Spoilers Star Trek: Lower Decks 1x05 - "Cupid's Errant Arrow"

[Crewman6]

Transporter works however any given episode requires it to work. There was something about Ransom's bug and "Lover" that the Cerritos biofilter didn't catch on transport.

Um...I'd say yes as to how the Bio-Filter of the transporter works.

It's not about whether or not "bio filters" are calibrated or whether they're working properly. It's impossible for them NOT to work.

Here's how a transporter works.

Imagine the following.

In the kitchen of your home is a large lego castle made entirely of gray bricks. This is a person. The person has a parasite inside it in the form of an orange lego police car.

You are the transporter. Your job is to take apart the castle brick by lego brick, catalog every single brick you find and the position they were in, then rebuild the castle in the bedroom.

So you take apart the castle and you catalog your findings. As you take apart the castle piece by piece, you suddenly discover that there's an orange police car inside it.

You can take that apart and catalog it, too.

And you can certainly put it back together, brick by brick, once you move all the legos to the bedroom to reassemble the castle.

BUT YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY MISS IT.

Even if you didn't "notice" the orange car, when it came to cataloging the pieces, you'd have all these pieces that didn't fit. And you'd sure as hell notice them when you'd try to put the castle back together.

The transporter does the same thing for a person or any object. It literally deconstructs it at the subatomic level. It makes a record of every single atom and subatomic particle that it takes apart and exactly where they belong and then it reassembles those pieces in another location.

It can't just reassemble random unknown stuff just because it's there. It can't "miss" something that doesn't belong. Period. Otherwise, it would never, ever work. By definition, it has to "know" exactly what every single subatomic piece of the transportee is, what they are, what they do and where they go.

It could no more "miss" a parasite in someone's head than you could accidentally put that orange car back together without ever noticing it.

 

[Tim Thomason]

Actually Spock is an old family name on Amanda's side. He mother was Dutch. Sarek let it slide because it sounded Vulcan.

I am like 96% sure that Amanda just named her son after the ancient baby doctor.

 

[Sarcastic Vulcan Salute]

It's not about whether or not "bio filters" are calibrated or whether they're working properly. It's impossible for them NOT to work.

Here's how a transporter works.

Imagine the following.

In the kitchen of your home is a large lego castle made entirely of gray bricks. This is a person. The person has a parasite inside it in the form of an orange lego police car.

You are the transporter. Your job is to take apart the castle brick by lego brick, catalog every single brick you find and the position they were in, then rebuild the castle in the bedroom.

So you take apart the castle and you catalog your findings. As you take apart the castle piece by piece, you suddenly discover that there's an orange police car inside it.

You can take that apart and catalog it, too.

And you can certainly put it back together, brick by brick, once you move all the legos to the bedroom to reassemble the castle.

BUT YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY MISS IT.

Even if you didn't "notice" the orange car, when it came to cataloging the pieces, you'd have all these pieces that didn't fit. And you'd sure as hell notice them when you'd try to put the castle back together.

The transporter does the same thing for a person or any object. It literally deconstructs it at the subatomic level. It makes a record of every single atom and subatomic particle that it takes apart and exactly where they belong and then it reassembles those pieces in another location.

It can't just reassemble random unknown stuff just because it's there. It can't "miss" something that doesn't belong. Period. Otherwise, it would never, ever work. By definition, it has to "know" exactly what every single subatomic piece of the transportee is, what they are, what they do and where they go.

It could no more "miss" a parasite in someone's head than you could accidentally put that orange car back together without ever noticing it.

Except that the transporter is not intelligent enough (apparently) to automatically compare transporter traces of the same person to find differences, or to inherently recognize that the grey bricks should not have an orange car in it, ever. And nobody seemingly thinks to run those types of checks on the regular.

They also sidestep the notion that there's no reason the transporter can't be used as an immortality/cloning machine. "What's that, Data? Tasha just got killed by Armus? Well boot up the version from when she just beamed down and re-energize."

 

[CorporalCaptain]

It's not about whether or not "bio filters" are calibrated or whether they're working properly. It's impossible for them NOT to work.

Here's how a transporter works.

Imagine the following.

In the kitchen of your home is a large lego castle made entirely of gray bricks. This is a person. The person has a parasite inside it in the form of an orange lego police car.

You are the transporter. Your job is to take apart the castle brick by lego brick, catalog every single brick you find and the position they were in, then rebuild the castle in the bedroom.

So you take apart the castle and you catalog your findings. As you take apart the castle piece by piece, you suddenly discover that there's an orange police car inside it.

You can take that apart and catalog it, too.

And you can certainly put it back together, brick by brick, once you move all the legos to the bedroom to reassemble the castle.

BUT YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY MISS IT.

Even if you didn't "notice" the orange car, when it came to cataloging the pieces, you'd have all these pieces that didn't fit. And you'd sure as hell notice them when you'd try to put the castle back together.

The transporter does the same thing for a person or any object. It literally deconstructs it at the subatomic level. It makes a record of every single atom and subatomic particle that it takes apart and exactly where they belong and then it reassembles those pieces in another location.

It can't just reassemble random unknown stuff just because it's there. It can't "miss" something that doesn't belong. Period. Otherwise, it would never, ever work. By definition, it has to "know" exactly what every single subatomic piece of the transportee is, what they are, what they do and where they go.

It could no more "miss" a parasite in someone's head than you could accidentally put that orange car back together without ever noticing it.

Ergo, that's not exactly how the transporter works.

It's not too difficult to imagine that the central problem in the method that you've proposed is that it would be practically impossible to keep from killing the person being transported. Not to mention, the "catalog" would be prohibitively complex to even attempt a live transport.

What would be more feasible would be a conversion to an isomorphic energy form and back again [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism], during which the person would remain alive and conscious the entire time. The idea of an isomorphic energy form is supported canonically by e.g. TNG "Realm of Fear" and ENT "Daedalus." The idea of people remaining conscious throughout transport is supported also by e.g. TOS "That Which Survives," TMP, and TWOK.

Operations on the transporter stream can be performed, but only those operations that can be programmed and that are established to be safe. The stream itself cannot be perfectly comprehended by the machine; nor can a catalog such as you describe exist in a way that can be reliably replicated, or otherwise it would be possible to routinely and endlessly duplicate people.

So, the idea that the machine can recognized only what it has been designed to recognize, as people have been saying, is spot on.

 

[cooleddie74]

Another example of the transporter showing us that subjects remain conscious throughout the transporting sequence is TVH, where Dr. Gillian Taylor begins yelling as she realizes something's happening to her and continues yelling until she rematerializes on the transporter pad inside the Klingon Bird-of-Prey.

 

[Charles Phipps]

It's not about whether or not "bio filters" are calibrated or whether they're working properly. It's impossible for them NOT to work.

Wrong.

Seriously. How many times has the transporter malfunctioned? Also, since it's canonical this didn't catch them, it's canonical they didn't work. The point of Star Trek fandom is to find solutions for oddities, not dismiss them as "impossible." Especially with fictional technology.

That's just ridiculous enough to be possible. Why not?

Arthur Conan Doyle is also Spock's ancestor.

 

[Photoman15]

Except that the transporter is not intelligent enough (apparently) to automatically compare transporter traces of the same person to find differences, or to inherently recognize that the grey bricks should not have an orange car in it, ever. And nobody seemingly thinks to run those types of checks on the regular.

They also sidestep the notion that there's no reason the transporter can't be used as an immortality/cloning machine. "What's that, Data? Tasha just got killed by Armus? Well boot up the version from when she just beamed down and re-energize."

The transporter AI would know about the orange car, but it doesn't know it's not supposed to be there. Let's change grey bricks to, let's say , Ensign Picard. He's waiting for his first assignment with his pals. He gets into a fight with some Nausicaans. He has to have his heart replaced with an artificial one (the orange police car). His next transport can't remove the piece that it thinks shouldn't be there. Each person would have to have a file of "what they're made of" But that would preclude beaming someone up (or down) from a new world.

As to the second point, technically they can do that (Tasha), but one, that may have been decided that it is unethical and is not allowed. Other wise, it could be done, but just isn't. I was writing a script for TNG when it was on where upon beam up, a crew member was hit by lightning at dematerialization. The surge was partially brought up and went thru the system. The damaged transporter lost the pattern but pulled part from a program that was just being shut down in the holodeck but used still had the crew members conscience. (I forget the details, but I had it explained better in the script). So the dilemma of the story was who was this person (way before Tuvix)? Was it Ensign So-and-So or K'Ehleyr (Worf was finishing up her death anniversary in the holodeck). I'm not presenting it here like I wrote it out, and I never finished it because TNG ended. I have it on a harddrive somewhere.

(this was written because I wanted to bring K'Ehleyr back )

 

[Photoman15]

Another example of the transporter showing us that subjects remain conscious throughout the transporting sequence is TVH, where Dr. Gillian Taylor begins yelling as she realizes something's happening to her and continues yelling until she rematerializes on the transporter pad inside the Klingon Bird-of-Prey.

Actually it doesn't show that. It shows that at de-materialization, she started yelling and when rematerialized, she continued because her brain was put back to the point at which she was de-materialized.

 

[Charles Phipps]

Actually it doesn't show that. It shows that at de-materialization, she started yelling and when rematerialized, she continued because her brain was put back to the point at which she was de-materialized.

I feel continuity of consciousness is something Star Trek has fallen in on because they hate the "kill and clone" explanation that has been common in pop culture.

 

[Trekker4747]

We've been shown, numerous times despite how little sense it makes, that people can speak in the middle of a transport.

 

[Charles Phipps]

We've been shown, numerous times despite how little sense it makes, that people can speak in the middle of a transport.

Eh it makes sense if they're just moving space. Transporters working like a door rather than a transformation.

 

[UssGlenn]

The only way Transporters can reassemble you without a pad is if it doesn't take you apart in the first place. It converts your atoms to a kind of energy that, under normal circumstances, snaps back to regular matter when released from the beam. That's how you can remain aware during a beaming, all your brain cells are still talking to each other, they are just temporarily made of an exotic form of energy.

Only during emergencies does the computer actually have to try and keep track of where your individual atoms go, and it can only do that if you are materializing on a pad.

 

[Charles Phipps]

In any case, I think we underestimate just how much work a transporter chief does. It's not just pushing a button and they probably have to operate the bio-filter.

 

[Trekker4747]

The only way Transporters can reassemble you without a pad is if it doesn't take you apart in the first place. It converts your atoms to a kind of energy that, under normal circumstances, snaps back to regular matter when released from the beam. That's how you can remain aware during a beaming, all your brain cells are still talking to each other, they are just temporarily made of an exotic form of energy.

Only during emergencies does the computer actually have to try and keep track of where your individual atoms go, and it can only do that if you are materializing on a pad.

That's always been my theory. It would take an impractical level of energy to turn someone into energy, transmit them, and the turn them back into matter. It'd be "cheaper" to just use a shuttle. (Though maybe then the death risk goes up.)

There's just "something" at the quantum level that makes an object "transmitable" and when it's out of that field or snaps back to matter without having to be "taken apart." But lay person way of looking/thinking of it is "deconstructed, molecule by molecule" which may be how early atomic-level transporters work as it required less energy to move things at that resolution than it would the quantum level. (Think moving bricks vs. moving particles of dust that can be assembled as a brick.)

 

[UssGlenn]

Replicators would be based on the brick by brick method.

 

[Noname Given]

Another example of the transporter showing us that subjects remain conscious throughout the transporting sequence is TVH, where Dr. Gillian Taylor begins yelling as she realizes something's happening to her and continues yelling until she rematerializes on the transporter pad inside the Klingon Bird-of-Prey.

There's also Kirk's and Savik's ongoing vocal discussion as they're beamed up from Regula One to the Enterprise as they're re-materializing in the Transporter room in Star Trek Ii The Wrath of Khan.

 

[UssGlenn]

There's also Kirk's and Savik's ongoing vocal discussion as they're beamed up from Regula One to the Enterprise as they're re-materializing in the Transporter room in Star Trek Ii The Wrath of Khan.

Can you imagine the outrage if they did that for the first time now?

 

[Trekker4747]

Replicators would be based on the brick by brick method.

Right, replicators and cargo transporters are atomic based. (Probably why replicated food lacks something, maybe something solid lost at so "high" a resolution.)

 

[jackoverfull]

I can’t believe nobody mentioned Realm of Fear, with Barclay remaining conscious a long time while in the beam!

 

[jackoverfull]

Not my favorite episode but I liked it. Only huge issue: how come that Barb leaves Boimler as soon as the parasite is removed when they had been having a *long distance* relationship for a while? Pheromones are transmitted through subspace now?