beaming a person at molecular-resolution instead of quantum?

[Sandoval]

transporters have two settings or modes, one being molecular-resolution which is suitable for beaming cargo and inanimate things, and quantum-resolution necessary to successfully transport people and animals and so on.

what do you think might happen if you were to beam a person through a transporter system at molecular-resolution as opposed to quantum-resolution?

would it kill them? or would they come out the other end but have lost their conciousness or self-awareness? would they merely be a copy and not the 'original article' in the way that star trek transporter systems appear to work?

 

[MacLeod]

Fortunantly I suspect what might arrive at the other end wouldn't live long.

 

[C.E. Evans]

You'd wind up with a person-sized chunk of Spam--the original variety--on the transporter platform.

 

[SchwEnt]

I disagree.
At a molecular level, a body would still be intact and whole. Why wouldn't it be? At molecular-resolution, it's still microscopically perfect.

But of course, quite dead.


(slightly OT)
How does quantum-resolution affect transport of ANY living things?

Would a houseplant need quantum-resolution for living transport? An insect? Or only higher-order lifeforms? (I gotta check my TNG TM)

 

[Timo]

Well, it apparently never hurt Lore.

I mean, Lore was beamed into space through a cargo transporter. Lore was the first to arrive to the room with the device, and he had no incentive to program the unit to be compatible with the transport of living things. When Data and Wesley arrived, neither of them had an opportunity to fool with the transporter controls, until Data and Lore's struggle ended with Lore being flung to the transporter pad. At that point, Wesley activated the unit with a simple-looking keypress only. So Lore was probably beamed out at the default setting of a cargo transporter.

One might of course argue that all transporters are at "full res" for default, for safety reasons. Or that Lore indeed wasn't all there when we next saw him. Still, "Datalore" is our only glimpse of cargo transporter ops where the unit had no pressing reason to be on quantum resolution mode.

In "Dagger of the Mind", cargo was beamed up from the penal-corrective-psychiatric colony, and a stowaway survived the process even though the operator didn't know he was in one of the boxes. But we could argue that the cargo had known, sensitive components and thus the quantum resolution setting was used.

Nevertheless, these two incidents might also be taken to suggest that there is no "molecular resolution": either the transporter always automatically uses the famed "quantum resolution" because it's wired to do so, or then transporter theory doesn't allow for anything but perfect resolution in the first place.

Certainly "molecular resolution" is a noncanon concept. It just isn't explicitly contra-canon.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MLJames]

Saw a program some time ago where a brain researcher put forth the argument that the brain's neural network is quantum in its structure. If that's the case, transporting a person at molecular resolution could result in varying degrees of dementia due to loss of details of the brain's architecture. If that happened to me, I'd frankly rather it killed me outright.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I disagree.
At a molecular level, a body would still be intact and whole. Why wouldn't it be? At molecular-resolution, it's still microscopically perfect.

I don't think anyone said otherwise.

But of course, quite dead.

In other words, a big chunk of meat. Sold in cans as Spam at your local grocery store...

 

[SchwEnt]

Oh okay. I just read "Spam" as a human transported in a malformed fashion (arriving as pressed processed dead meat) rather than the usual natural humanoid form.

But agreed, dead meat, in whatever form.

 

[scotpens]

. . .Certainly "molecular resolution" is a noncanon concept. It just isn't explicitly contra-canon.

Where did the concept of transporters having “molecular resolution” and “quantum resolution” modes come from anyway? This thread is the first time I’ve seen it mentioned.

 

[Timo]

The first time I saw it anywhere was in the TNG Tech Manual, p.102. Perhaps it was the authors' desire to reduce the ship's capacity for personnel transport? Bottlenecks in personnel transporting had played a central role in quite a few TOS episodes, after all.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MacLeod]

That's the only referrence I know for the different types of transportation as well. As for the difference between 23rd and 24th century transporters. Perhaps in the early days transporters only had one setting Quantum, as more was learned about it, it was discovered that you could get away with molecular resolution for inorganic objects.

As for Lore well the Snoog type android is an inorganic machine.

 

[SchwEnt]

I like to think that the difference between quantum and molecular resolution just reflects the development of transporter tech.

I always liked the idea that transporter tech and computer tech were interrelated (as suggested in the SFC).

Initial transporter experiments worked for objects, not living matter. And transporters worked for years without being able to convey living beings.

A quantum breakthrough in computer tech was needed, and that's where Daystrom's duotronics came into the picture. With duotronics, the transporter was now able to handle the quantum resolutions needed for living matter transport.

I like that idea, because if nothing else... a transporter pattern of a human being will require massive massive computer capabilities.

This would also seem to suggest that human-capable transporters only came about after duotronics, which is within Daystrom's lifetime, which is not too long before TOS. I can live with that.

 

[MacLeod]

Except, we had transporters capaable of transporting people in the 2150's. Though from memory it was implied that they had just been certified as safe for transportation of living material.

 

[SchwEnt]

^^^ Right, ENT showed people transporting in the 2150s. But I was going way back to the SFC, from 1980. At that time, no canon history beyond TOS/TAS/TMP. At that time, certainly no ENT.

 

[Timo]

As for Lore well the Snoog type android is an inorganic machine.

But those might well be more complex than organic machines, and less tolerant to any copying errors involved in the transporting process.

It's interesting that nobody ever mentions the concept of transporter resolution onscreen. All we hear about is signal degradation, without knowledge of the initial and final resolutions.

Considering the complexity of writing down the nature and motion status of every particle in a human body (and never mind that there might be more to us than that), it sounds downright plausible that the transporter doesn't do that at all - that it instead "lifts up" the human wholesale, at infinite resolution, transforms him into "phased matter" like the technobabble goes, and then un-transforms him a bit later (or perhaps the effect just wears off?). Omit the un-transforming stage, and you get yer average phaser gun...

In that theory, any "scanning" that happens on the side is just for coarse stuff like centering the transportee on the arrival coordinates or whatever. And the "pattern" is everything, literally - it contains all of the transportee in phased form, and requires no additional "piggyback" information for putting him back together.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Albertese]

^^^
Then how does that explain that DS9 ep where the runabout crew was saved overwriting Bashier's James Bond holosuite program and the entire computer memory was overwritten with the neural patterns? ("Our Man Bashier" if memory serves) That seems to suggest that it is a matter of information storage. At least on some level.

Also I like to believe that FJ's cargo transporter units where present on the 1701 but they are even more power intensive (even at molecular level) so the normal 6-man units are usually used if the cargo being transported is non-bulky enough to do so. The big ones are only fired up on an as-needed basis.

--Alex

 

[Timo]

Then how does that explain that DS9 ep where the runabout crew was saved overwriting Bashier's James Bond holosuite program and the entire computer memory was overwritten with the neural patterns? ("Our Man Bashier" if memory serves) That seems to suggest that it is a matter of information storage. At least on some level.

Good point. But the survival of our hero patterns in "Our Man Bashir" depended on Quark's holosuites as much as it did on the DS9 computing resources.

So it could well be argued that the all-important information was still stored in the usual phased matter streams, and that these were just distributed into the transporter systems of the holosuites with the assistance of the DS9 computers.

The holosuite pattern buffers kept the patterns intact, but had no built-in safeties against the erasure or slow degradation of the patterns because they were designed to handle only inconsequential patterns, such as those of chairs, scarves or pints of beer that the holodeck user might request and then discard. Thus, after the set-up phase, the whole plot centered on the holodeck, rather than on the computer nerds sorting out the bits and bytes - a win-win situation for the audience.

This sort of argument would be another successful dodge of the ever-present risk in the "transporter stores people as data" interpretation - the risk of this interpretation catering for, and even necessitating, immortality for our heroes! If all it takes to accidentally store a person is an old Cardassian mainframe, then Picard should certainly be backed up at Starfleet Headquarters if he didn't quite fit inside the Enterprise computer.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pauln6]

As for Lore well the Snoog type android is an inorganic machine.

But those might well be more complex than organic machines, and less tolerant to any copying errors involved in the transporting process.

It's interesting that nobody ever mentions the concept of transporter resolution onscreen. All we hear about is signal degradation, without knowledge of the initial and final resolutions.

Considering the complexity of writing down the nature and motion status of every particle in a human body (and never mind that there might be more to us than that), it sounds downright plausible that the transporter doesn't do that at all - that it instead "lifts up" the human wholesale, at infinite resolution, transforms him into "phased matter" like the technobabble goes, and then un-transforms him a bit later (or perhaps the effect just wears off?). Omit the un-transforming stage, and you get yer average phaser gun...

In that theory, any "scanning" that happens on the side is just for coarse stuff like centering the transportee on the arrival coordinates or whatever. And the "pattern" is everything, literally - it contains all of the transportee in phased form, and requires no additional "piggyback" information for putting him back together.

Timo Saloniemi

I think this is probably how transporter tech should be described since it negates the kill & copy argument. I view the signal as displaced energy from wherever the person has been phased to, quantum entangled with the phased matter so that it contains the 'pattern' to rephase the person back into our dimension. If the signal degrades, only part of that person can be phased back.

Maybe the pattern buffer records and retains links to the quantum entangled energy for a period of time which explains how it was possible to rephase Picard and bring him back in from his energy form in season one.

It also means that a person can live forever in their phased state as long as the quantum links don't degrade - supporting Scotty's survival. People lost in transport aren't really killed either - at least not from the transporter process - they're just held in limbo - which also gels with the Enterprise episode, even if the terminology used keeps varying.

Probably molecular resolution still needs to quantum entangle the object that is being transported but replicator technology knows how to replace any information that is lost. Probably a percentage of an object transported in this way is replicated rather than transported.

 

[Tiberius]

I think a clue is in the fact that the lower resolution is called molecular resolution.

Because chemistry is vitally important in Humans, it may be that the binds between molecules caused by their electrons need to be preserved. Molecular resolution wouldn't maintain this. Quantum resolution would.

 

[SPCTRE]

Saw a program some time ago where a brain researcher put forth the argument that the brain's neural network is quantum in its structure. If that's the case, transporting a person at molecular resolution could result in varying degrees of dementia due to loss of details of the brain's architecture. If that happened to me, I'd frankly rather it killed me outright.

"The human brain, it turned out, collapsed probability functions of this standing wavefront of consciousness in the same way that an interferometer determined the quantum state of a photon or any other wavefront phenomenon. Using terabytes of qubit quantum data and applying relativistic Coulomb field transforms to these mind-consciousness holographic wavefunctions, it was quickly discovered that human consciousness could be quantum-teleported to points in space-time where entangled-pair wavefronts already existed."

Wait, what?!