I never understood how transporters are not basically used as quicksave devices. Redshirt died on the planet after beaming down? Just create another copy from the transporter puffer. Tuvix deserves to live. Sure, just recreate tuvok and Neelix from the transporter puffer.
Edit: “Transporter puffer” may come from me watching the German dub
Transporters become horrifying when you think of them as something obliterating all your molecules then recreating them somewhere else. The thing that comes out the other side has all your memories and personality and looks the same… but you 100% died when you got vaporized in the teleport.
I would never do it.
Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called “moral value” of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements.
CEO Nwabudike Morgan, “The Ethics of Greed”
It’s my head-canon conspiracy theory that the true workings of the transporter are hidden/obfuscated, even from the technicians and engineers, to avoid the existential dread of facing the truth: you die, and then it clones you.
All these systems to make it appear as if it’s a single, consistent matter stream, to leave room for the possibility of a consistent consciousness or even soul. It all falls apart in light of William Riker. You can’t duplicate matter. The only feasible explanation is that they got his scan, and successfully materialized him, but the signal that would have disintegrated the original failed.
Tuvix died because people couldn’t accept how many times they had technically killed their colleagues, or commited suicide.
When you’re advanced enough to let go of concepts like having a soul, the idea of having your being destroyed and remade elsewhere becomes a lot let problematic. What’s the difference between being anesthetized and revived VS transported?
Shit, for all we know the universe just started five minutes ago and all of history is just a collective delusion. Just go with the flow and stop worrying about existential problems. One day you’ll die forever and that’s OK.
Spock had a soul and that is canon. His soul (or whatever it was that made Spock more than the sum of his sexy, sexy green parts) was so important to his friends they quit their jobs, stole their own ship, crashed her, stole another one then got Spock’s soul out of valet parking just in time by THISMUCHSECONDS before it (or he) got lost forever.
TLDR: souls are a thing for Vulcans, why not everybody else? Vulcans haven’t advanced beyond the concept at all.
Sure, but different writers treat it differently. What about the one episode with Broccoli, where we get a first person view of being in the transporter, and he clearly has a continuous consciousness throughout the experience.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realm_of_Fear
Based on this episode, you aren’t killed and recreated.
IIRC, it is explained (kinda) that the personal viewpoint of being solid within the matter stream isn’t entirely real. Wishywashy, but how do you show that on a screen, really?
To the bigger issue above, the function of the transporter is that the pattern buffer isn’t “storage” such that you cannot query against the buffer as if it’s data in memory where individual particles can be pinpointed. (Obv this is not necessarily canon and some episodes poke holes in the idea).
I’ve always imagined it more like a mound of dirt dumped onto a conveyor in FIFO order, sending it up the beam, then rolling in order into the pattern buffer. The buffer is just holding all the matter in a continuous conveyor in the original order so it can be reassembled on the pad. Outright saving a pattern to memory where every particle location, energy state, etc. would take basically all the memory everywhere (TNG: Lonely Among Us). Weapon and bacteria/virus patterns could be simple enough to detect within the buffer to knock those bits out as the “dirt” rolls around continuously.
And of course the longer you roll a bunch of dirt down a conveyor, the positions of particles shift out of their original position until eventually there’s not enough of the original pattern to reassemble properly.
My headcanon for Scotty locking the buffer into a diagnostic loop means additional scrutiny in the system’s pattern scanning which then keeps “knocking” bits back into place they were in the prior ‘pass’ down the conveyor in order to continue calibrating scanners.
Don’t look at me like I’m crazy, it totally makes sense!!!¡!!!¡!!! *cough
The cannon answer is that it doesn’t work that way, it coverts you to energy and that energy is turned back into you so “nothing changes”. In cannon it doesn’t kill you and assemble a new copy, and you can’t duplicate a person because you only have one copy of their energy.
Accidents like Thomas Riker are not supposed to be possible and only happen when they encounter strange energies which cause reactions that aren’t understood, so they can’t just make duplicates on demand.
The transporter doesn’t work this way
Sometimes it does but that doesn’t count because it’s not supposed to work this way
Just ignore it
Your soul is already lost to the warp.
I’m pretty sure even in Voyager there was an incident where someone got stuck in the transporter puffer/cache/whatever it’s called in the og
Off hand I actually can’t think of any, aside from as close as Tuvix got.
There was the episode where the population of Neelix’s home planet were revealed to be in some kind of particle limbo from a Star Trekium powered super weapon and a scientist was trying, unsuccessfully to restore them.
They don’t create matter, they create an energy matter stream that moves the person molecule by molecule. How it happens is scifi magic, but it’s not the same as creating new atoms, which would require every replicator to have the energy to obliterate a planet.
Replicators can make more than enough food to feed the ship.
Why not use some of those atoms to reconstruct victims of unfortunate accidents? If there’s not enough, why not pack enough?
No, they explicitly are written to a buffer of sorts and only when they were read completely are they reintegrated. That means you could easily just create two from the data and it would only use more energy.
Transporters were created to save money on the original series and have butt fucking plot holes ever since.
Bye dear Stamets, it’s been lovely knowing ya! /s
Janeway made the right call, no one wanted that Tuvix weirdo around, that’s why no one came to his defense.
It’s okay to murder people who are unpopular.
The gigachad viewpoint has arrived.
Tuvix was 50% Neelix which qualifies him for the death penalty. The real travesty is that Neelix was allowed to exist afterwards. /s
Janeway made the right call, Tuvok and Neelix had their own lives and families and they could be saved. Tuvok was also a majorly important member of the crew and his skills could easily have been instrumental to their salvation.
It was a total mess of a situation with no 100% morally correct solution. I think she did the closest to the right thing though.
Related…I don’t understand the hate this episode gets. Treck is at its Treckiest when it’s weird future moral dilemmas.
People argue about it instantly decades later. That proves it was effective.
It’s clear to me that if a sentient crewmate says “please don’t kill me” you should not murder them, no matter how grief stricken you are.
Tuvok and Neelix were dead.
(I do like this episode)
They were not dead in any way, that is like a major issue if the episode.
There being a method of resurrection doesn’t make a person any less dead. They were dead, but Janeway the necromancer knew how to bring them back to life. All it took was a sacrifice.
I think tuvix was asking for it. Remember that time he swapped out Janeway’s bra for a slightly smaller one. And it irritated her to the point she committed genocide on the breegans. He knew what was coming.
