The third entry of the new series of Star Trek Logs on Instagram, finds Vice Admiral Janeway (voiced by Kate Mulgrew) feeling nostalgic.
Admiral Janeway on the trail of Frex in the hunt for “rogue Protostar”
In the new log today, Admiral Janeway briefs the situation after episode 13 “All the World’s a Stage” with an update the hunt for the Protostar. The Dauntless is on the trail of Barniss Frex who escaped Relay Station CR-721 in episode 11, with her log revealing a bit more about his backstory. All this activity has Janeway reflecting back to the 2370s, which would be her time on the USS Voyager.
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A dig at Jean Luc?
Janeway signs off her log with “who can stand drinking tea from a replicator,” which is a nod to Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s famous replicator order, “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot” from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Playbill for the Enterprizians
Speaking of last week’s Prodigy episode, Paramount+ also released a fun mock Playbill for the play within the show.
These are the voyages of the season's runaway sensation! What classic Star Trek stories would you want to see retold on stage? #StarTrekProdigy pic.twitter.com/hzhKGUW30l
— Star Trek on Paramount+ (@StarTrekOnPPlus) November 15, 2022
Keep up with news about the Star Trek Universe at TrekMovie.com.
Who can stand drinking tea from a replicator, honestly?
Just a little foreshadowing that animated Jean Luc makes an appearance before too long?
Someone needs to convincingly explain to me why everyone in the 24th-25th century on Star Trek continuously replicates themselves using transporters, but then supposedly claim that a replicated perfect cup of tea is not identically as good as the original?
MAKES NO SENSE
The transporter takes an existing person or object and transports it to a remote location. The same person or object rematerializes to the new location. The replicator starts with nothing. It builds the object from raw source matter according to a preset algorithm/recipe. If the algorithm is imperfect, you get bad coffee.
I get the slight difference, but the replicator as I understand it, REPLICATES any item of normal matter based on a data file that includes every molecule from the original item (not an imperfect algorithm). So again, if your base file is the best cup of tea or coffee available, it will replicate that EXACTLY over and over.
You have a point. I guess it depends how exactly a replicator replicates… We won’t know for another 100 years or so…
The base file remains consistent. Our taste buds are another matter.
The differences go beyond that. Don’t forget, a transporter does not replicate. It transfers. It moves, it doesn’t create.
Tell that to Thomas Riker and William Boimler.
Exactly. There is a long standing debate too that the transporter does not move someone and that it creates a clone while killing the original.
Yeah I think it’s more likely if you think about it logically that it’s the same technology but they have both hardware and software restrictions to prevent the replication function on a transporter.
In fact this is kind of confirmed in SNW where M’Benga overruled those restrictions to permanently store his daughter as data in the ships computer. And if you can do that, you can replicate her, obviously.
Now we are getting into questions of the human soul. Lets say you do replicate his daughter. Her body. Her brain. Her synapses and brain patterns. Everything. Who says that “copy” will have that “spark of life” that the original had? I know Thomas Riker defies this but honestly I never agreed with that ep.
That is a different question, but yeah, that is disturbing.
The “spark of life” isn’t really something that is quantifiable. Bareil felt that he lost his when he had his brain replaced, but Picard and Spock both had their minds moved to new bodies and they were just as alive as ever.
I made the same point about Riker below in fact. But Riker was… Weird… Honesty I hate that ep because it not only defies Transporter rules, it defies the laws of physics altogether. Matter/energy should not be allowed to be created or destroyed and you shouldn’t be able to create someone out of thin air from no material.
Presumably the energy always comes from the ship, so more power was probably transferred to the transporter so that it could create two Rikers.
Explain M’Benga’s daughter then?
Not sure I know what you mean. What about her?
Stored indefinitely in the ship’s computer. So this shows there is a data file for her. Hence, ignoring any hardware software and regulatory restrictions, there should be no reason why you can’t replicate from that file.
So this sort of proves that the replicators and transporters are sister technologies.
She’s not stored in the ship’s computer – she’s stored in the medical transporter’s buffer.
While the writers can stretch the meaning of what a transporter buffer is or can do, it’s not the same thing as a digital memory buffer, like you would have an a hard drive.
The old TNG Technical Manual described the buffer as a magnetic bottle, physical holding tank for the matter stream, en route to and from the transporter pad, the emitter arrays, and the destination:
“This superconducting tokamak device delays transmission of the matter stream so that Doppler compensators can correct for relative motion between the emitter array and the target. A single pattern buffer is shared between each pair of transporter chambers. Operating rules require at least one additional pattern buffer to be available in the system for possible emergency shunting. In emergency situations, the pattern buffer is capable of holding the entire matter stream in suspension for periods approaching 420 seconds before degradation in pattern image occurs.”
This is why Scotty staying in the pattern buffer for decades was such a feat of engineering, because otherwise his pattern would have degraded in minutes.
In terms of computer power needed to store a single human being – knowing the exact position and quantum spin of every single particle in their body – it’s estimated as require 15 yottabytes of space (aka 1.5 × 10^31 bytes) – the current amount of data in every computer on earth right now is maybe one yottabyte.
Now, how M’Benga managed to keep his daughter in the pattern buffer for years is the writers making something up. Maybe medical transporters are designed to do this for emergency situations, or he hacked it somehow to constantly error-correct any pattern integrity issues?
There must be a difference between the replicator and the transporter from a story perspective, because otherwise you could simply replicate ( = make many copies of) people. Imagine the clone army from Star Wars, only instead of biologically growing clones of a soldier, you simply scan one soldier’s pattern and then make many copies. Or you could make a “backup copy” before sending anyone on a dangerous mission.
It has also been story point that you normally cannot store transporter patterns for an extended period of time. It took a miracle worker like Scotty to find a solution to that problem, and even for him it only worked for one of several people in the buffer.
Replicator patterns do not seem to have that problem unless anybody wants to suggest that there are actually crew members who regularly rescan a cup of tea into the replicator so that Jean-Luc can have his Earl Grey.
There are other indications that the replicator does not simply make an exact copy (down to the sub-atomic level) of an original item that was scanned: You can modify what you order, for example, you can specify a temperature or make something “extra sweet” or order your burger with or without french fries and so on. All of these would require changes to the stored pattern unless you’re suggesting that all of these variations have been scanned and saved separately in the replicator database.
“you could simply replicate ( = make many copies of) people” Thomas Riker says hi :-)
If there weren’t the obvious hardware, software and regulatory prohibitions, yeah you could. At least if you a accept the SNW M’Benga’s daughter storyline, which to me finally clarifies in canon how transporter technology and replicator technology are sister technologies.
Well, Thomas Riker was some unintended accident caused by some atmospheric interference.
I think the only real difference is that living patterns are too complex to store for long. In Our Man Bashir it took all of DS9’s processing power to store the neural energy of five people, and Scotty had to perform a miracle to store his own pattern for long.
That canon was obviously overwritten in SNW with M’Benga’s daughter being stored indefinitely in the ships computer without anyone in any other of the ship’s departments noticing it or any major energy drain.
Even then, he couldn’t store her indefinitely. He had to materialize her once a day or something.
He took her out of the transporter regularly. Since she wouldn’t notice any passage of time while being dematerialized that was either simply to make himself feel better or it was also to “refresh” her pattern regularly and prevent that “pattern degradation” that had usually prevented long-time transporter storage before.
My point was that this was 100+ years before DS9 and that there was not the extreme energy consumption issues with this procedure that they highlighted on that episode, nor should it have been a miracle for Scotty to figure this out since this was like 30+ years before he did this procedure.
As I commented in the other subthread…
“I think it’s more likely if you think about it logically that it’s the same technology but they have both hardware and software restrictions to prevent the replication function on a transporter. In fact this is kind of confirmed in SNW where M’Benga overruled those restrictions to permanently store his daughter as data in the ships computer. And if you can do that, you can replicate her, obviously.”
That being said I agree with you that it’s uncomfortable to the storylines for them to have to think through this issue logically, so they need it to be a grey area.
I still want to know why people just don’t make themselves younger using the transporter.
Weird header image. It looks like someone did a bad photoshop crop and now it looks like Janeway’s hair is clipping out of the scene?
She’s standing behind what looks like a beam on the ceiling, and this is obstructing the top of her head…
Low clearance?
Looks like, or big hair…
I think it’s the top of the replicator.