallucination. And considering Picard's "I don't want the game to end" line, it may be one of those.
 
If I remember, he precisely copied, incrementally, his positronic links in Lal's brain, with the goal of creating a hardware duplicate of his neural network with its own distinct memories and programs running on it.

And in Trek, a program is a dynamic entity that in the general case cannot be copied at all. Trying to do so would "kill" it, as we learn with many a holographic program.

As far as the Dr. is concerned, whether he left notes or not, it's hard for me to believe that his research so outpaced the rest of his field that it's taken decades (and counting?) to catch up. If it were any sort of real world, it would definitely make me suspect his "achievements' were a hoax, especially in a universe where the scientific community spans dozens, maybe even hundreds of worlds.

That's more or less the point, though. Soong wanted nothing to do with the scientific community, because he had been laughed out of that. So he isolated himself for perfecting a project that would astound everybody - and then apparently fairly quickly achieved the positronic breakthrough (thus establishing that this was indeed his "personal field of science" he had already developed to near-perfection without telling anybody, or else he would not have been originally laughed at).

Only, he never felt he had reached perfection: even Data was a failure he never got around to publishing... And remarkably, for a couple of extra decades, nobody even suspected Data might be positronic (thus suggesting nothing at all was known about positronics, such as "they glow like beacons across interstellar ranges"!).

But Soong's failure to publish anything, like, ever, is not the most important factor in the fate of positronics. That honor befalls on the fact that androids are uninteresting per se. Data was dumped on Starfleet, which found no real use for the tinkertoy for those decades. And no wonder, when the competing/ruling expert in the field, Graves, more or less dismissed androids as a category, and an apparent folly of Soong's specifically.

Why study positronics if they only trump other techniques in the useless field of androidry and nowhere else? (Admittedly, they did find another use relating to being crammed inside a humanoid skull - as brain prosthetics in "Life Support" - but this again might suggest that skulls are the only worthwhile application, and there just isn't that much demand for in-skull tech or for fake skulls. Holograms do all that much better, without any confining physical skulls.)

That said, I'm sure Picard is either remembering a conversation with Data, or dreaming of one, or then having a holoprogram written to match the memory or dream. No actual positronics involved.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Where was Lore's body stored after the last encounter with him? Enterprise-D or a Starfleet warehouse? Because if it was the Enterprise-D it was most likely destroyed Generations when the warp core breached.
 
It's a big question about how honest our heroes are with their superiors. Picard is entitled to keeping and subsequently wrecking his super-hyper-rare-and-expensive Kurlan naiskos, as even in the socialist'ish UFP setup, that's his personal property. Lore really, really shouldn't be.

Timo Saloniemi
 
I always thought that Lore went to that Maddox fellow to study, since he was denied full access to Data.
I would imagine that the majority of Lore's parts are scattered across several Star Fleet Scientific Installations and he'll never be allowed to be completely assembled again.

Maddox probably striped Lore's head down to it's basic structures, while still being able to keep it somewhat functional for study.
 
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The thing is, dismantling isn't much of an event in the life of a Soongian android. It's not comparable to, say, death penalty, or even a particularly severe jail penalty. More like a nap of cheerfully surprising length.

Being further torn apart by Maddox supposedly is, though. Otherwise Data wouldn't have turned down his request...

Supposedly, UFP law doesn't believe much in punishment. Would Lore get one?

Timo Saloniemi
 
Well, being deactivated is more like a dreamless sleep than death since they can be easily reactivated.
 
Might well be Data in that Drawer, for appropriately alliterative satisfaction. I mean, the thalaron dust did no harm to things like tables, clothes or tabletop gadgets at the Senate Hall. Data is a gadget; his body ought to have survived the kaboom just fine.

Assuming it was a thalaron kaboom, that is. But a thalaron kaboom apparently was the very thing he tried to avoid by phasering the thalaron doodad, because supposedly the release of thalaron forces would kill the rest of the hero folks even inside their airtight starship somehow - so are we to assume the kaboom was more conventional and conventionally ripped Data to pieces smaller than the ones we see?

Or would the thalaron have harmed the E-E crew only if deployed by that fancy fan-shaped delivery device unfolding from the Scimitar? That scenario would allow for Data to just harmlessly burst the thalaron dust out of its container and neutralize the weapon, to no great loss. Which does make one wonder. He has weathered whole-body amputation just fine previously. Lore did fine after getting beamed through shields into space, to float for years. So,what did kill Data?

Timo Saloniemi
 
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