Or where does their poop and pee go? I assume just turned into molecules for the replicators? What about the skin oils and dead skin cells and hair the sonic showers er blast off them?
:eek:
The second horrifying ST realization, behind that transporter existentialist horror.
Presumably yes, just the same as the rest of us…
DS9 had several oblique references to “waste reclamation” which probably means poop processing. It is assumed that a replicator can use any matter as feedstock and hey, free matter! For what it is worth, the transporter’s biofilter is probably a very crucial part of this process.
Donovan Leitch explained it all, way back in 1973:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjtqfsm9Vk4
Well…
Water systems and use of feces as fertilizer aside, it is a hell of a lot more INDIRECT than using a replicator to turn urine into earl grey hot.
So what was Nog? doing in all those episodes where he got a job on waste disposal on DS9? It didn’t have the advanced de-molecularizing function?
In one episode Trip Tucker explains to school kids that yes, everything on board is re-used over and over.
I watched an ep of TNG the other day, (best of both worlds i think) and Picard was standing in front of his office replicator, ordering his usual ‘tea, earl grey, hot’ when the door bell went, and Picard said ‘Come!’.
Note to self, be very careful with your use of language when standing in front of a replicator
Many of the so called technical manuals I’d read (I admit they may not be canon) do mention that everything is recycled. For some reason, it seems food scraps and solid waste a used as replicator feed. Also, the ship carries tanks of some sort of “nutrient matter” – it has a perfect mix of carbohydrates, proteins, minerals, vitamins, and other organic sources. That is fed into the replicator circuits, so it only has to rearrange “some” molecules, to get usable, tasty, food. Which just adds further questions – are the Earl Grey tea, the chocolate mouse, and the replicated gagh instead providing complete nutrition, just with the taste, consistency and appearance of the required food? When they make a roasted chicken, they also replicate the bones, in position, just to throe them away, to be re-replicated. Or sometimes made into milk? Or do some species hang around after human dinner and go, “You gonna finish that?” “The bones, no Lt., be my guest” “Thanks CRUNCH” Various times on the show, the crew complains, they want food that’s not good for them. And we hear the computer say – that’s not what I do.
On one of the DS9 episodes Molly would rather play than sit through another tense O’Brien-Keiko dinner conversions, and asks to be excused (and wouldn’t we all). Keiko tells her to “place her plate in the replicator.” – the task must be equivalent to washing dishes, for their technology level. Presumably, they will dematerialize the contents – scraps, bones, spare sauce and Molly’s saliva into the food vat, plasticware and cutlery into some other matter stream for other use. Or is it all the same? So are the dishes edible and nutritious, just not palatable. What about Naomi Wildman, her father seemed to be of the spectacularly “box-necked armor plated species” – could she crunch up a plate? Would it be worthwhile to have made plates nutritious for those people who like to chew up one when no one’s around who minds the noise?
They also recycle the ship’s vermin.
Atoms is atoms. At least some of the ones in your body were likely in some part of an animal, their feces, their vomit, etc at some point in the lifespan of the Earth. Get over it. You cannot “contaminate” a carbon atom.
You all do understand that your waste products are also recycled into simple compounds which are broken down by bacteria and fungi and used by plants to build their structure and nutients (carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids), ultimately to be consumed either directly or as part of a food chain as some food animal such as chicken, cow, or fish. The Star Trek way is probably more sanitary (microbes are no doubt broken up to component molecules along with inert waste) albeit less interesting.
Stranger
Seems to me that with replicator and transporter-type technology, waste reclamation would be a lot easier and more sanitary than in the present day.
Nowadays you have to filter/distill the water out of the sewage, and then find something to do with what’s left over- usually digest it with microbes and eventually use it as fertilizer for plants.
They’d be able to just directly rearrange the atoms and molecules into whatever they want; although I imagine, with certain limitations. There’s no reason they couldn’t take a tank of sewage and rearrange it into whatever they wanted, provided the proper mix of elements was present, or with minor additions.
“Some”? More like “all.” As in “all of the above.” 
IIRC from the TNG tech manual (which is official but not fully canon, so between that and the fact I have no idea where my copy is to confirm my recollection, take the following with a huge grain of salt), it’s broken down even further than that - it’s reduced to fundamental particles, then reconstituted as an undifferentiated mass of matter…then when the replicator is used the process is reversed and the undifferentiated mass of matter becomes whatever atoms are needed.
As Joni said:
*
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.*
In short, we’re all full of shit.
I’ve always assumed everything gets perfectly recycled, and rather like the idea. I suppose kosher keeping Jews might have lots of debates over what molecules end up in their replicated food.
That’s funny!
IANAJ, but unless the feedstock started out as pork or eels or whatever, wouldn’t anything out of a replicator by definition be kosher, since it’s not actually ham or eels or whatever other unkosher thing it’s been cobbled up by the replicator to be?
Or do the kosher laws use the “if it looks like bacon, smells like bacon and tastes like bacon, it must be bacon” rationale?
Maybe the captain only eats virgin molecules, but it gets worse as you go down the chain of command.
So, they can turn poop into Schroedinger’s cat food?
I remember Keiko O’Brian getting freaked out that her husband’s mother used to cook with actual meat, rather than replicated meat.