What we got back ascended to a higher plane..... Fortunately.
The safety of Transporters.. Tmp and more.
- Thread starter valkyrie013
- Start date
It's one of those proof-in-the-pudding deals, apparently: no matter what exactly you transform into ("phased matter" and "energy" might be functionally equivalent laymanspeak for the treknological reality), the point is that you then transform back to you. Death is unlikely to keep people awake at night if the package always includes resurrection.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
Unless you watched Pet Semitary...
...It's counterintuitive that transporters could be "early". Vulcans supposedly had them, just like they had warp drive. It would be an exercise in ethics for them to observe the humans attempt either a monkey-see-monkey-do copy or their own thing, and see them cross-circuit to C instead of B with inevitably fatal results. To intervene or not to intervene?
Whether Erickson copied or invented, he probably soon had to consider compatibility issues. Transporter signal works between dissimilar machines, which might not sound all that remarkable when it also works fine when there's no machine at one end. But by the 24th century at least, humans can watch Klingons transmit a signal (and then blow up!), and then will receive it with a Cardassian machine. We're talking about one and the same machine in the end, then. And basically, it's not just a matter of humans choosing to believe that Erickson's recent contraption works, but of humans choosing to believe that millions or billions of users from the past millennia weren't wrong to trust their lives on the device.
Timo Saloniemi
Whether Erickson copied or invented, he probably soon had to consider compatibility issues. Transporter signal works between dissimilar machines, which might not sound all that remarkable when it also works fine when there's no machine at one end. But by the 24th century at least, humans can watch Klingons transmit a signal (and then blow up!), and then will receive it with a Cardassian machine. We're talking about one and the same machine in the end, then. And basically, it's not just a matter of humans choosing to believe that Erickson's recent contraption works, but of humans choosing to believe that millions or billions of users from the past millennia weren't wrong to trust their lives on the device.
Timo Saloniemi
"Enterprise" suggests that Vulcans did not have (or at least didn't regularly use) transporters. When the crew were talking about them being approved for bio-transport, the conversation was something like "you could put people through this thing?" as opposed to "oh boy, the Vulcans finally gave us a transporter of our own". Also, T'Pol never seemed to be urging the use of the system, suggesting that it was as new to her as it was to the humans.
The science is beyond anyone, I think. Replicators can synthesize an object or substance molecule by molecule. But no energy manipulation is required, and the precision required is far less. If a replicator is running at only 99.99999 percent, your banana pancakes might not taste quite like mom's. If your transporter is running at the same level, what materializes might look like you, but it could have irreparable damage, or even die.
Alternate science might give a different explanation of how a transporter works, but doesn't explain duplications, divisions, combinations, or other odd phenomena we've seen over the years.
Alternate science might give a different explanation of how a transporter works, but doesn't explain duplications, divisions, combinations, or other odd phenomena we've seen over the years.
Well, they did Vanishing Point and Daedalus...
At the end of Vanishing Point, I felt like an hour of my life had been wasted.
Transporters are not "safe" or practical. You are destroying an object (or person) and reconstructing it someplace else. It requires a very significant amount of energy to accomplish, and in the case of human beings it's basically killing a person and then creating a clone. Watch the film "The Prestige" for reference.So, watching TMP for the 1147th time, a thought hit me, How did the transporter accident happen?
So, from my thinking when your beaming from a platform to another platform that you beam from your system to the receiving system, and materialize in the receiving platform. At the time of the accident, the Enterprise's system wasn't working properly, now, earlier in the movie, Kirk probably tried to beam up the Enterprise but was told by the operator that there system wasn't working, so he beamed up to the Orbital Complex, and took the scenic route over.
Now, when the 2 that beamed up, why didn't the operator know about it? with Sonak I would guess that he was using the same pad that Kirk used not an hour ago.
Even if it was a different pad/operator, when calling up the coordinates for the Enterprise, they would find that the system wasn't working, Kind of like a Maintenance Lockout of an Elevator that's being repaired. And even if the operator didn't see it, that the Enterprise's system would be locked down and not accept incoming beams, and be bounced back to the sender's platform. Basically there would be a big giant STOP Sign that told the sending platform that its not accepting incoming transports.
That they were sent and died to me is a BIG screw up of probably multiple safety features of the system
Now I'm opening this thread to any an all transporter safety topics, from how in Enterprise one person had Twigs in his skin when he beamed up, to 32nd century technology ( Still 6 months since discovery, so please use "Spoiler" tag if wanting to talk about that. ) and to discussions of how it might happen in real life, quantum teleporters, Dimensional Slides, Gateways, etc.
So Thoughts?
Debating the safety of transporters, one should consider the fact that in the real world, between thirty to fifty thousand people are killed in auto accidents in the U.S. alone every year. Right or wrong, It's what we accept as a price for the freedom to drive.
Robert
Robert
Transporters are as safe and practical as the writers of the fictional universe they operate in need them to be.
I am of course referring to the working theory that could support actual application of the "fiction."
What if the death rate was 100% though?
What does that film have to do with Star Trek?
Everything. lol There is only one working theory for transporter technology (unless you believe in teleportation via wizardry).
In Star Trek it's techobabble not wizardry
Yes, the notion we could develop another theory over the next hundred and some years is preposterous...
Transporters don't kill people because the writers say so. The fact that we don't have a way to do that yet is no different than the fact that we can't travel faster than light, replicate food or make working holodecks.
Not in Star Trek. The person is still alive while they are converted into energy and then back again; see TNG "Realm of Fear."
You can even talk while beaming; see TWOK.
Kirk and the landing party beaming down observed the death of the transporter operator while they were on the pads and partially dematerialized in TOS "That Which Survives."
Heck, even the accident example in TMP proves that live goes on during beaming.
Looked at another way, if a person didn't remain alive through the normal process of beaming, then of course they would be killed. Our heroes would never consent to that on a weekly basis, ergo, by reductio ad absurdum, they aren't killed. Not being killed, they remain alive through the whole process, accidents notwithstanding. It's the potential for accidents that concerns McCoy so much, and Barclay.
I concur, that's how the Transporters work, because the writers and in-universe rules on how the tech defined it to.
The Transporter doesn't replicate the body and destroy the original. They literally disassemble you on a sub-atomic level and re-assemble you at the destination, without killing the original person. They manage to "Phase" your atoms in a non-harmful way that won't kill you.
Transporters are in such common use that in Star Trek: Picard, they have Transporter Gates where people literally walk in and out like it's a Subway entrance. It takes ~⅓ second for Materialization or De-Materialization to occur.
They've shown that replicators can't create Living Organic Matter, only the base atoms that mimics it.
That's a limitation of Replicator Tech, which uses Transporter Technology to copy the atomic patterns of an object.
In the ST:ENT episode "Dead Stop", Phlox said:
"It's ironic, in a way. The station can duplicate a dead Human body in all its exquisite detail, yet a living, simple one-celled organism is beyond its capability."
- Phlox, describing the station's bio-replicator
