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.
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.