They didn't really think out the capabilities of the transporters

[JRoss]

So consider transporters and replicators. Transporters take matter, scramble it into energy, move it and remake it. The replicator, which takes a stored template from the computer and makes a previously non-extant item seems to work on similar principles.

Why don't the people of the 24th century "store" themselves, stepping onto a transporter pad, dematerialize, rematerialize but then store the data on a hard drive. If they die, then there is a clone body waiting for them. It's not the same as living forever, yes, but for a Starfleet officer who wants to ensure that their child will have a parent if they die, such a backup seems like it would be a boon.

If "Rascals" taught us anything, it was that when a transporter thingy turns you into a child you maintain all your memories and everything. Seems like your identity is independent of your biology. Why not "store" yourself as in the above example when you are at your physical peak (22-25-ish) and then every 20 years or so step onto the transporter, dematerialize and rematerialize as a younger person.

Why not store Data in this manner? Imagine a ship of Datas all working together.

 

[The_Baroness]

In Rascals, they didn't simply 'load a template' of their child selves, their patterns were altered.

I would expect that you'd need to replicate the most recent version of the person to retain the memories.

But aside from that, the amount of data would likely be just to large. Humans are a little more complex than a cup of tea, earl grey, hot.

 

[MacLeod]

Didn't it take virtually the entire memory of Starbase DSN, to store just five patterns?

 

[The_Baroness]

It did. And even then they were all nearly killed in the holosuite

 

[You_Will_Fail]

If "Rascals" taught us anything, it was that when a transporter thingy turns you into a child you maintain all your memories and everything. Seems like your identity is independent of your biology. Why not "store" yourself as in the above example when you are at your physical peak (22-25-ish) and then every 20 years or so step onto the transporter, dematerialize and rematerialize as a younger person.

Because this isn't real life, its a TV show.
The whole turning into a child thing was just a one-off fun plot for one episode, there's no point going beyond that

 

[JRoss]

Obviously a starship that explores dangerous space isn't the place to hold the patterns. You know how the Cyclons of BSG had those resurrection centers? That would be the way to go. Large planet-based facilities.

I don't buy the "not enough memory" reasoning. If a starship has multiple transporter bays that can function at once, then surely they have enough memory for more than five people. When you think of how many thousands or millions of food and object recipes are held by the Enterprise' computer, then holding people is not a stretch by any means.

 

[T'Girl]

how many thousands or millions of food and object recipes are held by the Enterprise' computer

But those are merely "blueprints" for the replicator, they aren't actual living beings being suspended in the pattern buffer or stored on DS9's holodeck matrix.

A repilicator can't create/recreate living organic beings.

 

[Satyrquaze]

Why not store Data in this manner? Imagine a ship of Datas all working together.

"The Measure of a Man" taught us that slavery is wrong.

 

[Kelthaz]

If "Rascals" taught us anything, it was that when a transporter thingy turns you into a child you maintain all your memories and everything. Seems like your identity is independent of your biology. Why not "store" yourself as in the above example when you are at your physical peak (22-25-ish) and then every 20 years or so step onto the transporter, dematerialize and rematerialize as a younger person.

Because this isn't real life, its a TV show.
The whole turning into a child thing was just a one-off fun plot for one episode, there's no point going beyond that

This. Not every single episode of Star Trek is going to fit neatly together with the rest. You should just look at the general principle (teleporters teleport things.) and ignore the specific technobabble instances of each episode.

 

[milo bloom]

If "Rascals" taught us anything, it was that when a transporter thingy turns you into a child you maintain all your memories and everything. Seems like your identity is independent of your biology. Why not "store" yourself as in the above example when you are at your physical peak (22-25-ish) and then every 20 years or so step onto the transporter, dematerialize and rematerialize as a younger person.

Because this isn't real life, its a TV show.
The whole turning into a child thing was just a one-off fun plot for one episode, there's no point going beyond that

This. Not every single episode of Star Trek is going to fit neatly together with the rest. You should just look at the general principle (teleporters teleport things.) and ignore the specific technobabble instances of each episode.

While that's a noble intention, this is one of those areas where TV showrunners need to sit down for a moment and say "on the off-chance this show goes on for 40-some years, should we set some limitations into this thing so it doesn't get silly?"

 

[Gary7]

This idea has been debated and argued about numerous times before. I'd recommend searching and reading those threads.

The question about a person's molecules has been ultimately theorized to be "transported" to another location, not destroyed and recreated elsewhere. So, you can't just pull organic matter out of thin air. You're not replicating a human being, just moving them around. And yes, they can be genetically altered... usually by accident.

 

[Sandoval]

Imagine a ship of Datas all working together.

They would take over the galaxy.

 

[Vanyel]

If "Rascals" taught us anything, it was that when a transporter thingy turns you into a child you maintain all your memories and everything. Seems like your identity is independent of your biology. Why not "store" yourself as in the above example when you are at your physical peak (22-25-ish) and then every 20 years or so step onto the transporter, dematerialize and rematerialize as a younger person.

Rascals was a unique situation, as are most transporter transformations.

Now, at 42, I can say that I know more now than I did then. I would love to be 25 again and know what I know now. I would love it, but I don't think I'd like it. The things I did then, I wouldn't be stupid enough to do this new time around. I wouldn't fit in with people my age, nor would I fit in with people my mental age.

What you're talking about sounds like restoring your computer through your backup discs. You got your computer back to the way it was at the time the backup was made. You lost everything else. Where would your Picards, Siscos, Janeways, Kirks, Admiral Ross and other top commanders be if they keep resetting themselves back to 20 or 25?

 

[JRoss]

If everyone reset? There would be a parity.

A ship full of Datas would not be slavery. Not if each willingly agreed to serve in Starfleet. Their assignment would be part of the agreement.

 

[CoveTom]

As Gary Sever says, this harkens back to the basic debate that's been had before about whether the transporter would actually be, well, transporting you from one place to another, or whether it would be destroying you and then recreating you later.

Although consensus here has always seemed to be that the only way the transporter could work "for real" is the latter, Trek has always made it clear that in that fictional universe it's the former. The transporter can't just keep your pattern stored on a hard drive and make one of you whenever you want, like a replicator can with a simple pattern for an inanimate object. The transporter actually moves you from one place to another. As such, you couldn't just make a "backup" and restore it whenever desired.

 

[JRoss]

That reasoning makes my head hurt. I'm not saying your argument is stupid, I'm saying the in-show logic is flawed. If their scanners are advanced enough to scan every molecule of a person's body, which they must be in order for transporters to work, and if computer has the memory to hold a pattern in the first place, which it does, then surely it has the ability to do a Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V operation.

 

[T'Girl]

Although consensus here has always seemed to be that [snip] it would be destroying you and then recreating you later.

As I recall the majority opinion was that the physical person who entered, was the physical person who emerged. And that it wasn't a brand new entity with copies of the original's memory.

Although this has come up multiple times, and we both perhaps are remembering different threads?

That reasoning makes my head hurt. I'm not saying your argument is stupid, I'm saying the in-show logic is flawed. If their scanners are advanced enough to scan every molecule of a person's body, which they must be in order for transporters to work, and if computer has the memory to hold a pattern in the first place, which it does, then surely it has the ability to do a Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V operation.

But once your pattern (your matter stream) has been sent to the destination, the pattern is gone. It's been rematerialized back into you. And the transporter system has a limited ability to store your matter stream, this was the source of the big panic on DS9, and the reason for Scotty's innovative juryrig of the Jenola's transporter in Relics. And in the case of Relics, half the people who went into the transporter died. Half of one of patterns was lost.

 

[Gary7]

That reasoning makes my head hurt. I'm not saying your argument is stupid, I'm saying the in-show logic is flawed.

Not really "flawed" so much as "incomplete." They can only go so far for plausibility, without boring the audience to tears. As such, there's a lot of "mystery" behind how things are theorized to actually work. That's fiction. And given that... well, there's enough ambiguity for many people to come up with valid differing interpretations that will clash with one another, resulting in endless debates until one side or another becomes exhausted, exasperated, or the topic drifts to something more benign.

 

[Jonas Grumby]

Seems to me that if the transporter actually sends your actual physical molecules from place to place (which I think was the intent, at least in TOS), then it wouldn't have to scan you in detail down to the sub-atomic level. It would only have to scan enough of each molecule to be able to uniquely identify it and then log its position in the "pattern."

 

[Timo]

Exactly - you yourself store the information needed to make you. It doesn't have to be stored anywhere else, it's inherent in your molecules, even if those molecules happen to be "phased", "beamed" to a different location and then "de-phased".

Actually, you probably don't even have to memorize the positions of the molecules, because the phasing process doesn't deny them of interactions with each other. Even in the "phased matter stream", your toy bone is still connected to your foot bone, and your phased self retains the ability to think and see and talk and sweat and whatnot - just in "phased form". So the requirements on computer memory are minimal, perhaps nil.

...Until your phased self begins to de-phase all on its own, which apparently happens within minutes unless you keep doing a cyclic transportation thing. Perhaps that's what was being done by the DS9 holodeck systems in "Our Man Bashir" - not storing raw data, but storing phased patterns in the many transporters that are an integral part of any holodeck?

Of course, information that is stored in your very molecules cannot be stored unless those very molecules are stored, so the sending station retains little or nothing of you after the transport is complete. And copying your molecules, while certainly doable with a big enough replicator, would require all the intricate scanning that the transporter never did.

Timo Saloniemi