For various reasons, it's clear there's something about the transporter process in Star Trek that maintains one's consciousness etc. through the whole thing, rather than just making a duplicate (at least in most situations), like how Barclay is shown to be continually conscious through the whole thing in one episode. For another example, to quote doctorwhom1 elsewhere in the comment section: "More evidence that transporters probably aren't suicide booths would be that telepaths are fine with them. If they really just killed and reassembled people then purely psychic entities (Spock's katra for example) would be ripped away from whatever's being transported."
@@Jeddostotle7 Clearly, they beam the soul along with the body. It's part of the energy pattern of consciousness. (Also, katras and souls are the same thing. I'm not sure why this doesn't seem to be a general consensus.)
"look chief… all I'm asking is you adjust the pattern to lose about 10 kilos of fat around the midsection, it's not like I'm asking you to make me younger…"
@@d.b.4671 Not only can it, it was actually done in the 2nd season of Star Trek: TNG. I forget the episode name, but in the one with the genetically modified children that created the 'aging virus' which infected Pulaski.
@@RPhillip Yep, that episode *Unnatural Selection* (where the Federation ban on genetic engineering of Humans apparently had a exemption clause - _continuity contradictions in Trek?_ … never!) and the ridiculous episode *Little Rascals* (where Picard, Guinan, Keiko and Ro become children due to a transporter accident) were my inspiration. And of course Little Rascals ends with the new tweened characters becoming adults again, instead of enjoying the opportunity of having all those extra years added to their lifespan - just have 6 years of growning (okay, longer for Guinan) and then they are a healthy mature teen/young adult… with decades of experience behind them. Still it did lead to some great child Picard memes.
I imagine that the Heisenberg Compensators are a subcomponent - certainly an important one, but they are part of one of the larger systems that enables it to perform its overall function, rather than a discrete part of the process. Probably part of the process that scans and saves the quantum image, since said image would otherwise have a 'fuzzy' resolution that would not be safe for use. Sort of like how, for an exotic engine, you might need to engineer special bearings for its turbine-equivalents; those bearings are very important, in that they allow the component they're part of to function, but you wouldn't necessarily call attention to them in an overview of the engine's standard cycle, but you very much would talk about how the dang things keep failing and need replacing, or realigning, or etc if they were a common source of fault (i.e., brought up in the relevant episode as an issue)
I was also really surprised he didn't mention the Heisenberg Compensator, it was one of the main trivia things I knew about the transporter. Maybe he'll mention it in a later video, I only discovered this channel today :S
These are basically suicide booths, evidenced by the fact that we got a duplicate Riker once. Basically they make a clone of you in a new location, and to avoid the inconvenience of having you at your present location they kill you.
Things that often break on Starfleet vessels: Holodecks, transporters, consoles, warp cores, rock containment spaces within walls and ceilings. P.S. with how often Starfleet vessels explode from any damage I refer to them as "Space Pintos". I might be showing my age a bit with that too.
A lot of people (myself included) have been on a quarantine Star Trek binge. First time watching for me, gone through all of TNG and now on Voyager. Thanks for this explainer, I had most of it figured out but there was some useful info and visualisations in this
I remember ST:Enterprise had a moment of crew contemplating the existential implications of tech that was new to them. A small mention even of some civilians believing that whoever arrives via a transporter is just a copy that lacks a soul. So yeah, transporters create undead. Prove me wrong. 😄
Actually that's not how it works in science. you postulated a result, and thus it's your responsiblity to prove it TRUE first. Otherwise we can go into 'I can say whatever I want to be true cuz you need to prove it to be false' realm of nutty-folk :p
This approach is both safer and has longer range, so it is preferred whenever possible. All you need to do is "Hand over" or receive the pattern, other side does the rest. It does not protect you from subterfuge by the other side however (See "Data's Day").
Barclay was shown to be conscious during transport, when he was attacked by 'parasites'. It even showed his POV. Being conscious during transport is something alluded to by others in-universe as well. I remember someone mentioning that the transporter worked by shifting space around, comparible to a wormhole or warp, and that the deconstruction/reconstruction is to move you through that distortion. So that it really IS you who emerges on the other side. Dang, wish I could remember where I heard that, cuz it is certainly something more convoluted than I would be able to think of.
I forget which show it was exactly, maybe Enterprise, but I remember one character describe that they could feel standing at two places at the same time. Which would mean the transporting process happens so fast that there is little time for the subjects brain to full register what is fully happening.
@@MandalorV7 that also indicates a continued consciousness between sites, making it less of a murdermachine than the brundle-teleporter which explicitly does deconstruct you...
Well, since the equivalence principle says everyone can be right if they consider themselves to be stationary, not everything, as it still includes anything with displacement 0 on their own inertial frame (such as the ship, or a ship that's following in the same warp factor)
I always figured that transporters worked on two levels. One is matter disassembly/reassembly and the other is a warped space approach. The first is like Legos with taking things apart; the second is like sliding a box from one space to another where the item is not disassembled. When considered this way the limitations and capabilities can both be reconciled - depends on what your story needs.
1. Take a picture of platform 2. Take a picture of you standing on a platform 3. Throw some glitter onto platforms 4. Walk next door to second set 5. Throw some glitter 6. Take a picture of set 7. Take picture of you on set Transporters are awesome.
The way I have theorized how transporters work is by way of quantum conversion of the matter itself into energy that is out of phase with time/space. Meaning that your being isn't really "taken apart" but rather the matter that makes you up is taken out of phase of time/space at that point the atomic structure becomes like an imprint to that place in time/space. The beam creates a quantum area the same pattern as where the being currently is making the two areas the same place at the same time. The phased matter then merely get's directed to the new place in time/space and de-phases from it's quantum energy form and comes back into phase in the new area of space/time. This way you are technically still intact just in a different quantum phase. In simpler terms, it's like the door system in monsters inc except on the quantum level. Just a thought.
Hi Rick and happy new year to you! Great vid and very thoughtful. I wondered about the dodgy stuff Voyager would do keeping people in suspension in eps like Counterpoint but perhaps you'll touch on it next week. Looking forward to it. (Hope the DR Who special was a treat - I'm in Oz so today we finally have it).
Since you can see the ship, that means visible light frequencies are getting through the shields hence set your phasers to visible light, and transporters to visible light, and you could shoot or beam through any shields
I've always wanted to see a inventor, that is taking supplies from a Starship junkyard and then starts combining: 1. Teleporter 2. a replicator 3. The Holodeck, Making something that will give them a young body Teleports a old guy into the teleporter and then teleport the younger version out. But with all of his memories
The no-deletion theorem suggests that the person who reappears on the other end of the beam is still you. It also suggests that if you were to upload yourself to a computer and die before the digital version is activated, it would be you, not a copy. I’m not a quantum physicist. Just a guy who has read Bobiverse
I think the confinement beam just holds the subject within the beam area, doesn't allow you to exit but otherwise, movement is still possible. We never see someone exit a confinement beam once established. In one episode Picard was held as they tried to beam him off a planet while another ship captain he was with was attacked and Picard was unable to go to the other captains aid until the transport process was aborted and he was released.
At the shows edit: A sound guy queues the transport sound and records it over the top of a still shot of Riker and is recorded over the top of the stock film... Then graphics guy does a fade between the sill shot of Riker and a shot of the empty transport pad - and this is edited into the still shot of Riker, when some sparkles are added on a computer using a CAD package.... 👍👍
Most of the time when they beam through shields there's some explanation about "normally we can't do it but we're exploiting the fact that we know the shielding's refresh rate and slip through the split second it's weakest where we need to punch through" or "we know the exact energy frequency of the shield and if we match the matter stream's carrier frequency it's like the shields aren't there." And then there was at least one time the explanation was "the beam is going through subspace, so it essentially tunnels around the space where the shield is".
I was given to understand that the annular confinement beam was needed to maintain the organization of the matter pattern. I think that the TNG tech manual says that they dispose of trash, by beaming it into space, without the ACB. The result is that the trash materializes as disassociated atoms.
Until that episode that deals with Barclay's transporter fears, there really was a genuine reason for doubt about transporters killing you and then assembling another you. BTW, weren't transporters also somehow sub-space based? It's been ages since i consulted the lore, and much of what i was once fluent it, is now forgotten!
Here's an interesting thought. If shields are supposed to prevent all forms of energy from getting past it, then how can communications work with the shields up? Plot device?
I liked the way Dark Matter did this. They didn't have transporters, but they did use a technology called transfer transit to transmit a DNA and brain mapping to constructed clones on the other end. These clones last for 72 hours. When they were finished with their mission, they could integrate those memories into the original. In the even the clone was killed, the memories were lost, but the original didn't die. The clones are then recycled. Probably a much more feasible technology.
Yes. It was a specific cycle of the sensor, wich required a opening in the shields. O'brien knew it and thus knew the shield frequency for that very short window.
I've been binge watching PBS Space Time in conjunction with your videos and so many new questions arise as to how an annular confinement beam would function, is it a quantum entanglement? Is it line of sight? It's obviously inhibit-able because of some episodes mentioning granite of certain qualities or some other fictional matter can stop a transporter. There are just so many questions a transporter tech brings into fruition.
if Scotty saved his life staying in the pattern buffer by looping then anything is possible, even stasis is unneeded anymore and since in Australia they did transport gas from tube to tube for 1 meter distance, not alot is needed to achieve real life place to place teleportation.
Well there is a "plausible" way to have Transporters-traversable Wormholes 🌌 Of course, that wouldn't be a Transporter per se but it's at least a more probable way to do it than this Matter/Energy/Quantum/Heisenberg Stuff 😅 The Iconian Gateway(s) seem to work like that plus it would also make sense needing to be not too far away from your Destination (for example in the Orbit of a planet) because you'd still need to know the surroundings before opening a wormhole-gate (safety-precautions). You also wouldn't need as much energy to use person-sized wormholes for transport than you'd need for bigger ones 🤔 Btw, even smaller micro-wormholes would be the only known plausible way to have FTL-Communications as far as i know, so yeah that'd be neat 😁
There was an episode of TNG where due to transporter malfunction, Riker got cloned due to the transport beam being reflected and scattered, like a reverse Tuvix from Voyager.
There is an alternative explanation for how transporters work is if we consider it another form of warp bubble travel rather than a matter to energy/energy to matter conversion process
Yeah, it is best not to think into it too much. Janeway's policy of not thinking about temporal mechanics is actually a good idea for a lot of the tech of Star Trek - and other science fictions.
I'm in the camp that whoever was transported is not the same person before transportation. This is because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which simply states that a given quantum state cannot be known absolutely, and that the "scanning" alters the quantum state. There's also the religious aspect considering that the body is destroyed at the subatomic level, converted to energy and then recreated from said energy. The original body had been destroyed so that person is dead. Also on another channel they covered the immense energy levels that would be involved to render an average person to pure energy would be. The transporter would be one of the least likely to come to fruition.
The way the teleporters are described is always a bit wonky but they have been reasonably consistently portrayed, for instance moving and being alive while teleporting. With the benefit of hindsight I wonder if GR would have just made them mini warp bubbles instead 🤔
How I understand transporter tech is it is essentially breaking the nuclear force keeping the quarks that make up atoms together, so that you're removing the atoms mass. Since anything with mass can't go the speed of light, removing your mass by breaking you down into quarks enables your matter to be beamed to a planets surface at the speed of light. The thing is atoms are actually mostly empty space - which the transporter obviously _isn't_ transporting with you, so despite being an insane number of quarks being transported just for a single individual, the actual space the beam would take up would still end up being microscopic in size - far less than the width of a single hair. So how come they can't just create a hair-width sized hole in the shield directly over the beam emitter to let it through _without_ the need to lower shields? Even if an enemy can detect such a tiny hole, it's highly doubtful they'd ever be able to hit it - nevermind with enough force/energy to do the ship any significant damage.
I think you can't transport from ground onto a ship while the shields are up, but the same isn't true going from ship to ground. The shields deflect energy directed at the ship, but not generated by the ship - for example phasers and torpedoes can fire through shields as well.
Beaming through shields can also be achieved if you can match the shield modulation, of course. Personally, I think I would prefer stepping through a stable spatial distortion over having my subatomic elements ripped apart, but to each their own I suppose. Now please explain the difference between transporters and replicators. It seems to me that these applications _should_ be a lot more similar than they are made out to be.
I think a better way to put the question would be: is the person that comes out the other side of the transporter the same you or just a copy of you and the original you was effectively killed when dematerialised? Or would you only be a copy if the backup pattern was used to re-materialise you?
My guess is they figured out how to bend space enough that it turns into a pocket universe, which would allow them to store an arbitrary amount of equipment "in" a portable device, so long as the device could maintain the connection to the pocket universe
If particles can be quarantined in the matter stream prior to being reassembled, it assumes all structural data is maintained in the matter stream. That would not be the case if objects were just vaporized to the quantum level. A proton, electron a quark are all fundamentally the same as other protons, electron and quarks. Deconstructed from my DNA, purines can make up any living thing. Thus, there would be no need to scan an object, let alone use the scan to reassemble. So either quarantine happens at the time of assembly or objects likely aren’t disassembled to the extent suggested and thus people don’t really die at the time of transport.
The thing I never totally got was...doesn’t the main transmitter need to be directly pointed at the targeted location / object? Like, if something is behind a ship, and it’s main transmitter is front...then does the matter beam...curve around the ship? Unless, of course, it’s teleporter pad to teleporter pad, but even then wouldn’t the 2 have to be aligned with each other?
Locks onto calcium in bones Initiates transport. Transporter operator screams as skeletons materialize on transporter platform. Meanwhile on the borg cube....
Dirty pool. Deus ex Machina Although however well this idea has been thought out, it stretches my coefficient of suspension of disbelief to the snap-back point. Incidentally, Stargate ripped it off.
8:10 This is not a mater of plot. Ships can fire through their own shields and enemy shields if they know the frequency. And use sensors through their shields. If you know the frequency, shields never matered. *Beaming* through a shield is harder (not as short and nicely pulsing as a weapon), but not impossible. It requires very precise data (basically the frequency) and even then you might not make it. 32nd century transporters are a lot quicker, so they got less issues here - but they still need the frequency.
There's also the *other transporter technologies* that are probably worth a video TNG *The High Ground* - Interdimensional travel that ignores shields but is toxic to the user. [It would have solved the "beam a bomb into the enemy ship" issue, giving the user a _I win_ button]. Voyager *Displaced* - The Nyans had a translocator that could work at 10 light years and _completely ignored shields_ even when the shield strength and mucguffins were increased to compensate. And at closer range it could do the _beam the entire crew off the enemy ship trick._ [And the Voyager crew captured the vessel that was equipped with it, and had it in their possession for some time as they returned the various fellow captives. Yet somehow they didn't bother to acquire the technology (and the advanced sensors that would have gone with it). Once again keeping up a proud Starfleet tradition. Although in this case the name _translocator_ may have been off-putting, as transsexual individuals had in theory no discrimination in the Federation, but there was still the thorny issue of the hermaphroditic species J'naii (Riker bonked a secretly female one in _The Outcast).]_
a really good story line would be if somebody had copied the consciousness of all these brainwave transfers we see throughout star trek and cloned them all. i mean we all know that transporting is just copying somebodies brainwaves, destroying the body (and keeping the materials for future transports), creating a new body at the location of the transport and then pasting the brainwaves into them. there could be billions of originals/copies out there.
I'm still amazed that Starfleet ever accepted this tech. Cuz yeah, it's essentially a copy being made, even if there's some wibblywobbly techreason that it's the same atoms used from the original Matter Stream... Cuz it's still a rebuild copy. It's like draining the paint from a picture and then having someone repaint it again. It'll never be the original picture again. But hey it's scifi stuff about quantum entanglement and that's a theoretically plausible thing of two things swapping information, so as long as it'd include the 'soul' or whatever you'd call the stuff that makes you 'you', it's still you that appear even if you're a rebuild copy of the same material or a copied image imprinted with the soul onto it. My question is that, that if you ARE a copy... how long until the copy of a copy issue would begin?
The “does it kill you” becomes more complicated since it uses the exact same particles to reassemble you as you originally were made of. Cause then you have to define what makes a person a person and determine if putting something back exactly the way it started retains all the properties, or if the interaction itself changes something. Ie can a transported change your personality, even if all the neural cells and energies are exactly as they were right before transport?
Less so when you remember that Star Trek is a world in which emergent minds are everywhere. V’GR for example. Data for another. As our bodies (including brains) are biological machines and computational drives why wouldn’t our minds also be emergent properties. The mere existence of Q and the Q Continuum seems to support this idea that there are deeper foundational realities in Trek that our minds can at least visit if not inhabit partially or entirely. Moving the pieces of your body no matter how small the pieces are would not kill you because you are the emergent mind and not the body. The real question I have is by what process is the mind still tethered to the body through the transport sequence.
IIRC from the ubiquitous TNG Technical Manual, Heisenberg compensators and annular confinement beams are completely separate functions within a transporter system. According to the technobabble, Heisenberg compensators are a workaround to the quantum uncertainty principle. Because the position and the velocity of any given particle cannot both be measured exactly at the same time, which would be kind of necessary for transporters to even begin to do what they say they do. So the TNG Tech authors invented the Heisenberg compensator as a narrative device to preempt any questions that might arise. Though goodness knows how it could possibly work.
What if every time a character goes through the transporter, one consciousness ends and another begins? And nobody knows it happens because all the memories are in the new consciousness...
Now, to get all existential... When using a transporter, does your soul go with you when the rest of you goes?? If it's not a physical thing, can it be transported?
See I get transporting to another pad works. You have the machines on that pad to take the pattern and reassemble you and again. But how the hell do you transport to something besides a pad? What reassembles you? And if it’s just the transporter on the ship doing it long distance then why have multiple dedicated rooms to it?
On the "would transporters kill you?" question: I believe this video, without ever directly saying so, answers that question. th-cam.com/video/owPC60Ue0BE/w-d-xo.html The answer is, surprisingly, "no." In that it is impossible to do what the transporters did to make Thomas Riker, and they could _only_ successfully dematerialize and rematerialize arbitrary subjects if they do, in fact, dematerialize and rematerialize, both. You can't "rematerialize" a subject you never dematerialized, so the continuity of identity is at least as solid as any other case: you're you, because you couldn't have been transported if you hadn't been dematerialized. You're not a clone of a dead person. You're you.
Couldn’t you just drop the shields around the transporter array leaving a very small gab in the shields for the signal to through The transporter didn’t detect the remat in DS9
tl;dr: I don't agree (Star Trek) transporters totally disassemble and rebuild you in a way that introduces the existential concerns (Trek has been clear it's definitely you in and out). It is NOT like breaking apart a LEGO build and rebuilding it because if so, you simply have raw material (sub-atomic particles / LEGO bricks), and the exact previous locations of each brick / particle don't matter, and my LEGO instruction book won't degrade, and mistakes are near impossible, and I can lose any amount of bricks and replace with spares. Instead, I imagine the completed LEGO build has a ton of strings connecting each brick to every other brick it MUST connect to, and transporters pull the build apart, keep the strings intact (strong, weak, or undiscovered sci-fi force), but bunch them all up in the matter stream, then reform everything by putting everything back in its place, sustaining and preserving all functions and thus consciousness; limited edits are possible, but breaking too many strings means you'd no longer build the original, which would be a concern in the brain. Maybe I'm putting too much weight on the Barclay episode (I feel this was seen elsewhere, though), but a lot of how transporters are shown and how people talk about them make me think they don't fully "disassemble" you in the scary way one might imagine. All particles retain some cohesion with each other which is why you're conscious through most of the process and the trip. Only at some point are you not conscious but I always saw it as more like a stasis. I don't remember anyone saying they black out, but limited movement has been possible (Barclay grabbing someone is the most extreme), people are aware of "rough" transports, etc. The ACB freezing people was - in real world - likely just about keeping people still to make the transport effect, so once that tech improved, we can also assume Trek tech improved to not need to freeze people. I'm sure there are inconsistencies depicted though I'd be willing to chalk that up to real world budget, again, and people will naturally want to stand still anyway. Even pattern degradation feels like it could involve that lack of cohesion. After all, if you truly disassembled things and people to subatomic particles (ie., lets assume THE single most fundamental "base material" of the universe), then pattern degradation and transporter failures make no sense. As long as you have the data stored on a computer somewhere and you have all the raw material, you can rebuild the thing without caring for where exactly each part was originally. Every time I destroy and rebuild a LEGO set, I have no care to remember exactly which brick went where. I just need the same types to go into the right places, following the instructions, which can't after degrade in 4 minutes. This does sound like potentially killing and making a new person out of your parts. It would technically be a Frankenstein's monster where subatomic particles were all rearranged differently than the original.
"what we got back didn't live long, fortunately" ~best summary of the risks of the Transporter.
"It turned inside out!"
"And it exploded."
@@richardleeskinneriii9640 Now, now- THAT wasn't actually Star Trek... ;)
Galaxy quest
Ah yes, the "disassemble me and create quantum duplicate me in a different place" machine. I'm with Bones on this one, I'll stick to shuttles.
Until the movies, Bones used to beam down all the time
Are we the same exact beings we were at birth or from last night, quantum permanence is silly if you start to think about it..
For various reasons, it's clear there's something about the transporter process in Star Trek that maintains one's consciousness etc. through the whole thing, rather than just making a duplicate (at least in most situations), like how Barclay is shown to be continually conscious through the whole thing in one episode. For another example, to quote doctorwhom1 elsewhere in the comment section:
"More evidence that transporters probably aren't suicide booths would be that telepaths are fine with them. If they really just killed and reassembled people then purely psychic entities (Spock's katra for example) would be ripped away from whatever's being transported."
"One to beam down."
The transporter malfunctions. Again.
"Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good..."
@@Jeddostotle7 Clearly, they beam the soul along with the body. It's part of the energy pattern of consciousness. (Also, katras and souls are the same thing. I'm not sure why this doesn't seem to be a general consensus.)
"look chief… all I'm asking is you adjust the pattern to lose about 10 kilos of fat around the midsection, it's not like I'm asking you to make me younger…"
...although now that I think about it, a transporter could probably do that.
@@d.b.4671 Not only can it, it was actually done in the 2nd season of Star Trek: TNG. I forget the episode name, but in the one with the genetically modified children that created the 'aging virus' which infected Pulaski.
Possibly an alternative for male enhancement but I'm sure "humanity has progress beyond that sort of thing".
Man I'd pay for that.
@@RPhillip Yep, that episode *Unnatural Selection* (where the Federation ban on genetic engineering of Humans apparently had a exemption clause - _continuity contradictions in Trek?_ … never!) and the ridiculous episode *Little Rascals* (where Picard, Guinan, Keiko and Ro become children due to a transporter accident) were my inspiration.
And of course Little Rascals ends with the new tweened characters becoming adults again, instead of enjoying the opportunity of having all those extra years added to their lifespan - just have 6 years of growning (okay, longer for Guinan) and then they are a healthy mature teen/young adult… with decades of experience behind them.
Still it did lead to some great child Picard memes.
"With enough force to punch through plot shields"
I am surprised that moving target transportation was mentioned but the Heisenberg compensator was omitted.
I imagine that the Heisenberg Compensators are a subcomponent - certainly an important one, but they are part of one of the larger systems that enables it to perform its overall function, rather than a discrete part of the process. Probably part of the process that scans and saves the quantum image, since said image would otherwise have a 'fuzzy' resolution that would not be safe for use.
Sort of like how, for an exotic engine, you might need to engineer special bearings for its turbine-equivalents; those bearings are very important, in that they allow the component they're part of to function, but you wouldn't necessarily call attention to them in an overview of the engine's standard cycle, but you very much would talk about how the dang things keep failing and need replacing, or realigning, or etc if they were a common source of fault (i.e., brought up in the relevant episode as an issue)
I was also really surprised he didn't mention the Heisenberg Compensator, it was one of the main trivia things I knew about the transporter. Maybe he'll mention it in a later video, I only discovered this channel today :S
Surprised that the fact it's nothing more than a clever edit as none of this actually exists - hasn't been mentioned yet... 🤣
“If you have to take me apart to get me there, I don’t want to go!” Douglas Adams
These are basically suicide booths, evidenced by the fact that we got a duplicate Riker once. Basically they make a clone of you in a new location, and to avoid the inconvenience of having you at your present location they kill you.
It's basically magic.
"A wizard did it." - Lucy Lawless in The Simpsons
We were transported to a new year. Happy New Year, everybody.
@Tesla-Effect Year of Hell, Part 2
@@hawkeye5955 Who's gonna tell Janeway-
Things that often break on Starfleet vessels: Holodecks, transporters, consoles, warp cores, rock containment spaces within walls and ceilings.
P.S. with how often Starfleet vessels explode from any damage I refer to them as "Space Pintos". I might be showing my age a bit with that too.
A lot of people (myself included) have been on a quarantine Star Trek binge. First time watching for me, gone through all of TNG and now on Voyager. Thanks for this explainer, I had most of it figured out but there was some useful info and visualisations in this
If I remember correctly, knowing a shield's frequency does allow transporters to bypass them.
And yet there have been numerous times of “we’d use the transporter but we can’t drop our shields.
@@the_kraken6549 Yeeep, besides if the Shield Frequency is known, you can just shoot through them. Like in Voyager and Star Trek Generations.
That's it, I'm buying a Danube class runabout. No more scrambling my molecules.
Make sure it’s the “Rio Grande;” she lasted all 7 seasons.
The perfect size for a bachelor(ette) to fly around space on their own, like a future version of getting a houseboat, or an RV.
I remember ST:Enterprise had a moment of crew contemplating the existential implications of tech that was new to them. A small mention even of some civilians believing that whoever arrives via a transporter is just a copy that lacks a soul. So yeah, transporters create undead. Prove me wrong. 😄
Actually that's not how it works in science. you postulated a result, and thus it's your responsiblity to prove it TRUE first.
Otherwise we can go into 'I can say whatever I want to be true cuz you need to prove it to be false' realm of nutty-folk :p
Transporter room to transporter room beaming makes a lot more sense than say, transporter room to random area or random area to random area beaming.
This approach is both safer and has longer range, so it is preferred whenever possible. All you need to do is "Hand over" or receive the pattern, other side does the rest.
It does not protect you from subterfuge by the other side however (See "Data's Day").
@@christopherg2347 It's the transporter that scans, broadcasts you, and disassembles /rebuilds you.
Barclay was shown to be conscious during transport, when he was attacked by 'parasites'. It even showed his POV. Being conscious during transport is something alluded to by others in-universe as well.
I remember someone mentioning that the transporter worked by shifting space around, comparible to a wormhole or warp, and that the deconstruction/reconstruction is to move you through that distortion. So that it really IS you who emerges on the other side.
Dang, wish I could remember where I heard that, cuz it is certainly something more convoluted than I would be able to think of.
I forget which show it was exactly, maybe Enterprise, but I remember one character describe that they could feel standing at two places at the same time. Which would mean the transporting process happens so fast that there is little time for the subjects brain to full register what is fully happening.
@@MandalorV7 that also indicates a continued consciousness between sites, making it less of a murdermachine than the brundle-teleporter which explicitly does deconstruct you...
"But, the animal is inside out..."
And it exploded
They should've just gone with Hitchhiker's "Law of Indeterminacy."
[CGP Grey has entered the chat...]
[SPOILERS]
I feel like this is a direct response to the EC beaming onto the bridge of Disco with their shields up still.
Man I love that epsisode, with the skeletal lock in voyager
"Beaming to moving targets is harder".
So... literally everything in space?
Well, since the equivalence principle says everyone can be right if they consider themselves to be stationary, not everything, as it still includes anything with displacement 0 on their own inertial frame (such as the ship, or a ship that's following in the same warp factor)
@@DrVictorVasconcelos I am about 30 billion braincells short of being able to understand this
I assume they mean under acceleration or with an unpredictable trajectory.
I always figured that transporters worked on two levels. One is matter disassembly/reassembly and the other is a warped space approach. The first is like Legos with taking things apart; the second is like sliding a box from one space to another where the item is not disassembled. When considered this way the limitations and capabilities can both be reconciled - depends on what your story needs.
1. Take a picture of platform
2. Take a picture of you standing on a platform
3. Throw some glitter onto platforms
4. Walk next door to second set
5. Throw some glitter
6. Take a picture of set
7. Take picture of you on set
Transporters are awesome.
😆
The way I have theorized how transporters work is by way of quantum conversion of the matter itself into energy that is out of phase with time/space. Meaning that your being isn't really "taken apart" but rather the matter that makes you up is taken out of phase of time/space at that point the atomic structure becomes like an imprint to that place in time/space. The beam creates a quantum area the same pattern as where the being currently is making the two areas the same place at the same time. The phased matter then merely get's directed to the new place in time/space and de-phases from it's quantum energy form and comes back into phase in the new area of space/time. This way you are technically still intact just in a different quantum phase. In simpler terms, it's like the door system in monsters inc except on the quantum level. Just a thought.
The video about when transporters don't work should have something like "I can just Beam back up. And other lies you tell yourself" in the thumbnail
Hi Rick and happy new year to you!
Great vid and very thoughtful.
I wondered about the dodgy stuff Voyager would do keeping people in suspension in eps like Counterpoint but perhaps you'll touch on it next week. Looking forward to it.
(Hope the DR Who special was a treat - I'm in Oz so today we finally have it).
Since you can see the ship, that means visible light frequencies are getting through the shields
hence set your phasers to visible light, and transporters to visible light, and you could shoot or beam through any shields
I've always wanted to see a inventor, that is taking supplies from a Starship junkyard
and then starts combining:
1. Teleporter
2. a replicator
3. The Holodeck,
Making something that will give them a young body
Teleports a old guy into the teleporter and then teleport the younger version out.
But with all of his memories
The no-deletion theorem suggests that the person who reappears on the other end of the beam is still you. It also suggests that if you were to upload yourself to a computer and die before the digital version is activated, it would be you, not a copy.
I’m not a quantum physicist. Just a guy who has read Bobiverse
I think the confinement beam just holds the subject within the beam area, doesn't allow you to exit but otherwise, movement is still possible. We never see someone exit a confinement beam once established. In one episode Picard was held as they tried to beam him off a planet while another ship captain he was with was attacked and Picard was unable to go to the other captains aid until the transport process was aborted and he was released.
Beaming through shields is my biggest issue with the Dyson sphere episode.
You forgot the Heisenberg compensator. It was an ingenious little bit the science advisors had the writers add to speak to the science nerds.
At the shows edit:
A sound guy queues the transport sound and records it over the top of a still shot of Riker and is recorded over the top of the stock film...
Then graphics guy does a fade between the sill shot of Riker and a shot of the empty transport pad - and this is edited into the still shot of Riker, when some sparkles are added on a computer using a CAD package.... 👍👍
hey Rick, Congrats on 100k 😊 Really love your videos and your sense of humour 😁
Congratz on 100K subs chief! Love your videos
that andorian is crazy thick
Most of the time when they beam through shields there's some explanation about "normally we can't do it but we're exploiting the fact that we know the shielding's refresh rate and slip through the split second it's weakest where we need to punch through" or "we know the exact energy frequency of the shield and if we match the matter stream's carrier frequency it's like the shields aren't there." And then there was at least one time the explanation was "the beam is going through subspace, so it essentially tunnels around the space where the shield is".
It make a digital copy of you, disintegrates you, then creates a physical copy at a different location.
Dicta immortality! Larry Niven, "A World Out of Time".:)
I was given to understand that the annular confinement beam was needed to maintain the organization of the matter pattern. I think that the TNG tech manual says that they dispose of trash, by beaming it into space, without the ACB. The result is that the trash materializes as disassociated atoms.
Until that episode that deals with Barclay's transporter fears, there really was a genuine reason for doubt about transporters killing you and then assembling another you. BTW, weren't transporters also somehow sub-space based? It's been ages since i consulted the lore, and much of what i was once fluent it, is now forgotten!
A Transporter sure would make mutiny easy.
Here's an interesting thought. If shields are supposed to prevent all forms of energy from getting past it, then how can communications work with the shields up?
Plot device?
Visible light gets through it just fine too.
I liked the way Dark Matter did this. They didn't have transporters, but they did use a technology called transfer transit to transmit a DNA and brain mapping to constructed clones on the other end. These clones last for 72 hours. When they were finished with their mission, they could integrate those memories into the original. In the even the clone was killed, the memories were lost, but the original didn't die. The clones are then recycled. Probably a much more feasible technology.
22nd Century : Poopy Doodles made from apples
32nd Century : Apples made from Poopy Doodles
Is this why replicators work instead of getting a pattern from someone standing on transporter, the pattern come for the computer instead?
O'Brien was able to beam through shields of the Phoenix (episode The Wounded). I believe it was in between the refresh cycle.
And he also beamed through the original Enterprise's shield cycle
Yes. It was a specific cycle of the sensor, wich required a opening in the shields. O'brien knew it and thus knew the shield frequency for that very short window.
I saw an articule a few days ago where they were able to successfully transported a object across a distense of 44km with 99.5% success.
Easy answer to the transporter clone problem: the star trek universe seemingly has souls and the transporter is able to transport those too.
I've been binge watching PBS Space Time in conjunction with your videos and so many new questions arise as to how an annular confinement beam would function, is it a quantum entanglement? Is it line of sight? It's obviously inhibit-able because of some episodes mentioning granite of certain qualities or some other fictional matter can stop a transporter. There are just so many questions a transporter tech brings into fruition.
if Scotty saved his life staying in the pattern buffer by looping then anything is possible, even stasis is unneeded anymore and since in Australia they did transport gas from tube to tube for 1 meter distance, not alot is needed to achieve real life place to place teleportation.
If I was given the transporter right now I'd use it as a weapon and just transfer people's hearts to my living room
Well there is a "plausible" way to have Transporters-traversable Wormholes 🌌
Of course, that wouldn't be a Transporter per se but it's at least a more probable way to do it than this Matter/Energy/Quantum/Heisenberg Stuff 😅
The Iconian Gateway(s) seem to work like that plus it would also make sense needing to be not too far away from your Destination (for example in the Orbit of a planet) because you'd still need to know the surroundings before opening a wormhole-gate (safety-precautions).
You also wouldn't need as much energy to use person-sized wormholes for transport than you'd need for bigger ones 🤔
Btw, even smaller micro-wormholes would be the only known plausible way to have FTL-Communications as far as i know, so yeah that'd be neat 😁
A process like that could easily get a sign flipped somewhere. Then you'd come out as a mirror image of yourself.
There was an episode of TNG where due to transporter malfunction, Riker got cloned due to the transport beam being reflected and scattered, like a reverse Tuvix from Voyager.
Theres a book on that. "Spock Must Die"
Let's say, hypothetically, you teleported the bones out of someone's body
Did i really just watch that whole thing? I swear I now know more about Star Trek physics than I do about physics in reality.
There is an alternative explanation for how transporters work is if we consider it another form of warp bubble travel rather than a matter to energy/energy to matter conversion process
Yeah, it is best not to think into it too much. Janeway's policy of not thinking about temporal mechanics is actually a good idea for a lot of the tech of Star Trek - and other science fictions.
I'm in the camp that whoever was transported is not the same person before transportation. This is because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which simply states that a given quantum state cannot be known absolutely, and that the "scanning" alters the quantum state. There's also the religious aspect considering that the body is destroyed at the subatomic level, converted to energy and then recreated from said energy. The original body had been destroyed so that person is dead. Also on another channel they covered the immense energy levels that would be involved to render an average person to pure energy would be. The transporter would be one of the least likely to come to fruition.
Whatttt someone's clothing? My good man I was not even thinking that...much.😂
Yeah, no one could convince me that this is not a death machine.
The way the teleporters are described is always a bit wonky but they have been reasonably consistently portrayed, for instance moving and being alive while teleporting.
With the benefit of hindsight I wonder if GR would have just made them mini warp bubbles instead 🤔
You should be able to been through shields if you have the ships prefix codes to bypass the shields and open a hole long enough to pass through
Aaaaand this is why I prefer wormholes over matter disassembly transportation ^^; Just take my existing form, and move it somewhere else
How I understand transporter tech is it is essentially breaking the nuclear force keeping the quarks that make up atoms together, so that you're removing the atoms mass. Since anything with mass can't go the speed of light, removing your mass by breaking you down into quarks enables your matter to be beamed to a planets surface at the speed of light. The thing is atoms are actually mostly empty space - which the transporter obviously _isn't_ transporting with you, so despite being an insane number of quarks being transported just for a single individual, the actual space the beam would take up would still end up being microscopic in size - far less than the width of a single hair. So how come they can't just create a hair-width sized hole in the shield directly over the beam emitter to let it through _without_ the need to lower shields? Even if an enemy can detect such a tiny hole, it's highly doubtful they'd ever be able to hit it - nevermind with enough force/energy to do the ship any significant damage.
I think you can't transport from ground onto a ship while the shields are up, but the same isn't true going from ship to ground. The shields deflect energy directed at the ship, but not generated by the ship - for example phasers and torpedoes can fire through shields as well.
"He's dead Jim" ^9.e+20
Beaming through shields can also be achieved if you can match the shield modulation, of course.
Personally, I think I would prefer stepping through a stable spatial distortion over having my subatomic elements ripped apart, but to each their own I suppose.
Now please explain the difference between transporters and replicators. It seems to me that these applications _should_ be a lot more similar than they are made out to be.
I think a better way to put the question would be: is the person that comes out the other side of the transporter the same you or just a copy of you and the original you was effectively killed when dematerialised? Or would you only be a copy if the backup pattern was used to re-materialise you?
Can you explain the concept of portable trans-warp beaming devices?!
Or should we stay away from the alternate star trek timeline?
In the Kelvin timeline they stopped trying to make their tech sound probable. So why care?
Super micronization on a quantum scale? They got programmable matter etc...
My guess is they figured out how to bend space enough that it turns into a pocket universe, which would allow them to store an arbitrary amount of equipment "in" a portable device, so long as the device could maintain the connection to the pocket universe
In my head if you have a cold you can just hop in the transporter
If particles can be quarantined in the matter stream prior to being reassembled, it assumes all structural data is maintained in the matter stream.
That would not be the case if objects were just vaporized to the quantum level. A proton, electron a quark are all fundamentally the same as other protons, electron and quarks. Deconstructed from my DNA, purines can make up any living thing.
Thus, there would be no need to scan an object, let alone use the scan to reassemble.
So either quarantine happens at the time of assembly or objects likely aren’t disassembled to the extent suggested and thus people don’t really die at the time of transport.
Being transported while having colon cancer... Rectum? Damn near killed him.
teleports are just rly rly fancy 3d printers
The thing I never totally got was...doesn’t the main transmitter need to be directly pointed at the targeted location / object?
Like, if something is behind a ship, and it’s main transmitter is front...then does the matter beam...curve around the ship?
Unless, of course, it’s teleporter pad to teleporter pad, but even then wouldn’t the 2 have to be aligned with each other?
Locks onto calcium in bones
Initiates transport.
Transporter operator screams as skeletons materialize on transporter platform.
Meanwhile on the borg cube....
Dirty pool. Deus ex Machina Although however well this idea has been thought out, it stretches my coefficient of suspension of disbelief to the snap-back point. Incidentally, Stargate ripped it off.
8:10 This is not a mater of plot. Ships can fire through their own shields and enemy shields if they know the frequency. And use sensors through their shields.
If you know the frequency, shields never matered.
*Beaming* through a shield is harder (not as short and nicely pulsing as a weapon), but not impossible. It requires very precise data (basically the frequency) and even then you might not make it.
32nd century transporters are a lot quicker, so they got less issues here - but they still need the frequency.
Transporters aka Biological/Mechanical 3-D Teleprinters!
There's also the *other transporter technologies* that are probably worth a video
TNG *The High Ground* - Interdimensional travel that ignores shields but is toxic to the user. [It would have solved the "beam a bomb into the enemy ship" issue, giving the user a _I win_ button].
Voyager *Displaced* - The Nyans had a translocator that could work at 10 light years and _completely ignored shields_ even when the shield strength and mucguffins were increased to compensate. And at closer range it could do the _beam the entire crew off the enemy ship trick._
[And the Voyager crew captured the vessel that was equipped with it, and had it in their possession for some time as they returned the various fellow captives. Yet somehow they didn't bother to acquire the technology (and the advanced sensors that would have gone with it). Once again keeping up a proud Starfleet tradition. Although in this case the name _translocator_ may have been off-putting, as transsexual individuals had in theory no discrimination in the Federation, but there was still the thorny issue of the hermaphroditic species J'naii (Riker bonked a secretly female one in _The Outcast).]_
a really good story line would be if somebody had copied the consciousness of all these brainwave transfers we see throughout star trek and cloned them all. i mean we all know that transporting is just copying somebodies brainwaves, destroying the body (and keeping the materials for future transports), creating a new body at the location of the transport and then pasting the brainwaves into them.
there could be billions of originals/copies out there.
I'm still amazed that Starfleet ever accepted this tech. Cuz yeah, it's essentially a copy being made, even if there's some wibblywobbly techreason that it's the same atoms used from the original Matter Stream... Cuz it's still a rebuild copy.
It's like draining the paint from a picture and then having someone repaint it again. It'll never be the original picture again.
But hey it's scifi stuff about quantum entanglement and that's a theoretically plausible thing of two things swapping information, so as long as it'd include the 'soul' or whatever you'd call the stuff that makes you 'you', it's still you that appear even if you're a rebuild copy of the same material or a copied image imprinted with the soul onto it.
My question is that, that if you ARE a copy... how long until the copy of a copy issue would begin?
Funny thing about transporter, why can't the transporter buffer duplicate the pattern and make multiple copy of the same person?
Can you do a video on disco’s 32nd century personal transporters?
The “does it kill you” becomes more complicated since it uses the exact same particles to reassemble you as you originally were made of. Cause then you have to define what makes a person a person and determine if putting something back exactly the way it started retains all the properties, or if the interaction itself changes something.
Ie can a transported change your personality, even if all the neural cells and energies are exactly as they were right before transport?
Less so when you remember that Star Trek is a world in which emergent minds are everywhere. V’GR for example. Data for another. As our bodies (including brains) are biological machines and computational drives why wouldn’t our minds also be emergent properties. The mere existence of Q and the Q Continuum seems to support this idea that there are deeper foundational realities in Trek that our minds can at least visit if not inhabit partially or entirely. Moving the pieces of your body no matter how small the pieces are would not kill you because you are the emergent mind and not the body. The real question I have is by what process is the mind still tethered to the body through the transport sequence.
I just came to see the transporter mishaps from ENT
Love the content
Cough Ferengi transporters.
I did not see the "Heisenberg compensator" or is that AKA annular confinement beam?
IIRC from the ubiquitous TNG Technical Manual, Heisenberg compensators and annular confinement beams are completely separate functions within a transporter system.
According to the technobabble, Heisenberg compensators are a workaround to the quantum uncertainty principle. Because the position and the velocity of any given particle cannot both be measured exactly at the same time, which would be kind of necessary for transporters to even begin to do what they say they do. So the TNG Tech authors invented the Heisenberg compensator as a narrative device to preempt any questions that might arise. Though goodness knows how it could possibly work.
@@meson183 Thank you :-)
Beam me up, Scotty!!
P. S. Heinsberg Compensator......
P. P. S. Dr. McCoy hated it(and check himself is that any thing missing after each Beam transport...... )!!
What if every time a character goes through the transporter, one consciousness ends and another begins? And nobody knows it happens because all the memories are in the new consciousness...
Having the frequency of the shields would help to beam through them.
Now, to get all existential... When using a transporter, does your soul go with you when the rest of you goes?? If it's not a physical thing, can it be transported?
See I get transporting to another pad works. You have the machines on that pad to take the pattern and reassemble you and again. But how the hell do you transport to something besides a pad? What reassembles you? And if it’s just the transporter on the ship doing it long distance then why have multiple dedicated rooms to it?
and the self-transporters of the 3rd season of Discovery?
So you are saying transporters work like this except when they don't and they work like that?
On the "would transporters kill you?" question: I believe this video, without ever directly saying so, answers that question. th-cam.com/video/owPC60Ue0BE/w-d-xo.html
The answer is, surprisingly, "no." In that it is impossible to do what the transporters did to make Thomas Riker, and they could _only_ successfully dematerialize and rematerialize arbitrary subjects if they do, in fact, dematerialize and rematerialize, both. You can't "rematerialize" a subject you never dematerialized, so the continuity of identity is at least as solid as any other case: you're you, because you couldn't have been transported if you hadn't been dematerialized. You're not a clone of a dead person. You're you.
Couldn’t you just drop the shields around the transporter array leaving a very small gab in the shields for the signal to through
The transporter didn’t detect the remat in DS9
tl;dr: I don't agree (Star Trek) transporters totally disassemble and rebuild you in a way that introduces the existential concerns (Trek has been clear it's definitely you in and out). It is NOT like breaking apart a LEGO build and rebuilding it because if so, you simply have raw material (sub-atomic particles / LEGO bricks), and the exact previous locations of each brick / particle don't matter, and my LEGO instruction book won't degrade, and mistakes are near impossible, and I can lose any amount of bricks and replace with spares. Instead, I imagine the completed LEGO build has a ton of strings connecting each brick to every other brick it MUST connect to, and transporters pull the build apart, keep the strings intact (strong, weak, or undiscovered sci-fi force), but bunch them all up in the matter stream, then reform everything by putting everything back in its place, sustaining and preserving all functions and thus consciousness; limited edits are possible, but breaking too many strings means you'd no longer build the original, which would be a concern in the brain.
Maybe I'm putting too much weight on the Barclay episode (I feel this was seen elsewhere, though), but a lot of how transporters are shown and how people talk about them make me think they don't fully "disassemble" you in the scary way one might imagine. All particles retain some cohesion with each other which is why you're conscious through most of the process and the trip. Only at some point are you not conscious but I always saw it as more like a stasis. I don't remember anyone saying they black out, but limited movement has been possible (Barclay grabbing someone is the most extreme), people are aware of "rough" transports, etc. The ACB freezing people was - in real world - likely just about keeping people still to make the transport effect, so once that tech improved, we can also assume Trek tech improved to not need to freeze people. I'm sure there are inconsistencies depicted though I'd be willing to chalk that up to real world budget, again, and people will naturally want to stand still anyway. Even pattern degradation feels like it could involve that lack of cohesion.
After all, if you truly disassembled things and people to subatomic particles (ie., lets assume THE single most fundamental "base material" of the universe), then pattern degradation and transporter failures make no sense. As long as you have the data stored on a computer somewhere and you have all the raw material, you can rebuild the thing without caring for where exactly each part was originally. Every time I destroy and rebuild a LEGO set, I have no care to remember exactly which brick went where. I just need the same types to go into the right places, following the instructions, which can't after degrade in 4 minutes. This does sound like potentially killing and making a new person out of your parts. It would technically be a Frankenstein's monster where subatomic particles were all rearranged differently than the original.
The suicide box. Futurama had it right