no man, that would mean it’s William Riker’s birthday too. Thomas’ birthday is the same as Wills , it doesn’t matter how many times they died and got “revived” by teleportation.
Yes, the current theory on how transporters would work in the real world is duplication and digitization, but in Star Trek it is a literal matter transference. Transporter signals and confinement beams act like radio waves, they can only go so far and through so much before they fall off, and whatever matter got disassembled at point A is what gets sent out and reassembled at point B.
…At least until the transporter chief does something unorthodox like making a second confinement beam around the first to prevent matter leakage, only to have that second beam be unnecessary AND get mirrored back to point A where it used ambient particles to build an effectively complete duplicate of the person being transported without the knowledge of that person or the ship doing the transporting in the first place.
Thomas Riker was given the same memories of William Riker, but he didn’t exist before that incident.
Okay but whatever matter materialized as Thomas Riker wasn’t sucked up from the planet by the transporter. The beam is just information. Everything transported gets assembled from new matter - or plasma or whatever - which means they could deliberately replicate as many Rikers as they wanted to. Or brilliant scientists, philosophers, redshirts, etc. To duck this reasoning they decided to make it a moral issue, like they did with cloning and genetic enhancement in Strange New Worlds.
The transporter is a great example of sci fi tech that isn’t fleshed out and applied in ways that would be obvious if it were real. That happens a lot when something is invented for production reasons - in this case to avoid shooting too many shuttle takeoffs and landings.
I disagree that the transporter is creating matter. Didn’t Gene himself go to the trouble to say that transporters and replicators are not the same tech (even if they share a lot of the same principles of operation)?
If a transporter was creating people, it would have to also be an industrial replicator, tech that didn’t exist during Kirk or Archer’s day. It would also mean that replicators can create (complex) life, which is repeatedly said to be impossible. The episode Ship In a Bottle had to trick Moriarty into thinking it was possible to beam him and his partner off the holodeck and into the real world, because it wasn’t possible by any stretch of the imagination.
Thomas Riker is a miracle. The rogue transporter confinement beam and the accidentally duplicated pattern signal should have failed every step of the way but somehow didn’t. AND it miraculously acquired the necessary matter to resolve the signal into a living person. The matter belonging to William Riker proper made it back to the Potemkin. Who knows, maybe neither of them are pure. Maybe William is 1% planetary dust and Thomas is 1% William.
I’m sure Starfleet R&D ogled over Picard’s report to Starfleet Command for a long time. But I think the fact that the Moriarty program was still just a hologram in a lab at the turn of the 25th century suggests they couldn’t find a way to replicate that accident.
mirrored back to point A where it used ambient particles…
I always wondered about that. Where do all the extra atoms come from?? Most rooms don’t have ~80 kg of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen lying around. (Yes, some of those are in the air, but nowhere near enough.)
Unless, by coincidence, Thomas was beamed into existence next to a walk-in freezer full of meat.
Per this Wikipedia article, the average human is about 65% oxygen, 19% carbon, and I’m going to ignore the rest.
Per Wolfram Alpha, a typical cubic meter of air has 270 grams oxygen and 160 grams carbon. Comparing to the ratios above, oxygen is the limiting factor.
One Riker (80 kg) requires all the oxygen from (80 kg x 65%) ÷ 0.27 kg/m^3 = 192 m^3 of air. So if you beam Thomas Riker into a very large living room (8 x 8 x 3 = 192 m^3), it would have enough atoms to build his body, but then he’d asphyxiate because all the oxygen was used up. That said, a tennis court (~800 m^3) would be sufficient.
Yes, but that kind of subjective comparison doesn’t work when you do a little math. The density of air at 1 atmosphere is about 1.2 kg/m3. According to Jonathan Frakes he weighed about 90kg when they shot TNG, so assembling Riker would require about 17 cubic meters of air - about how much is in a 16x16-ft room with a 10-ft ceiling - which is about the size of the transporter room. And that would use ALL the air in the room, i.e. making the room a vacuum, which doesn’t happen.
And that’s just for one guy, not a whole landing party. Of course the air could be supplied through vents - but it would have to rush in like a hurricane, which doesn’t happen, and this doesn’t cover how people beam into places that aren’t equipped like that.
On the flip side, we know people’s atoms don’t turn into air when they beam away, because there’s no violent outward whoosh from where they were standing. The effect would be as if they asploded.
Seems to me the transporter would have to operate on principles that just aren’t known to us right now. Maybe the fabric of spacetime itself can somehow spawn and absorb matter, enabling a person’s atoms to appear seemingly out of nothing when when they materialize - as well as local air disappearing to get out of their away. Vice versa when the person dematerializes. In fact instead of just information being beamed up, maybe the person’s actual atoms are transported through a special spacetime medium, not just radio waves. The idea of sending your original atoms might clear up the philosophical/moral dilemma about whether the transporter kills you.
But then where did Tom Riker come from? I dunno, maybe the transporter glitch forked Will through the spacetimes of two separate multiverses, and both of them got reassembled in our universe? Or maybe it wasn’t technically a transporter glitch but a weird wrinkle in spacetime, where it folded onto itself and he got sent through both folds.
It probably all came from the distortion field around the planet that caused the issues in the first place. It was strong enough to disrupt a transporter beam, so it might have been made up of physical matter swirling around in the upper atmosphere.
Having the beam reflected back to the surface took with it enough junk for the transporter signal to repurpose into a new Riker. :P
We’ll say that’s the reason Thomas acted a little cockeyed compared to William.
no man, that would mean it’s William Riker’s birthday too. Thomas’ birthday is the same as Wills , it doesn’t matter how many times they died and got “revived” by teleportation.
Yes, the current theory on how transporters would work in the real world is duplication and digitization, but in Star Trek it is a literal matter transference. Transporter signals and confinement beams act like radio waves, they can only go so far and through so much before they fall off, and whatever matter got disassembled at point A is what gets sent out and reassembled at point B.
…At least until the transporter chief does something unorthodox like making a second confinement beam around the first to prevent matter leakage, only to have that second beam be unnecessary AND get mirrored back to point A where it used ambient particles to build an effectively complete duplicate of the person being transported without the knowledge of that person or the ship doing the transporting in the first place.
Thomas Riker was given the same memories of William Riker, but he didn’t exist before that incident.
Okay but whatever matter materialized as Thomas Riker wasn’t sucked up from the planet by the transporter. The beam is just information. Everything transported gets assembled from new matter - or plasma or whatever - which means they could deliberately replicate as many Rikers as they wanted to. Or brilliant scientists, philosophers, redshirts, etc. To duck this reasoning they decided to make it a moral issue, like they did with cloning and genetic enhancement in Strange New Worlds.
The transporter is a great example of sci fi tech that isn’t fleshed out and applied in ways that would be obvious if it were real. That happens a lot when something is invented for production reasons - in this case to avoid shooting too many shuttle takeoffs and landings.
I disagree that the transporter is creating matter. Didn’t Gene himself go to the trouble to say that transporters and replicators are not the same tech (even if they share a lot of the same principles of operation)?
If a transporter was creating people, it would have to also be an industrial replicator, tech that didn’t exist during Kirk or Archer’s day. It would also mean that replicators can create (complex) life, which is repeatedly said to be impossible. The episode Ship In a Bottle had to trick Moriarty into thinking it was possible to beam him and his partner off the holodeck and into the real world, because it wasn’t possible by any stretch of the imagination.
Thomas Riker is a miracle. The rogue transporter confinement beam and the accidentally duplicated pattern signal should have failed every step of the way but somehow didn’t. AND it miraculously acquired the necessary matter to resolve the signal into a living person. The matter belonging to William Riker proper made it back to the Potemkin. Who knows, maybe neither of them are pure. Maybe William is 1% planetary dust and Thomas is 1% William.
I’m sure Starfleet R&D ogled over Picard’s report to Starfleet Command for a long time. But I think the fact that the Moriarty program was still just a hologram in a lab at the turn of the 25th century suggests they couldn’t find a way to replicate that accident.
Now this is some quality nerding.
I always wondered about that. Where do all the extra atoms come from?? Most rooms don’t have ~80 kg of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen lying around. (Yes, some of those are in the air, but nowhere near enough.)
Unless, by coincidence, Thomas was beamed into existence next to a walk-in freezer full of meat.
Inb4 Star Trek / Delicious in Dungeon crossover.
Air is more stuff than you would think. If you were able to isolate a cylinder of air around the Eiffel Tower the air would weigh more than the tower.
Okay, now I have to actually do the math.
Per this Wikipedia article, the average human is about 65% oxygen, 19% carbon, and I’m going to ignore the rest.
Per Wolfram Alpha, a typical cubic meter of air has 270 grams oxygen and 160 grams carbon. Comparing to the ratios above, oxygen is the limiting factor.
One Riker (80 kg) requires all the oxygen from (80 kg x 65%) ÷ 0.27 kg/m^3 = 192 m^3 of air. So if you beam Thomas Riker into a very large living room (8 x 8 x 3 = 192 m^3), it would have enough atoms to build his body, but then he’d asphyxiate because all the oxygen was used up. That said, a tennis court (~800 m^3) would be sufficient.
‘Riker’ is officially a unit of measurement now.
Yes, but that kind of subjective comparison doesn’t work when you do a little math. The density of air at 1 atmosphere is about 1.2 kg/m3. According to Jonathan Frakes he weighed about 90kg when they shot TNG, so assembling Riker would require about 17 cubic meters of air - about how much is in a 16x16-ft room with a 10-ft ceiling - which is about the size of the transporter room. And that would use ALL the air in the room, i.e. making the room a vacuum, which doesn’t happen.
And that’s just for one guy, not a whole landing party. Of course the air could be supplied through vents - but it would have to rush in like a hurricane, which doesn’t happen, and this doesn’t cover how people beam into places that aren’t equipped like that.
On the flip side, we know people’s atoms don’t turn into air when they beam away, because there’s no violent outward whoosh from where they were standing. The effect would be as if they asploded.
Seems to me the transporter would have to operate on principles that just aren’t known to us right now. Maybe the fabric of spacetime itself can somehow spawn and absorb matter, enabling a person’s atoms to appear seemingly out of nothing when when they materialize - as well as local air disappearing to get out of their away. Vice versa when the person dematerializes. In fact instead of just information being beamed up, maybe the person’s actual atoms are transported through a special spacetime medium, not just radio waves. The idea of sending your original atoms might clear up the philosophical/moral dilemma about whether the transporter kills you.
But then where did Tom Riker come from? I dunno, maybe the transporter glitch forked Will through the spacetimes of two separate multiverses, and both of them got reassembled in our universe? Or maybe it wasn’t technically a transporter glitch but a weird wrinkle in spacetime, where it folded onto itself and he got sent through both folds.
I love speculating about this stuff!
It probably all came from the distortion field around the planet that caused the issues in the first place. It was strong enough to disrupt a transporter beam, so it might have been made up of physical matter swirling around in the upper atmosphere.
Having the beam reflected back to the surface took with it enough junk for the transporter signal to repurpose into a new Riker. :P
We’ll say that’s the reason Thomas acted a little cockeyed compared to William.
Isn’t that essentially what Neelix’s cooking was?
Finally we learn the terrible truth behind “leola root”. 😸