The safety of Transporters.. Tmp and more.
- Thread starter valkyrie013
- Start date
I think the very idea of the transporter is ridiculous. I mean it's ok in Star Trek because it's fiction, just as is ok that when Samantha wiggles her nose things happen but in real life, it's just... idiotic. So is the transporter safe, well, it doesn't really matter, the question is does it contribute to making an interesting story. Plus there's no real coherence with how a transporter work. I mean sometimes it works with the DNA but that is ridiculous since from the DNA alone Picard would have gotten his heart back a long time ago and just put the injured Worf through the transporter and he gets his spine back. So it's not from DNA it's from something else but then we get episodes like Rascals where it is from DNA after all. So what the...!!!
If either Unnatural Selection or Rascals were developed to their potential, people would be effectively immortal anyway. Just either reload an earlier body, or turn your clock back to age 11, as many times as you want.
And don't forget away team fatalities. Just keep an record of their pattern in the buffer... if they die down there, just reconstruct them using the old pattern. Only thing they lose is their memory of the away mission. Tasha Yar could have been on the bridge to greet her sister, Marla Aster could have gone home to Jeremy that night. Hell, you could give the Taresian vampire chicks as many clones of Harry Kim as they need, and still had one of him manning Voyager's bridge as they broke orbit.
And don't forget away team fatalities. Just keep an record of their pattern in the buffer... if they die down there, just reconstruct them using the old pattern. Only thing they lose is their memory of the away mission. Tasha Yar could have been on the bridge to greet her sister, Marla Aster could have gone home to Jeremy that night. Hell, you could give the Taresian vampire chicks as many clones of Harry Kim as they need, and still had one of him manning Voyager's bridge as they broke orbit.
Yeah, the Taresian method of reproduction is puzzling. They seem to dry up the body of their victims as if they were mummified for centuries. I mean it's like in Dune when they get the water of the dead that's pretty much what would be left... It makes no sense but in Voyager, what does?
Hardly matters. Voyager just beams up Harry's corpse and adds water from stores while regenerating it. Then Harry (who has no idea what's happening, because they're using the original pattern) gets sent down to get sucked dry again by three different women. Rinse, repeat ad nauseam.
Good one!
Could be there's a limit to how many times a person can survive genetic surgery with a transporter, especially within a limited period of time.
Technobabble babble:
Maybe the process causes atomic nuclei to become sources of strange energies, and the nuclei have to cool down, but the half-life is long, or else there'll be some bizarre reaction when the flux exceeds a certain level, and if that happens the person has to get sent off to the Farm on Endicronimas V for palliative hospice care.
I have found those scenes a bit weird. If someone is transformed into energy then.... they haven't got, for example, a mouth to talk with, it's energy until transporter puts it back together. What, something doesn't make sense in scifi, call the.... people with straitjackets?
I don't get the "they don't have a mouth" issue.
Telephone wires don't have mouths, either. Today they don't even have wires. Yet we have zero problem comprehending that speech could be transformed into something else without ceasing to be.
As for eternal life via transporter, "Unnatural Selection" isn't necessarily it yet: we could argue that since Pulaski was resurrected from earlier data, she lost all those parts of her life that came after the storing of that data (and was simply quick to catch up after resurrection). Nobody would be too happy with immortality where you don't get to live - it would be like volunteering to get severe Altzheimer's.
"Rascals" rejuvenated the bodies without creating a discontinuity of thought. But Kirk, Spock and McCoy got forcibly rejuvenated at least twice, too, with what amounted to several decades of biological aging reversed. Did that add forty years to their total lives? Or detract forty from it, due to the immense stress? Rejuvenation is iffy: you have to know a lot about the details to determine if it's any good for immortality.
Timo Saloniemi
Telephone wires don't have mouths, either. Today they don't even have wires. Yet we have zero problem comprehending that speech could be transformed into something else without ceasing to be.
As for eternal life via transporter, "Unnatural Selection" isn't necessarily it yet: we could argue that since Pulaski was resurrected from earlier data, she lost all those parts of her life that came after the storing of that data (and was simply quick to catch up after resurrection). Nobody would be too happy with immortality where you don't get to live - it would be like volunteering to get severe Altzheimer's.
"Rascals" rejuvenated the bodies without creating a discontinuity of thought. But Kirk, Spock and McCoy got forcibly rejuvenated at least twice, too, with what amounted to several decades of biological aging reversed. Did that add forty years to their total lives? Or detract forty from it, due to the immense stress? Rejuvenation is iffy: you have to know a lot about the details to determine if it's any good for immortality.
Timo Saloniemi
There's also Lonely Among Us where for some reason they merged the energy version of Picard out in the cloud with his last transporter pattern. IIRC he didn't remember anything from being out in the cloud which makes me wonder if all that talk about merging them was a polite fiction and they just restored his backup copy and left the original Picard floating as energy out in space... 
Yes you are.
Its also something Starfleet officers would never condone doing.
Using the transporters to reverting the body continuously to an earlier age, repair damage to it, etc. was evidence we needed UFP can easily implement immortality.
My guess is that because those were accidents (except in the case of Picard's original pattern being used - although, isn't that just a copy of earlier Picard?).
The technology is easily there and can already do all these things... so I think it should be expanded upon, and Trek stories adjusted to fit the new setting while maintaining UFP principles and ideals.
Obviously, there would still be measures in place to minimize the chances or prevent creation of transporter duplicates, but for everything else, they really should have been expanded upon.
Forgot about that! Really good line
With the mouth thing I think I meant that while Barclay was in the transporter beam he was still aware of his surroundings and eventually rescued someone from the transporter beam. If you're transformed into energy I don't think that could be possible.
In certain episodes like "One Man Bashir" it is clearly stated that people are just transformed into computer data and therefore couldn't 't be aware of anything at all. There's also "Relics" where obviously for seventy years Scotty didn't experience the passage of time at all.
I think that's incorrect. He probably experienced the passage of time very, very, very slowly. It may have seemed like an extra-long beaming cycle. The pattern of Franklin, the man accompanying Scotty, degraded past the point of recovery. That means the pattern changed over time. That changing of the pattern could well correlate with passage of time experienced by the transportee.
The fact that the pattern is degrading doesn't mean that it experiences anything. just as an old picture whose colors fade over time doesn't experience anything either. There is nothing in what Scotty said that even suggests that he experienced anything other than a normal beaming cycle.
Again, we're talking computer data. Anybody familiar with computers knows that computer data is not a program, it doesn't change over time unless there is a physical degradation of the memory chip or the hard disc. Otherwise, it's no more sentient than words in a book.
An inanimate object is not a human being. An old picture never experiences any thing to begin with. Neither does a new picture.
No, we're not. Computer data can be copied without loss of fidelity. Only when accidents happen can a transporter beam be duplicated. There's an analogy of sorts, but no equivalence.
I don't know why there's degradation in the transporter buffer. Apparently, it's some sort of very unstable computer memory. However, the content of that unstable memory is nothing but data. Data that can be saved on more permanent material, that is to say, computer memory and replicator memory and in the case of Our Man Bashir holosuite memory. The point is, it's just memory, it can be copied and erased or modified. It's not sentient, no more than the words in a book. Nobody would ever argue that the content of a book is self-aware, Why would you do so about computer memory which is basically the same thing?
Here's the entire Transporter Process:
Stage 1 & 2:
Stage 3 & 4:
There's 2x Parts to the Transporter System:
+ The Matter Stream
The 'Phase Transition Coils' begins to disassemble you on a atomic level by partially unbinding the atomic energy at a Sub-Atomic level.
NOTE: There are LIMITS to this process since the Matter Stream can be held in the Pattern Buffer (Which sits right below the Transporter Pad and is about the size of an entire deck) for 420 seconds (7 minutes) before degradation occurs. That's the NORMAL limit.
+ The Data Stream:
The 'Molecular Imaging Scanner' makes a detailed scan of every atom in your body and each atoms individual Quantum State
This "Data Portion" can be retained forever and StarFleet has a policy of retaining the last few images of your body at a Atomic Level along with it's Quantum State.
Final Analysis on extending your time in the Patter Buffer in the Transporter:
The pattern buffer is a key component of the transporter system. The buffer is used to temporarily store the matter stream, following dematerialization, but prior to sending the stream to its target whilst the other systems function. This is done because of the relative motion of transporter and target. By temporarily storing the matter stream, the Doppler compensators have the time to adjust the targeting scanners.
A matter stream cannot be stored indefinitely in the buffer; after 420 seconds (7 minutes), the stored pattern will degrade and the object will be lost. The only known record of a person surviving in a buffer longer than the expected figure was Captain Montgomery Scott on board the USS Jenolan, NCC-2010. Following the Jenolan's crash-landing on a Dyson sphere, Scott, with the help of Matt Franklin, was able to store his pattern in the buffer for 75 years. This was achieved by disabling the rematerialization subroutine, connecting the phase inducers to the emitter array, bypassing the override, and locking the buffer into a continuous diagnostic cycle. Although Captain Scott's pattern suffered less than 0.003% degradation, and was successfully recovered by Geordi La Forge of the USS Enterprise-D in 2369, Franklin was irretrievable, as one of the inducers had failed, causing a 53% degradation in his pattern.
Starships can also transfer patterns from one pattern buffer to another by "locking on" to the target buffer and energizing.
To eliminate the medical condition called transporter psychosis, Federation transporters are equipped with multiplex pattern buffers.
What Scotty did was a desperate MacGuyver like "Jerry Rig" of the normal Transporter System.
Scotty himself suffered some degradation at 0.003% of his Molecular structure, survivable & he got lucky by the stroke of the writers pen & Plot Armor.
His buddy Franklin lost 53% of the pattern for whatever reason and he died.
If you intend on pursuing this route of storage, you need to make sure that whatever routine is used to keep the Matter Stream alive and not degrading over time past 7 minutes gets researched and tested thoroughly before putting into practical use.
A 50% survival rate over 75 years isn't good IMO, and who knows what other technical failures could occur.
If your computer hardware dies, power outage to any system, any of the components die due to natural degradation over time or other outside factors.
Storing people in the Pattern Buffer is very risky and not recommended in general.
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Keystrokes, microphone diaphragm movements or Wii swings are transformed into charged states of transistors, and lo, a conversation, an opera or a kung-fu fight can take place within a plastic box where only electrons are dancing. Why would this appear impossible in other contexts?
Indeed, the more the transporter allows its subject matter to keep on interacting with itself, the easier its job. Taking apart every molecule and pigeonholing them takes a lot of bureaucracy, but it still contains its own antithesis: those molecules remain intact, with each atom conversing with the neighboring ones via whatever type of interaction the electromagnetic force transforms into when "phased". So why take anything apart? Just "phase" it all, and let it keep on conversing, thus carrying all its positional data within.
For all practical purposes, the transporter is just a make-ghost machine, turning folks into ectoplasm and then pushing them through walls and space, till they bob back to realspace. Today we can transform X to Y in various abstract ways; the transporter just adds another, more concrete one. It doesn't turn people into data, it turns them into phased matter, as per dialogue. And only in exceptional situations are computers involved at all, such as in "Our Man Bashir", where the computing resources of an entire station are barely coping with one special (if ill-defined) fraction of a total process a compact runabout transporter routinely achieves with ease.
Timo Saloniemi
