Not a new topic, but a new take on it. You wouldn’t get me on one of those things.
17 thoughts on “Star Trek Transporters”
I always thought it inconsistent that there was any illness, disease or injury that transporter technology, if real, couldn’t fix. Coronavirus? Go through the transporter and have the computer filter out the disease. Ditto cancer, common cold etc. Broken limb, pierced/destroyed organ? Go through the transporter and have everything put back to normal using prior transport “blueprint”.
Not just disease. Immortality as well. You just make a copy of your 25 y/o self and by age 65 you step into the “transporter” and remove any deltas other that the quantum energy states that preserve your memories and gained knowledge/skills and the “new you” is back in business for another 40 years, etc. etc. ad infinitum.
“Go through the transporter and have the computer filter out the disease.”
Larry Niven covered that in…A World Out of Time, I think. They never really mentioned it in any of the shows (that I recall, but I might be wrong), but various books, possibly the Technical Manual, mentioned that in the TNG era, this was done.
OT: Rand, have you been having issues with your site lately? In the last few days I’ve had several instances where trying to visit the site I got “error establishing a database connection”, and I just got it again when I posted my previous comment (it worked OK when I hit Back and submitted the comment a second time.)
I’ve been getting that too.
Yes, it has been a little glitchy. I’ll talk to the sysadmin.
I will also add that I’ve experienced this as well.
+3
I got an entire novel out of this stuff, Dark Sky Legion (Bantam, 1992) that some have called the grimmest future ever. The premise is, FTL is impossible but things like transporters (short range only) work. And then it asks what a Galactic Empire in those circumstances would be like. I called it The Metastable Order.
McCoy hated the transporter as well.
Ditto on “Error establishing a database connection.” (And wouldn’t receiving that error be just great after the transporter disassembled you?)
Where other stories imagine a world torn by war, or at the mercy of technology run wild, Star Trek imagines, if not the best possible future, one very close to it.
The Prime timeline, yes. The Kelvin Timeline seems to be only about war and technology run wild.
And all because a bunch of Romulan politicians were unwilling to believe an utterly unbelievable warning about global warming some stupid supernova.
I used to play Star Trek: the Roleplaying Game back in the ’90s. I had a Federation character who refused to use transporters. For religious reasons. The sect I belonged to believed you were killed the first time you used one, with your soul departing, and a doppleganger was the end result. I was a crackerjack shuttle pilot.
Scott Adams wrote a book where he posited that you’d be a fool to trust a coworker not to beam you into the middle of a wall when those same coworkers require safety training to use an office Xerox machine.
SF has a stock of “this changes everything” technologies, such as antigravity, FTL, teleportation, immortality, etc. Good SF uses no more than one such technology in a story. Bad SF treats it as a Chinese menu. Worst SF just uses them all. Part of the reason for that is, each technology not only changes everything, it can, if you’re not careful, contain these seeds of the other technologies within it. For example, with teleportation, you can generate unlimited energy, by dropping a stream iron filings down Jupiter’s gravity well, somehow extracting energy from the stream, until it reaches a teleporter that sends it back up top to fall some more. Of course, pretty soon the stream will reach reletivistic velocity and become a problem. When writers use these technologies, they have to come up with imaginary impediments (e.g., you can’t teleport uphill without replacing the potential energy you just extracted as kinetic). And those imaginary impediments basically count as fantasy elements.
I think the article hits the nail on the head when you consider the energy cost of de-materialization and materialization. Oh I dunno why, maybe it was something I read about E=mc**2. This makes the whole proposition impractical irrespective of the computational requirements. There is one variant on this I would accept and that would be if there were a mechanism for enveloping you into a space-time warp bubble that required no machinery to sustain it but required machinery to form and de-form it. Essentially you “warp-out” of our normal space-time to be “warped” back into it at anyplace in zero time because “quantum effects”. Now you are only using energy to pull matter out of a parallel quantum universe “field” that allows non-destructed matter to re-appear. Need a better scientific basis that this? OK call it “dark matter” transit and now you’re good until it’s existence is disproved. Because of the impracticality of forming a self-sustaining large bubble the size of a starship this only works for small amount of mass, either cargo or crew. Also limited range. But you’d still need a receiver. Of course you fix that by making sure receivers are available wherever they are needed. In the episode in ST:TOS “Gary Seven” an alien civilization has also solved the range problem and don’t bother with starships at all. That episode seemed to me to be the most practical way to do interstellar travel, with the one exception of getting the receiver installed in the first place. This also solves another of my big problems with the transporter technology in ST. And that is that you don’t need a receiver at the other end. In ST:TNG they obviously realized that the whole “meet me in the transporter room” concept from TOS was ridiculous. If the range was 16,000 miles what difference is a couple hundred feet? So in the end I don’t want to get into heavy discussion about the ST Transporter because in the end I read the book “The Making of ST” which interviews Roddenberry on why the concept in the first place and he made it very clear why, it was a “plot gimmick” to speed up scenes so that they didn’t waste anytime in transit via shuttles when unnecessary to the plot of the episode. Why they couldn’t just cut to a scene where they’ve already landed a shuttle on a planet and go from there was beyond me. Maybe it also saved a ton of money not having to do a lot of set construction or special effect filming cause CGI didn’t exist back during TOS. But that seemed like pretty flimsy (filmsy?) reasoning to me.
One other thought. Using the “warp mini-bubble” requires only the one technological breakthrough of warp drive as a means of teleportation and transportation. Not two separate Universe shaking technologies. Of course there is also the “Artificial Gravity” breakthrough technology as well in order to do ST as we know it. Maybe that’s just another manifestation of space-time warping to create a “gravity well”. So maybe just ONE technological breakthrough needed for all the rest as Mr. Barton points out makes for great SF.
In ST:TOS episode “The Doomsday Machine” they also make it clear they don’t have the technology to manipulate solid neutronium (solid neutron matter). Otherwise you could have lined the bottom-most sections of the ship with small amounts of it to create continuous artificial gravity. Of course it would attract “downwards” on the topside of the ship both inside and out and attract “upwards” on the bottom of the ship from the outside. I don’t even want to THINK about how to maneuver such a ship much less generate a warp field around it. This would make starships tend to want to be essentially spheres with the neutronium at the core. I think therefore sticking with the warp drive breakthrough to “drive” everything else is the better bet.
Oh yeah I forgot about sub-space radio. The answer is in the name. Sub-space i.e. quantum communication.
I always thought it inconsistent that there was any illness, disease or injury that transporter technology, if real, couldn’t fix. Coronavirus? Go through the transporter and have the computer filter out the disease. Ditto cancer, common cold etc. Broken limb, pierced/destroyed organ? Go through the transporter and have everything put back to normal using prior transport “blueprint”.
Not just disease. Immortality as well. You just make a copy of your 25 y/o self and by age 65 you step into the “transporter” and remove any deltas other that the quantum energy states that preserve your memories and gained knowledge/skills and the “new you” is back in business for another 40 years, etc. etc. ad infinitum.
“Go through the transporter and have the computer filter out the disease.”
Larry Niven covered that in…A World Out of Time, I think. They never really mentioned it in any of the shows (that I recall, but I might be wrong), but various books, possibly the Technical Manual, mentioned that in the TNG era, this was done.
OT: Rand, have you been having issues with your site lately? In the last few days I’ve had several instances where trying to visit the site I got “error establishing a database connection”, and I just got it again when I posted my previous comment (it worked OK when I hit Back and submitted the comment a second time.)
I’ve been getting that too.
Yes, it has been a little glitchy. I’ll talk to the sysadmin.
I will also add that I’ve experienced this as well.
+3
I got an entire novel out of this stuff, Dark Sky Legion (Bantam, 1992) that some have called the grimmest future ever. The premise is, FTL is impossible but things like transporters (short range only) work. And then it asks what a Galactic Empire in those circumstances would be like. I called it The Metastable Order.
McCoy hated the transporter as well.
Ditto on “Error establishing a database connection.” (And wouldn’t receiving that error be just great after the transporter disassembled you?)
Where other stories imagine a world torn by war, or at the mercy of technology run wild, Star Trek imagines, if not the best possible future, one very close to it.
The Prime timeline, yes. The Kelvin Timeline seems to be only about war and technology run wild.
And all because a bunch of Romulan politicians were unwilling to believe an utterly unbelievable warning about
global warmingsome stupid supernova.I used to play Star Trek: the Roleplaying Game back in the ’90s. I had a Federation character who refused to use transporters. For religious reasons. The sect I belonged to believed you were killed the first time you used one, with your soul departing, and a doppleganger was the end result. I was a crackerjack shuttle pilot.
Scott Adams wrote a book where he posited that you’d be a fool to trust a coworker not to beam you into the middle of a wall when those same coworkers require safety training to use an office Xerox machine.
SF has a stock of “this changes everything” technologies, such as antigravity, FTL, teleportation, immortality, etc. Good SF uses no more than one such technology in a story. Bad SF treats it as a Chinese menu. Worst SF just uses them all. Part of the reason for that is, each technology not only changes everything, it can, if you’re not careful, contain these seeds of the other technologies within it. For example, with teleportation, you can generate unlimited energy, by dropping a stream iron filings down Jupiter’s gravity well, somehow extracting energy from the stream, until it reaches a teleporter that sends it back up top to fall some more. Of course, pretty soon the stream will reach reletivistic velocity and become a problem. When writers use these technologies, they have to come up with imaginary impediments (e.g., you can’t teleport uphill without replacing the potential energy you just extracted as kinetic). And those imaginary impediments basically count as fantasy elements.
I think the article hits the nail on the head when you consider the energy cost of de-materialization and materialization. Oh I dunno why, maybe it was something I read about E=mc**2. This makes the whole proposition impractical irrespective of the computational requirements. There is one variant on this I would accept and that would be if there were a mechanism for enveloping you into a space-time warp bubble that required no machinery to sustain it but required machinery to form and de-form it. Essentially you “warp-out” of our normal space-time to be “warped” back into it at anyplace in zero time because “quantum effects”. Now you are only using energy to pull matter out of a parallel quantum universe “field” that allows non-destructed matter to re-appear. Need a better scientific basis that this? OK call it “dark matter” transit and now you’re good until it’s existence is disproved. Because of the impracticality of forming a self-sustaining large bubble the size of a starship this only works for small amount of mass, either cargo or crew. Also limited range. But you’d still need a receiver. Of course you fix that by making sure receivers are available wherever they are needed. In the episode in ST:TOS “Gary Seven” an alien civilization has also solved the range problem and don’t bother with starships at all. That episode seemed to me to be the most practical way to do interstellar travel, with the one exception of getting the receiver installed in the first place. This also solves another of my big problems with the transporter technology in ST. And that is that you don’t need a receiver at the other end. In ST:TNG they obviously realized that the whole “meet me in the transporter room” concept from TOS was ridiculous. If the range was 16,000 miles what difference is a couple hundred feet? So in the end I don’t want to get into heavy discussion about the ST Transporter because in the end I read the book “The Making of ST” which interviews Roddenberry on why the concept in the first place and he made it very clear why, it was a “plot gimmick” to speed up scenes so that they didn’t waste anytime in transit via shuttles when unnecessary to the plot of the episode. Why they couldn’t just cut to a scene where they’ve already landed a shuttle on a planet and go from there was beyond me. Maybe it also saved a ton of money not having to do a lot of set construction or special effect filming cause CGI didn’t exist back during TOS. But that seemed like pretty flimsy (filmsy?) reasoning to me.
One other thought. Using the “warp mini-bubble” requires only the one technological breakthrough of warp drive as a means of teleportation and transportation. Not two separate Universe shaking technologies. Of course there is also the “Artificial Gravity” breakthrough technology as well in order to do ST as we know it. Maybe that’s just another manifestation of space-time warping to create a “gravity well”. So maybe just ONE technological breakthrough needed for all the rest as Mr. Barton points out makes for great SF.
In ST:TOS episode “The Doomsday Machine” they also make it clear they don’t have the technology to manipulate solid neutronium (solid neutron matter). Otherwise you could have lined the bottom-most sections of the ship with small amounts of it to create continuous artificial gravity. Of course it would attract “downwards” on the topside of the ship both inside and out and attract “upwards” on the bottom of the ship from the outside. I don’t even want to THINK about how to maneuver such a ship much less generate a warp field around it. This would make starships tend to want to be essentially spheres with the neutronium at the core. I think therefore sticking with the warp drive breakthrough to “drive” everything else is the better bet.
Oh yeah I forgot about sub-space radio. The answer is in the name. Sub-space i.e. quantum communication.