MovieChat Forums > Star Trek (1966) Discussion > The MASSIVE implications of 'transporter...

The MASSIVE implications of 'transporters' make no sense


I don't even get why they are called TRANSporters, when they should be called TELEporters, but the way it's explained, they shouldn't even be called that, but disintegrator-reintegrators and converters of energy patterns into material forms or whatnot.

It's pretty ridiculous way to 'transport' someone anywhere, and I get why they had to do something like that in a TV show, but heck, just calling it 'magic' that some ancient wizard created, would have been more plausible and better explanation.

Think about ALL the implications of that technology, holodeck being one of the most insignifigant ones (though obviously world-, or even galaxy-changing).

If it's true the Kirk, Spock and Bones all die every time they go through that thing, and then their 'pattern' is recreated into a perfectly living human being, exactly as Kirk, Spock and Bones (the plausibility of THAT alone could take a library of books to discuss), then it means..

..are you ready for it..? You can't go back once you read this..

..there's NO problem with there being two Kirks, two Spocks, two Boneses. Exactly as they were. Why couldn't the computer create more people from those patterns? Why bother breeding the old-fashioned way, when the computer can just create a million people much faster and populate any planet with perfectly chosen people that are exactly as their original humans were?

The implications of this 'pattern' stuff.. are staggering. Any faction could create vast armies in an instant, and with EDITING those patterns, 'perfect people' for any given job could be created. You could create 100 000 Einsteins to go on all Starfleet missions and ships to solve problems and think of new possibilities, you could create Datas, Spocks, and even if 500 000 Spocks die, no biggie, just recreate 500 000 more.

I have previously already discussed how ridiculous this materialistic thinking of 'everyone is just molecules, so a computer can recreate EXACT YOU easily' is, and when soul, auras, chakras, etc. are not taking into account, and people are not 'reconstituted' into the OPTIMAL versions of their bodies (youthful, strong, 100% healthy, no defects or problems of any kind, not even a tiny mole or lazy eye or anything - yeah, I should try to think outside Austin Powers movies)..

..it just makes no sense.

But when you REALLY think about these things, you see how easily this kind of stuff falls apart - you can't have that kind of technology, or everything would become meaningless, people would lose their value, there would be no humanity, and so on. I mean, who is going to grief the death of their son, if the computer can just recreate him from the 'pattern', and he's going to be 100% identical in every way?

Same goes for everything.. you age, you can transport and you are young again. Eternal life.

You see where I am going with this? If this tech existed, and the explanation was true, then there would be no reason to do anything or to try to achieve anything, as every human being would be valueless and disposable, expendable (yeah, but please don't make that joke), and re-creatable.

No disease or illnesses, because transporter would 100% heal you. Heck, it could create two of you every time just in case!

No point in having a personality or enjoying life, because there are literally thousands of 'yous' doing the exact same thing.

The implications are too MASSIVE for this post, but at least I capitalized the word 'massive' for effect to try to show how incredibly vast these consequences would be. Anyone with a 'transporter' would have INFINITE ARMIES of the best possible soldiers/leaders/captains/whatnot. They would only need to train the most efficient, fast-brained, superhumanly good martial artist/soldier/warrior/programmer/whatnot, and then they'd have infinite amount of him/her/it/whatever.

Do you see it yet? The implications of this kind of tech would just bring horror to the Universe, and everything would eventually collapse. But even THAT wouldn't matter, because even food can just be created.. infinite amount of food!

This makes this show's plots really redundant - why tranport some medicine to some colony, when you can just use teleporter (or whatever it should be called) to reconstitute everyone into 100% optimal, healthy forms? Then you can create 1000 clones of every single individual of that colony, and do amazing things to any planet very easily.

Who needs Genesis, when you have transporters that you can use to colonize and terraform any planet with million terraforming-geniuses and so on..? When you can create bodybuilder type people that love to work with shovels, and just make them do all the hard labor, or create an enormous factory with robots that can do everything (after all, inventors of robots can be cloned, too)..

The implications are ridiculously huge, but yet that's how they choose to explain things, and yet not explore ANY of these very direct consequences of the existence of such tech.. makes no sense.

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I have ONLY scratched the surface with that post, by the way - there are SO many more, even more massive implications. If you can create any, even living forms, from 'patterns' in a computer, what's stopping you from creating planets or space stations that way as well? Why construct anything, EVER!, if you can just 'patternize' something into reality?

Then we get to the mad scientist lab... think of Dr. Frankenstein (not the name of the monster, but the doctor, by the way), think of all the mad people in reality and in fiction wanting and trying to create monsters, experiment with living beings, create weird cross-beeds, make mice grow a human ear as part of their body and so on.

Getting it yet? WHAT is the limitation that the computer can create, when you EDIT those patterns? Think how many weird transmutations and monsters these mad scientists can now create from simply copying patterns and editing them? Ok, this monster has too many eyes, edit the pattern... how about if they had a hand instead of a tail, edit the pattern.. then tweak and tweak it until you get the 'perfect monster', then clone it 12000 times..

The implications won't stop, you can 'create new life' with these things, why need for Genesis when you have the darn 'transporters' and replicator technology?

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Did you sniff your fingers when you scratched?

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I was going to say your question made no sense, but considering the OP, it does indeed make sense.

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Yep, I try not to be rude, but a very large percentage of OP's posts are unusual in their thought processes. Or to put it another way, avortac4 makes no sense.

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The sad thing is that he cribs these from an unfunny crap site call screenrant and passes it off as his own.

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In 1966 television was a passing fancy in that people would watch a given program and were expected to forget about it over the following few months. Few people had the time to ponder an episode endlessly. This is how the transporter and its implications did not imperil the series back during the 1960's. By the time the 1980's came Star Trek was seen as a cash cow by its owner namely Paramount. As long as the revenue kept pouring in they did not worry about the science as the company moved from TNG to DS9 to Voyager and so on. The easier thing to "clean up" is the sound of a ship moving through space that we should not hear due to the vacuum of space. That really should have been cleaned up by the time TNG hit the air.

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Very interesting post. You cite many things that I never thought about before.

Dr. McCoy was the only one who hesitated about stepping onto the transporter pad and having his "molecules scrambled".

But the simplest explanation for the transporter was what Gene Roddenberry said. He simply did not have the budget to show the Enterprise landing on planets in every other episode. He just hoped viewers would accept the Transporter and not think too hard! Well it IS television. So who bothers to think? lol

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Come on PJ, you didn't read this nut's garbage did you? I know you're better than that!!

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Well my curiosity got the better of me when I saw the subject line. It was such a long post that I thought he deserved at least one comment for his efforts.

I didn't say I AGREED with everything he wrote, only said that I never thought of those things before.

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Ah, you're probably not familiar with his constant "makes no sense" posts. To be honest, I used to reply to them as well and pointed out how silly his posts are.

He doesn't seem to understand that "suspension of disbelief" is a requirement of any movie watching, but most particularly with science fiction.

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[deleted]

"Suspension of disbelief", oh definitely. It's especially important if you enjoy science fiction. It explains how every alien Kirk encountered spoke English!

As I wrote, Gene Roddenberry did not want the episodes to explain any of the science or technology used. He figured that the viewers would just accept that a phaser worked. He said that on cop shows none of the police officers explained how their guns were able to fire bullets. You just accepted that they worked.

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Yep. The Trek transporter is *so* iconic, and yet as you pointed out it was a money saving special effect to save the cost of special effects for "landing" a shuttle craft every episode.

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Transporters are the best example of impossible technology. Others are FTL and time travel. Sci fi has always been more fantasy than science!

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You forgot to mention heavier-than-air flying machines.

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The thing is, I don't care. It's all a made-up story, and I watch it for entertainment. When I want to know how space and space travel actually work, I read a book.

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you must be boring in BDSM parties

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