In the Star Trek universe, transporters work by taking a snapshot of a person at the molecular level, disassembling him or her and reassembling him or her elsewhere, correct? Why aren’t people in the Star Trek universe immortal?
If a person dies, all you’d have to do is find an old snapshot (I’ll get to this in a minute) and assemble the person as he or she was. This raises two primary concerns:
1.) Could you find and use old snapshots?
2.) Even if you could and did, you’d be assembling them as they were whenever that snapshot was taken. They would be losing the knowledge and memories they’ve acquired since then.
Both of these questions are answered by the same TNG episode. I can’t remember what it was called, but the plot revolved around a research center where perfect humans had been bred. These perfect humans had antibodies that actually left their bodies and killed shit in the environment. They had super antibodies, basically. They were immune to all disease. But there was a problem when their antibodies started killing people. A doctor on the ship (an older woman- not Crusher) was infected by these antibodies and seemed doomed to die. The crew solved this problem by finding an old transporter blueprint of her and cross-referencing that against her current snapshot. It transported her while filtering out the antibodies, which hadn’t been in the older picture of her.
So…
1.) Clearly it’s possible to use these old snapshots.
2.) It’s possible to make changes to these blueprints.
So a person could be transported and all the effects of aging filtered out. They would do this every few years and remain young forever. There would be no more disease. Poisons would be useless. A person could die on the far side of the universe and you could simply reboot an old copy of him or her.
Is this ever brought up in the series?
I use “snapshot” and “blueprint” for want of better terms.
If trabsporters and replicators could be used inordinately and many times over and all the data needed to record a person could be recorded, the effects upon every stage of human civilization and culture would be immensely changed. Scarcity would no longer be a problem, because gold, diamonds, rare chemicals and drugs, gold-pressed latinum, etc. could be duplicated as many times as you want. You could, indeed, record and reconstitute people --at least up to the last time they were transported. Not only could you reduplicate them, you could make plenty of copies. This isn’t immortality, though – you keep creating people fromn a former stage in their lives, sans all the memories since. You could live for a thousand years, but each “you” would be limited to whatever the lifetime of a person was.
The idea has been raised in SF plenty of times (Have a look at George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral sometime. That was back in the 1940s). I suspect they didn’t use most of this in the Star Trek universe (and created doublespeak explanations) because they want to have a series of dramas in something that pretty closely resembles our own world. If we set it in a world with a wealth of transporter/replicator capability, people would be concerned about scarcity of time and the death of the unrecorded portions of their lives, and suchlike. They’d see things a lot differently.
IIRC, the information went into the same drawer as the Doctor’s human mother – something that never really happened and you can’t say it had.
In the case of ST, they realized that it was too much of a deus ex machina (The captain were killed on the mission? Rustle up another one!). They didn’t want to deal with the can of worms they opened, so they ignored it.
Well the biggest problem I gather is storage. There was a DS9 episode where a transporter accident forced them to store the patterns of 5 people in the stations computer memory long term. It took a good percentage just to store their bodies.
Interestingly from that episode transporters store much higher resolution data for matter inside the brain. The human brain having analog computing features it makes sense you’d want a much higher sample there.
Further I submit once storage issues where solved they did start using immortality technology. That’d explain “crewmen” Danials surviving his own death.
I think the problem was in explaining the transporters in that way. The way they actually act, it seems more like, when they energize, the person still remains completely put together, and it literally moved from place to place, through “subspace” or something.
It gets rid of all these transporter headaches–including the one where you are technically killing the person every time you transport, but creating a copy. The only thing it leaves is how you can split between good and evil versions of yourself.
It’s not Star Trek, but Wil McCarthy has a great collection of sci-fi books in which one key piece of technology is a ‘fax.’ He explores the implications of transporter like technology that can create multiple instances of a person, filter out certain undesirable characteristics, etc. Very fun reads, and a nice treatment of the questions raised by the OP.
But as mentioned in my OP, they have demonstrated in the series the ability to mix old and new blueprints. So it would seem, given that, it would be possible for me to take a blueprint of CalMeacham from ten years ago and a blueprint of CalMeacham from right now and mix the two so that you have your brain from today and your body from a decade ago- they do that but with the immune system in the show.
They kinda explored this in the episode Relics. I don’t remember details, but they might have technobabbled the reasons why this isn’t universally used.
ISTR in the episode in question, they used a sample of Dr. Pulaski’s DNA (I believe from a hair follicle) as a guide, but the transporter itself didn’t have the information needed do the filtering.
When I was in graduate school, I thought I would be able to build a transporter. When you have a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Scan, every electron in your body reverses it’s spin. That means it stops spinning, at which point it has no momentum and begins spinning in the opposite direction. If there is no momentum, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is not violated.
Of course, electrons aren’t really spinning, that is just a name for an attribute.
On a related note, there was that episode of TNG with commander Riker’s double found on that deserted planet. So, we can infer that they could have cloned an army to do battle with the Jem Ha’adar in DS9, but were simply so puritanical in their adherence to the Prime Directive that they simply chose not to.
There was also the episode of DS9 where the Sisko, O’Brien and Jadzia Dax were inexplicably saved from a transporter malfunction when their consciousness was placed inside of a holosuite. So you could, in (Star Trek) theory, save someone’s memory engrams, clone them in a transporter, and just fix them up ship shape. Or so I suspect.
Charles Stross also does this in Glasshouse, with the additional wrinkle that you can reconstitute your body any way you want while keeping your mind intact (from switching genders to going for biological prosthetics), and exploring what happens if someone can hack your stored data backup.
