Please advise on this conversation we had over on c/Piracy. Transporters and replicators, basic operating principles?

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How does a Tom Riker happen then? How are you able to completely duplicate an entire being if the original isn’t being “killed” and then a new copy created in the new location.

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Two transporter beams, a weirdly reflective at.osphere that only exists in a single planet in the known universe, and plot devises intended for the sole purpose of that one story.

Most of which are explained in that same episode if you'd actually pay attention to it.

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Well, if you can convert energy to matter, you can convert matter to energy. So garbage in, Earl Gray out.

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apple crunch
“Tastes pretty good for shit.”

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They “nuh-uh’d” this in Enterprise. The inventor of the technology is introduced and basically says the people who propagate that theory are a constant thorn in his side, despite having no basis for it in the reality of that universe.

You're welcome to believe the inventor if you wish, but I'd ask if you also believe the CEO of Boeing when he says their planes are safe...

They also show people experiencing, and reacting to other things in, the matter streams during longer transports. Kind of hard to do if you’re dead.

Yeah I can see why this'd be confusing. Keep in mind the transport process at the referenced time periods takes ~ 6 seconds. 3 to dematerialize, near instantaneous travel to the destination, and 3 to rematerialze. It is that part in the middle which makes it clear the person has died. Being conscious in the matter stream and hence thinking you're the same person is the result of it being a near-perfect copy.

There are far more examples that refute the inventor:

Dr. Mbemba kept his daughter stored in a transporter buffer for months. She retained no memories of during her storage. Her brain and heart both stopped. This is clinical death by definition. Thus,
every time the transported are held within the buffer completely for any period of time (seconds while they disarm weapons, or decide what to do with them on screen) they are clearly dead and a floppy disk is being discussed.
Thomas Riker's accident creating Wil's duplicate. People are almost literally photocopies of a destroyed original by this example alone.

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they may as well be turning humanoid waste into food

Yeah, they are. Waste matter is reclaimed as energy/supplies for food production

It would imply that transporter and replicator technology are, basically, the same thing.
I agree. This is supported by replicators and transporters having a very similar special effect on the show.

they’d have to be violating the laws of thermodynamics to get more efficient energy production than matter-to-energy conversion.
I don't follow here. Why do they 'have' to be? They could very well be spending more energy but the increased amount is 'trivial' from their perspective. This would not violate Thermodynamics.

Ah I think I see the confusion. They are using antimatter for energy creation. Energy to matter for transport or replication is 'paid' for by the matter to energy destruction of the og material (whether it be the transported individual, waste matter collected from the crew, equivalent amounts of reactor fuel, or some combination of these) and the excess cost of thermodynamics is paid for by the matter-antimatter reactions in the reactor.

Is the efficiency miraculous? Yes, ofc. Is it breaking thermodynamics? No. It's easy to see how they are paying for the excess costs with reactor fuel and that is without any hand-wavium of subspace or dilithium crystals being involved.

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You're welcome to believe whatever fantasy you want, too, it's not reality after all

If you choose to believe your version of events, and whatever justification you need to use for it, feel free. We can both ignore each others reasoning just fine, I'd imagine.

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Ah I think I see the confusion.

I was saying that there's nothing, within our current physics, that is not efficient than a matter/antimatter reaction. You get 100% of the energy. Whether or not it's useful energy is another question, and I'm doing some hand-waving around the topics of containment, manipulation, etc. However, nothing we know of is a more efficient use of matter to generate electricity. Not fission; not fusion; not radioactive decay. If we could wrap a black hole in a Dyson sphere and capture Hawking radiation, it'd still be less efficient than M/AM annihilation.

I was saying that - barring a magic technology such as capturing usable energy from quantum fluctuation, saying ST has a form of energy production that is a matter-based energy production that is more efficient than M/AM annihilation would violate our known laws of physics, because introducing a hydrogen atom to an anti-hydrogen atom is 100% efficient and costs nearly nothing to effect.

ST is full of magic technologies, and carrying around a bunch of AM as part of a way to play Mozart in the ready room is really dangerous, so - maybe they use it a bit, but they rely on more stable, less dangerous energy sources like dilithium. Anyway, trying to mix hard science and Star Trek is a dangerous endeavor. ST is more hard-sciency than the Space Wizards in Star Wars, but there's still a vast amount of speculation required to make things work.

data1701d (He/Him)

I think you give valid examples and make your point well.

However, another weird thought is perhaps we’re always slowly dying to some extent. For instance, you at age 7 is dead; today, yourself at age 7 cannot speak or act or think. For instance, in a situation where your young self may have tried to buy a toy, you have different wants and make different decisions - you cannot perfectly replicate what that past self would have wanted.

This might be true even of myself from five seconds ago - I hadn’t thought of a certain wording of this concept yet, and so might have worded it differently under different circumstances. This could be true even a millisecond ago, or a duration approaching either an instant or perhaps one cycle based on whatever the “clock rate” (if there is such a thing) or the human brain is.

However, to function, we need a convenient abstraction for what life and death are. I think my definition of life would be when one particular sum of experiences permanently terminates its (mostly) granular evolution.

Thomas and Will Riker both evolved from the same sum of experiences of the original William T Riker; since those sums of experience are still evolving, he is, within our convenient definition, alive.

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If you can convert mass into energy and vice versa, that takes care of your huge energy requirement right there. Just turn an apple into energy and you have your 50 Hiroshimas. This also solves the energy storage problem. Just stick it into matter until you need it.

Elise

AFAIK they're made from forcefields and photons, not matter and tractor beams. Or are tractor beams forcefields?

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Tractor beams and force fields are actually both supposed to be applications of graviton technology, so...kinda?

But no, I don't think that bit of the Technical Manual is very consistent with how we saw the holodecks actually being used.