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The transporter has a failsafe to replace missing atoms or molecules that didn’t make the trip by pulling from reserves. It got a lock, attempted transport, then got an error saying 7x10^27 atoms didn’t make it and replaced them, leaving the original Riker on the planet and constructing an entirely new Riker on the Potemkin’s transporter pad. Thomas is the original, Will is the clone.
PC LOAD MATTER? What the hell does that even mean?!
How do you think that they deal with all the waste on ship? It’s all just kept in a big vat for the replicators. And replicators are just small specialized transporters with preprogrammed buffers.
Anyone got a spare matter cartridge?
There’s not an ounce of Cyan in Riker’s body, but this thing still refuses to materialize without a new cartridge!
Excuse you?
They’re both clones, as is the fate of anyone who uses a Star Trek transporter.
Found Bones.
Bones died that day. I’m just what you remember of him.
As far as I know, no matter is transported in a Star Trek transporter. It selects a certain volume of space, creates a digital copy of that and then transforms ship energy into new matter that exactly replicates that pattern while disintegrating the original source. That’s why it should be possible to use the transporter as a backup machine for all those poor red shirts
There are multiple references to a matter stream. The system does a matter-energy-matter conversion, but the final matter is (typically) sourced from the starting matter. Whether that counts as moving the matter is dubious, to say the least. It’s like disassembling a Lego set, melting down the bricks, casting new bricks from the melted plastic, and then building the set again. Is it the same set?
The Riker of Theseus?
It took the mass from the replicator. Fewer tacos were served that day.
All transporters keep a tribble or two in the buffer for additional rush matter; their dna being part human helps too.
I never see enough Invader Zim references. Thank you 🫡
You’re welcome.
Is Admiral Vance referring to the cookie or Thomas Riker?
It brings us to a question: Is it cannibalism when we are what we eat?
If you consider this cannibalism, then consuming any kind of sustenance is cannibalism since it’s all recycled matter. Replicators are actually further removed from cannibalism since they first transform it all into energy first.
Edit: typo
i always figured that the transporter was ultimately just a scanner and the beaming in process is the same as being replicated, but the replication has to be done while the scanner is running because there’s simply too much data to actually store long-term unless you’re willing to use the whole ship/station/whatever as a buffer, like that one DS9 episode. and i guess the scan requires a level of detail it can only get from the source destructively which is why it isn’t a clone unless the beam gets reflected? or something? this is one of those things that makes less sense the more you try and figure it, and suddenly a literal matter stream somehow seems more feasible
maybe ships have Einstein Compensators or some shit allowing 1:1 matter energy conversion but it only works on transporters so you can’t make a perpetual energy machine? i need to lie down
Thanks for your contribution to this nonsensical discussion.
The destruction has to be intentional, since a transport can also be canceled midway. Also remember the Voyager episode where they stored an entire ships crew in the transport buffers for extended periods of time to circumvent some racist patrols that would attack them otherwise
Perhaps Voyager had more storage in its systems, due to being a newer model of ship? It was more advanced in a bunch of other ways as well (variable geometry nacelles, class 9 warp drive).
Pfft. Uh, hello reversed polarity?!
This one gets it.
It’s the same way replicator technology works. They’re reassembling matter that’s been stored for that purpose. Two Rikers just means less matter is left in the storage buffer.
Just send a couple of Red Shirts on an away mission. There’s plenty more where they came from.
Recycling tragic accidents is just good policy, and necessary to preserve the ecosystem on visited planets.
If we happen to get a few cloned bridge officers out of the bargain…that’s just good fortune.
Can you imagine how much energy is stored in a transporter buffer?
I mean, they’re flying around in a big engine that bends the fabric of space, so maybe it’s not such a big deal a few hundred years in the future. I guess it’s like comparing a furnace and bellows with a nuclear reactor.
I imagine there’s all sorts of backup systems and contigencies in place. Just wanted to see what serious, creative, or silly answers I’d get.
The real question is why didn’t she recreate the accident to double Tuvix before splitting one of them back into Tuvok and Neelix?
I’ve been thinking about this possible solution for over 30 years now.
It did conserve his mass. Twice. At the same time.
And IIRC, some weird shit in the atmosphere during transport was the source of any extra energy needed to have created the new matter.
It (þe transporter) grabbed some random innocent on þe ground to use as mass.
The same way you killed Tuvix.
If I didn’t have need for Tuvok and Neelix, I’d have exchanged Tuvix for a sack of coffee and a cute little puppy.
Maybe just 2 sacks of coffee.
Oh boy now I’m vaklempt
Ahem: a second transporter beam locked on to his signal. Since the transporter uses that beam to convert physical matter into an energy pattern there were in essence 2 matter converted energy patterns. The energy came from the transporter.
Proper answer.
Fine. The answer any time someone questions any aspect of the show is even simpler: Q did it.
E = MC2
Energy is matter with some speed of light fuckery.
But what about the matter stream?
Wasn’t there an energy fluctuation, so more energy could be entered into the system.
But also, Banach Tarski. On the subatomic level, maybe these types of shenanigans could manifest.
Edit: it turns out that copying a person requires a lot of energy, more than a heavy storm would have over years.
Possible, I suppose.
They cached 1 oz of 💩 from each of the previous 3000 transports.
So Thomas Riker is full of 💩?
Will Riker is. Thomas is the original.
Because of Quantum
E=mc^2
Energy and mass are just different measures of the same thing. The transporters job is to take mass and turn it into something that it can more easily move around (a wave? Particle stream?) and back. So as long as the transporter is connected to the ship’s energy supply it should theoretically be able to use that energy (instead of the energy from your body) to reassemble any pattern it wants without breaking the law of conservation of mass.
Riker is 6’4 let’s say 200lbs, which is 8,153,369 terajoules.
DATA: Imagination is not necessary. The scale is readily quantifiable. We are presently generating twelve point seven five billion gigawatts per (an alarm goes off)
One watt is one Joule per second, there is some debate out there about the “per” part of the quote since watts already implies per second, but we probably assume the ship is capable of generating 12,750,000 terawatts, or 12,750,000 terajoules per second.
8,153,369/12,750,000 gets us about 0.64 seconds of the ships output to create our duplicate Riker.
However the quote above was when the ship was basically idling, (not actually at warp) so the actual output of the ship is likely exponentially larger.
Basically they have so much power available, that they can just rearrange it into whatever mass they want.
