Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 3x10 - "The Last Generation"

[Macintosh]

"replicate an entirely new, healthy organ for replacement"

It literally states they replicated an entirely new healthy organ...

And I'm literally stating that they're using biological replication, not technological molecular replication, because if they were using technological molecular replication they'd have no need to specifically call out the need to scan patient DNA.

You're mixing up the halves from "Our Man Bashir".

ROM: Neural energy has to be stored at the quantum level. The holosuite can't handle that.
ODO: So if their physical bodies are stored here, where are their brain patterns?
QUARK: Everywhere else. Their brain patterns are so large that they're taking up every bit of computer memory on the station. Replicator memory, weapons, life supports.

Ah, good, "neural energy". Glad we cleared that up and went with something sensible.

It was specifically the neural energy that had to be stored at a quantum level, and also that was the crappy Cardasian computers, not Starfleet computers. Which we know from 11001001 are capable of a lot higher level of storage.

All we know from TNG: "11001001" is that in 2364 the Enterprise-D (and possibly the other few Galaxy-class ships around at the time) had the largest and most powerful mobile computers in the Federation. It tells us nothing about how effective Cardassian computers were, because the Bynars weren't members of the Cardassian Union; and we might imply from "11001001" that space stations can have significantly more complex and powerful computers than starships. And even assuming Cardassian computers were less powerful than the Starfleet equivalents, why would Starfleet have not upgraded them by DS9: "Our Man Bashir" after running the station for four years? They upgraded the weapons and shields.

 

[Sci]

 

[thribs]

I get the impression the E wasn’t destroyed but something else disastrous happened to it.

 

[Citiprime]

People are forgetting season 1.

The entire crux of the problem that caused the Federation to withdraw support from helping Romulan refugees was a lack of ships. If it was as simple as replicating ships, then Starfleet wouldn't have been scratching everything out of mothballs to act as transports, or telling the Romulans "too bad, so sad" after the Synths blew everything up.

Also, it's implied the destruction of Utopia Planitia has caused problems with starship production.

 

[thribs]

They had plenty of ships here.

 

[Racefuel]

They had plenty of ships here.

They also assembled the majority of the fleet for this little shindig clusterfuck.

309 ships, assuming an upper limit of about 500, is a huge chunk of the fleet.

 

[Fateor]

*Points out that I've already answered this elsewhere and that it was clearly so successful and revolutionary a technology that it was never seen or heard from again.*

The ability to replicate living organs was again mentioned in the Voyager Episode Phage, where they had to discount the possibility of it's use for plot reasons.

Does require fuel though, and presumably large amounts of energy storage of some kind, unless you're going to replicate your starship v-e-r-y s---l---o---w---l---y. Feeding a gas giant into a fusion reactor just to produce a single starship seems a touch... wasteful, no?

Let's take Voyager as an example, which is the only starship we have a canonical on-screen mass for (700,000 tons). Assuming perfect energy storage and energy-to-matter conversion efficiency, which is of course impossible but for the sake of argument let's go with it, to replicate that would require 6.3e25 J. That's a lot of energy. It's about a sixth that of the total amount of energy our sun outputs every second. To produce that much energy by the much less efficient deuterium and deuterium-tritium fusion we know Starfleet fusion reactors use would require 75,000,000 tons of fuel – again, assuming impossibly perfect storage/conversion efficiencies/etc. That much deuterium, if stored as a cryogenic liquid, would occupy around 450,000m³, which is equivalent to a sphere 120m in diameter. That's a BIG reactor.

Except that's not how Star Trek replicators work.

 

[Farscape One]

The ships Picard was trying to get built were specifically designed to hold thousands of people... maybe even more. When the synth attack occured, all those nearly completed ships were destroyed.

There's precedent for this in TNG. In "The Ensigns of Command", they needed to get the Sheliak to hold off on colonizing that world of over 15,000 humans. A colony was on the way, but it would take 3 weeks to get there.

Despite the transporters not working in that radiation, the Enterprise would still need help in evacuating 15,000 people... and that ship is HUGE.

Imagine trying to evacuate a world of millions, if not billions.

A couple thousand ships like Akira, Sovereign, Excelsior, Miranda, Norway, etc. class ships are still not enough to do the job. Which is why you need purpose built colony ships.

 

[Macintosh]

Except that's not how Star Trek replicators work.

I look forward to reading your treatise on how matter-energy conversion without using matter-energy conversion works.

 

[Racefuel]

Its pretty clear that replicators require energy, and apparently they're finite in capacity since they require raw materials to recombine into recognizable food.

 

[Sci]

The ships Picard was trying to get built were specifically designed to hold thousands of people... maybe even more. When the synth attack occured, all those nearly completed ships were destroyed.

There's precedent for this in TNG. In "The Ensigns of Command", they needed to get the Sheliak to hold off on colonizing that world of over 15,000 humans. A colony was on the way, but it would take 3 weeks to get there.

Despite the transporters not working in that radiation, the Enterprise would still need help in evacuating 15,000 people... and that ship is HUGE.

Imagine trying to evacuate a world of millions, if not billions.

A couple thousand ships like Akira, Sovereign, Excelsior, Miranda, Norway, etc. class ships are still not enough to do the job. Which is why you need purpose built colony ships.

Yeah, trying to evacuate something like six billion people would be a logistical challenge on a scale that's virtually impossible to comprehend.

 

[Citiprime]

The ships Picard was trying to get built were specifically designed to hold thousands of people... maybe even more. When the synth attack occured, all those nearly completed ships were destroyed.

There's precedent for this in TNG. In "The Ensigns of Command", they needed to get the Sheliak to hold off on colonizing that world of over 15,000 humans. A colony was on the way, but it would take 3 weeks to get there.

Despite the transporters not working in that radiation, the Enterprise would still need help in evacuating 15,000 people... and that ship is HUGE.

Imagine trying to evacuate a world of millions, if not billions.

A couple thousand ships like Akira, Sovereign, Excelsior, Miranda, Norway, etc. class ships are still not enough to do the job. Which is why you need purpose built colony ships.

Interesting trivia tidbit about those ships ... In season 1, those transports are called "Wallenberg Class" starships.

The class is presumably named after Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who used his connections to offer protection and save tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary. As no good deed goes unpunished, near the end of World War II Wallenberg was detained by Soviet forces and disappeared without a trace. His ultimate fate is unknown to this day and still the subject of speculation.

 

[Farscape One]

Yes. Because getting them off the planet is just the first step. Locating a suitable one within a reasonable distance is another, because large ships like that can't go that fast. You'd need supplies for medicine, replicators, life support systems, etc. A new world can't be too far away because a ship carrying all those people can only hold so many supplies for a set number of people.

 

[shyborg]

Yeah, trying to evacuate something like six billion people would be a logistical challenge on a scale that's virtually impossible to comprehend.

I wonder if it would've been possible to do a fireman line of ships and use the transporter. So they'd beam people from the planet to ships then go down the line of ships to a planet

Not saying it would've saved everyone but I wonder if this would've been a workable option

 

[Fateor]

I look forward to reading your treatise on how matter-energy conversion without using matter-energy conversion works.

That's easy.

Replicators use base matter as feedstock to remove the vast majority of the energy requirement when creating things.

 

[Farscape One]

I wonder if it would've been possible to do a fireman line of ships and use the transporter. So they'd beam people from the planet to ships then go down the line of ships to a planet

Not saying it would've saved everyone but I wonder if this would've been a workable option

Around 40,000 kilometers is the maximum range of transporters. A large chain of ships wouldn't get them out of the system, let alone to a distant world.

Not a bad idea, but there are nowhere near enough ships to do that.

 

[Citiprime]

I know I'm probably opening pandora's box with this question (by bringing up a story idea that I really don't like and I think creates more problems than it helps), but since the Romulan supernova and the Kelvin Universe are connected in a way, and Spock Prime brought the knowledge of subspace beaming from the Prime Universe, shouldn't you be able to beam the Romulans off of Romulus using subspace beaming, and transport them to a habitable planet within range?

If Kelvin Universe Khan can beam from Earth to Qo'noS, the Romulans should be able to find a safe haven within range?

 

[Bea Jonas]

I appreciated it because it helps establish the TNG cast as being humans with human traumas instead of these sterile, perfect models of humans who are utterly unrelateable

You say sterile/perfect, others might say progressive/enlightened.
TNG's first season is set in the year 2364, that's 340 years in our future.
If you managed to transport a group of people from the year 1684 (that's 340 years in our past) to the year 2024, surely they'd perceive us as highly advanced—as advanced to them as the TNG crew is to us.

 

[Sci]

I know I'm probably opening pandora's box with this question (by bringing up a story idea that I really don't like and I think creates more problems than it helps), but since the Romulan supernova and the Kelvin Universe are connected in a way, and Spock Prime brought the knowledge of subspace beaming from the Prime Universe, shouldn't you be able to beam the Romulans off of Romulus using subspace beaming, and transport them to a habitable planet within range?

If Kelvin Universe Khan can beam from Earth to Qo'noS, the Romulans should be able to find a safe haven within range?

Beaming one person across interstellar distances when you have a genius on the scale of Spock or Khan to do the calculations is a very different thing from trying to scale that up to the level of beaming billions of people. Remember, even Spock messed up and got Kirk beamed into the Enterprise's liquid coolant system when he transwarp beamed one person across interstellar distances.

 

[Racefuel]

I assure you the average human today isn't that different from one from the 17th century