did anybody else notice that in the very earliest episodes of the original Star Trek, every actor had to stand in a certain location to get beamed back up?
It’s been decades, but I remember saying to myself, “boy, that looks silly”.
When 5 people beamed down, they all stood at equal distances from each other on their little round platforms in the transporter room.
And when they were beamed back up, they stepped into the same formation-- standing on the ground in the same order and at exactly the right distances between them, so they returned to the same platforms in the transporter room.
I think that only lasted for a couple episodes. But I really don’t remember.
I’ve always been bothered by: Why the fuck do they even need a transporter room or pad more specifically in the first place?
Also, about 70% of the times they beam down to the planet; they have to walk a hundred miles to get to where they want! Why not just beam them to where they need to go in the first place. :dubious:
Absolutely… he said, sheepishly. All lyrics are from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1982) by Douglas N. Adams (as he described himself: the other DNA that appeared in Cambridge in 1952).
[FanWank]It’s easier to find your target, as it were, with a transporter pad. I remember that intership beaming was dangerous in Kirk’s day. It is also probably less disorienting for those being transported if they stand in relation to each other as they will be on the pad.
I can see Spock and Kirk switching places at the last moment, though, to piss off McCoy. “SPOCK! JIM!” “Doctor, you have urinated on your trousers.”[/FanWank]
Localised ion storms in the upper atmosphere, beta-tachyon emissions from a large mineral deposit near the target site, Quantum resonances in the…whatever, planetary defence shields, all sorts of reasons.
God damn, you are my hero.
I see it as the same technology used to wash the clothing on the Enterprise. Seriously. The way they wash the clothing is that it is put into a device that removes everything that is not in the original imprint, then re-creates it anew.
Of course, if that logic was properly adhered to, in the worlds of Star Trek, disease would be nonexistant since if somoene got sick, you could beam them out and back and create a version of themselves without the disease.
From any technical standpoint, a matter transporter of the Star Trek variety is so much garbage. When they’ve disintegrated a substantial portion of the crewman, how does the rest of him not just splatter on the floor in a puddle of protoplasm and skeletal residue? How do you rebuild an entire body, one atom at a time, at great range and differential velocity without Doppler shift or interference screwing up your signal? How do you keep from rematerializing your crewman with a bunch of extra air–or worse, in the case of the rare non-“M class” planet with a toxic atmosphere–embedded in him? Oh, sure, you can invoke “force fields” and “subspace transmissions” but that just brings a whole new layer of bullshititude into the rationale. Trek is pure space opera, written by people who have only the faintest grasp of science, and at best a vehicle for interesting allegorical concepts.
My answer to the O.P.–assuming the process works as advertized, and kinetic energy is somehow compensated by the system–is that you’d feel yourself fainting from low blood pressure and/or disappearing neural connections, pass out, and then re-awaken on the planet feeling slightly drained (like a whole-body bruise) with no memory of the process. Do this enough times and I think your head would be scrambled, with attendent memory and functional problems. In the long run, small but systemic mistakes in gene coding during transport will result in high rates of cancer and nervous system disorders. Mr. Scott, I’ll remain here on the surface and face down the Furious Decapitator Beast of Rula Delta IV. At least I have some chance at remaining in few enough pieces to put back together for the funeral.
The shuttlecraft don’t seem to be that hot, either; they seem to have a worse record of catastrophic accidents than the Ford Pinto. Personally, I think it’s due to the obviously technophobic attitude of humanity in the 24th Century; it’s like the whole show is a big Apple Switch campaign: *When I used to command a Klingon Bird-of-Prey, there were all these levers and buttons and you had to do math and stuff to ‘lay in a course’. It was sooo confusing. [waves hands around] Who wants to spend your duty shift doing trigonometry and uploading course corrections? But with Federation vessels, you just point it where you want to go, hit a single button, and there you are! My name is Capt. Janie Porche, and I saved the galaxy!*The computer is clearly capable of doing anything that doesn’t actually require climbing down a Jeffries tube (and it should be able to do that except for the inexplicable dearth of semi-autonomous robots and remote probes) and yet, they have to crew an entire star ship with hundreds of delicate organic mechanisms with very limited processing power using a slow and crude electronic-to-optical-to-tactile-to-electronic interface. Heck, even when they have the ideal crew replacement andriod, they disable his Bluetooth/WiMAX functionality in favor of the same crude interface and communication systems everybody else has to use, presumably in some futile effort to make everyone exactly equal. What’s the deal with that?
Hey, that’s no problem. You just have to find some way to make the Alcubierre Drive a reality. Oh, and you’ll need a really massive energy source–probably something like a medium sized star–and a way to produce gross quantities of exotic, negative energy density matter. This is an almost trivial feat compared to rendering a body atom for atom and reproducing it to immeasurable exactitude thousands of miles away.
We’d ask the baboon, but he’s inside-out. Literally.
Speaking of which, according to Seth Brundle, it feels like a hiccup.
Of the Star Trek style transporter, I’d think the atmospheric pressure differential would blow out their ear drums and give them the bends most of the time. They’d be writhing in pain too much to care about the cool cross-fade effect.
I LOVE that story. Sometimes I fantasize about the horror of being trapped for billions upon billions of years in blackness with just my own unblinking consciousness. ::shivers::
Season 7
138. Think Like A Dinosaur
Original airdate: June 15, 2001
Based on a short story by: James Patrick Kelly
Written by: Mark Stern
Directed by: Jorge Montesi
Guest stars: Enrico Colantoni, Linnea Sharples, David Lewis
Featuring: Peter Grier, Scott McNeil
Synopsis: One human is the only permanent occupant of a station located on a vast empty plain of the moon. His companions are an emotionless lizard-like alien species who have developed a highly advanced means of long distance travel by ‘jumping’ through space.
The machine that did the transporting was supposed to destroy the original body upon receiving a confirmation that the data had arrived properly. But there was a technical glitch which resulted in there being no confirmation, so the body wasn’t eliminated. Eventually, they found out that the transmission did indeed go through - so that there were now 2 of this person. The aliens were very insistent that the original be eliminated, so they forced their human liason to kill the original.
Haven’t they done this once or twice… and then forgot about it?
I think Stephen King described it as “an eternity of white” or something along those lines. Of course in Star Trek it would necessarily be sparkling white. However, there’s a little-known transporter subroutine that erases the by-then-totally-insane consciousness during rematerialization and replaces it with a copy of the original, so it’s all good.
I remember being strangely perplexed by the bit in the (first? second?) movie where the actors carried on their conversation during transport, and the way that their voices got all tinny and such. Of course it makes exactly as much sense that you could be transported while clog-dancing or whatever, but I’d been subconsciously trained by the series to accept that transport would fail catastrophically if you weren’t holding perfectly still with your feet firmly planted. And what was with that weirdly blobby transporter effect in the first movie? That was just so wrong.
After much consideration of this topic as a child, I decided that being transported would probably look like a double-exposed photo, with the sparkle effect also INSIDE your eyeballs, like the phosphene effects of a migraine headache. Some may argue that the one TNG episode disproved this theory, but that was from the perspective of Dwight Schultz’ character, and I submit that his perceptions may not be representative of most organisms’.
Also, being transported leaves a metallic aftertaste, like putting your tongue on a battery.
Actually, IIRC, it’s not QUITE that easy. (For one thing, with a person’s pattern, you can’t eliminate all changes from the original pattern, because that would mean the person hasn’t grown or retained any memories since then, and it’s impossible to nail down a living intelligent person to an old pattern even then, because the Heisenberg compensators generally would get overloaded.)
But they do have ‘biofilters’ - software routines to look for hostile bacteria, viri, and other disease agents in a transporter pattern and excise them. Biofilters have indeed been used for non-transportation medical reasons.
The problem with them, though, is that there are some syndromes that are hard to recognize because they disguise themselves as part of the host body, down to the genetic level.
I always wondered why if they beam an away team to the surface of some planet and the guy in the red shirt gets killed, why don’t they just reassemble him from a pattern that any good techie would keep on record for just such emergencies? Really, if you can put someone into a pattern buffer you can save him onto the hard drive for later retrieval.
