In TNG, Picard says that the Federation has evolved past a need for money. Indeed, we never see any.
In DS9 though, Quark talks a lot about bar tabs and costs. Surely OāBrien and Bashir donāt get free drinks, so how do they pay? Iād assume that any Ferengi worth his lobes wonāt accept anything that can be replicated, so do Federation officers get a stipend of tradeable āvalueā when interacting with cultures that still expect payment?
I think thereās also a reference to Quark paying rent to Sisko for running the bar. Presumably thatās denominated in latinum. I wonder where it goes? Maybe the secret āGarak black opsā fund.
@valek879
Look at all the gardening videos on YouTube. People love producing food. Even a rather small patch produces more of something than you can eat. (If you want to eat other things too)
The only thing non industrial local gardening wonāt you give is consistency. When certain produce is ripe there suddenly is a lot, and then not. They might solve this with people grade transporters.
@DharmaCurious
Whats the difference between a transporter and a replicator? Once youāve gotten the pattern of a tomato why canāt you just keep copying it? Presumably a human is too complicated to do that regularly but why not a tomato?
A transporter is a device which takes matter, shifts it into subspace, and can do some manipulation of that matter in the process, but canāt reconstruct it arbitrary. Once the transported object has been rematerialized, all the transporter has left is a record of what that matter was at a far lesser precision than what would be needed to replicate it.
A replicator is a transporter designed to shift inert matter into subspace and modify it extensively from that state. A typical replicator is less precise than a transporter and is simultaneously limited by the complexity of its recipes. It cannot produce functional living things, for example.
Transporters and replicators are frequently referred to as matter-energy conversion devices. This is technically true but somewhat deceptive. Itās also a common misconception that a transporter is an advanced replicator, instead of the other way round, but we know this isnāt true: a safe-for-humans Transporter was invented and used in the 22nd century, while the contemporary replicator equivalents were primitive protein resequencers.
Havenāt they had multiple episodes where something is in the ābufferā of the ship? What is the buffer? Why canāt you just copy the buffer and put whatever you want into it?
First off, itās clear that the metaphor the writers initially had in mind was a computer storing data. The TNG tech manual is just vague enough to be ambiguous on this point, but very heavily implies a āscan and save a pattern -> destroy the original -> rebuild from the patternā process. Terminology like āpattern bufferā no doubt comes out of that conception.
Itās also clear that by the end of 90s Trek at least some people with decision making power felt it was really important to explicitly shoot down a lot of the ākill and clone machineā theories about how transporters work, which is why Enterprise in particular is full of counter-evidence. Of course, TNG Realm of Fear was clearly not written by someone with ākill and cloneā in mind, and stands as another very strong bit of evidence against that theory. The conflicting intentions make things confusing, but they are not irreconcilable.
My preferred explanation is as follows: When they shift something into subspace, they still need to keep an accurate track of exactly where in subspace everything is (the āpatternā), in addition to preventing whatever extradimensional subspace interference whosamawhatsit from damaging the matter itself. (If youāre familiar with computer programming, the pattern is functionally a huge set of āpointersā, not pointing to a specific piece of computer memory, but a specific point within the non-euclidian topology of subspace.) This pattern is stored in the āpattern bufferā, a computer memory storage unit with an extremely high capacity but which only retains data for a limited time. The transporter then uses this pattern to find the dematerialized transportee in subspace and rematerialize them at the target coordinates, taking great care to ensure that all these trillions of pieces are moved to the correct locations in realspace. These steps can be (and often are) accelerated, with a person beginning to materialize at the target coordinates while still dematerializing on the transporter pad (see TNG Darmok for an example off the top of my head).
The reason you canāt just tell the transporter to make another copy of whatās in the buffer is that although you have a lot of information about whatever you just dematerialized, you only have one copy of the matter in the buffer. If you try to materialize another one youāll be trying to pull matter from subspace where none exists: the transporter equivalent of a Segmentation Fault, to use another computer science term. If you tried to use that pattern to convert an appropriate quantity of base matter into a copy of whatever was in the buffer, youāll still be missing any information about the transported material which canāt be gleamed exclusively from a mapping of where each piece was: you wonāt necessarily know exactly what every piece was, at a precision necessary to recreate it. Especially if the diffusion of material into subspace is sufficiently predictable that the pattern doesnāt need a pointer for every individual subatomic particle, but can capture a a cluster of particles with each one.
We know from the existence of ātransporter tracesā that the transport process does leave behind some persistent information about a person who was transported. We also know that it is possible for the transporter operator to identify and deactivate weapons mid-transport. It makes sense that a mapping of pointers could be extrapolated out to get a lot of data about the matter being transported (such as detailed information on a subjectās cellular makeup, or if thereās a device capable of discharging a dangerous amount of energy) while still falling far short of the data required to make an exact copy.
@Lem453 There are cargo transporters and people transporters. The people transporters are more faithful. The replicators are more like cargo transporters. See āHeisenberg Compensatorā https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Heisenberg_compensator
I mean, on a molecular level there is no difference. I feel like they even did the whole ship of Theseus thing several times. And the obvious one is the 2nd Riker. Enterprise (the series, not the ship) saw the addition of transporters to starships and they talked about it a lot in that episode. Bones in the original refused to use them because he understood the science of it and knew people were essentially being killed and reassembled every time they were transported.
I always got the impressions that people who said non-replicated food tasted better were either deluding themselves or that extra flavor they attribute to the food is like, non food things in it. Leftover dirt, mold starting to growā¦ Kind of like how completely filtered water is tasteless when the minerals and other fine particulates are removed. Transporters, as a side effect of how they work, remove illnesses from the body (Except when it needs to not for plot reasons. And donāt get me started on the billions of bacteria that exist in our body all the time that are necessary for life that wouldnāt count as āyouā). So presumably, they would remove all those tiny things in food if transported, and obviously wouldnāt create them in the first place if replicated.
Thatās something I hadnāt considered about replicated food. As a gardener, I can attest that the dirt itās grown in can have a pretty big impact on taste. It could be that.
Could also be, like, you order your replicated tomato, and theyāre giving you Tomato variety number 7, as is standard for replicators, and you just donāt care for that variety. Kinda like how banana candy doesnāt taste like bananas, because it actually tastes like a variety of banana you canāt get anymore, so no one thinks it tastes real anymore.
Doctor McCoy used the transporter very frequently with minimal complaining; the only complaint I can recall is from TMP and followed a horrific and unexpected transporter accident.
As for transporters in Enterprise, two things are especially noteworthy: one, they explicitly refuted the idea that the transporter creates a āsome sort of weird copyā of the person or object transported, and two, those human-safe transporters were contemporary with very primitive replicator equivalents called protein resequencers. Clearly transporters arenāt building humans atom-by-atom from data alone if they canāt figure out how to do more than resequence protein molecules in any other context.
Transporters donāt do anything to affect the matter they are transporting unless explicitly intended to: by the 24th century they are programmed to filter out recognizeable pathogens, and can be used to deactivate weapons or occasionally monkey with the genes of a person in mid-transport, but things routinely pass through the transporter without issue which are either totally unknown or explicitly non-replicatable. None of this makes sense if the sequence is scan -> destroy -> rebuild, but makes total sense if the transporter is shifting the transportee into subspace (with some tweaks to allow them to exist there) and then back out of subspace at the destination.
Thomas Riker (and now William Boimler) is the one big exception. Both occured under a very specific and extremely rare weather condition, and the first time this happened the Chief Engineer on the flagship of the Enterprise was shocked that such a thing was even possible. Iām much more inclined to believe that the ātransporter duplicatesā are actually the result of the phenomenon that duplicated Voyager in Deadlock, not the transporter actually constructing two people from the pattern and matter of only one.
Good point! Also, donāt they use stasis to keep food fresh for longer?