Skip to main content

star trek - How Can Replicators Work Without Mass/Energy Conversion?


Part of what got me thinking about this was this question about whether Federation transporters use matter or energy and my answer. My answer is taken from the Star Trek: The Next Generation Writers' Technical Manual, Fourth Season Edition. This is sent to all writers and prospective writers (that's how I got it) as the official source of how everything technical works in Star Trek.


On the larger section on the transporter (and not the short summary), On page 28, under The Transporter - Once and for All:



... The stream of molecules read by the pads is sent to the Pattern Buffer, a large cylindrical tank surrounded by superconducting electromagnetic coils. It is here that the object to be transported is stored momentarily before actual beaming away from the ship (or even within the ship). It is the Pattern Buffer and its associated subsystems that have been improved the most in the last half-century. While the actual molecules of an object are held in a spinning magnetic suspension (eight minutes before degradation), the construction sequence of the object can be read, recorded in computer memory (in some cases), and reproduced. There are limits to the complexity of the object, however, and this is where the potential "miracle" machine still eludes.

The Transporter cannot produce working duplicate copies of living tissue or organ systems.

The reason for this is that routine transport involves handling the incredibly vast amount of information required to "disassemble" and "reassemble" a human being or other life form. To transport something, the system must scan, process, and transmit this pattern information. This is analogous to a television, which serves as a conduit to the vast amount of visual information in a normal television transmission.




And then, from the same section, on page 29:



From the Pattern Buffer, the molecular stream and the coded instructions pass through a number of subsystems before reaching the emitter. These include the Subspace, Doppler, and Heisenberg Compensators. Each works to insure that the matter stream is being transmitted or received is in the correct phase, frequency, and so on. (sic)



In short, objects are disassembled by the transporter, the molecules and data about them (like brownian motion) will all be stored and transmitted and re-assembled. This pretty much blows the whole "matter-energy scrambler" theory out of the water and says that the transporter does not change matter to energy and back again.


Yet in the same tech manual, on page 12, under Transporter (this is the shorter summary section), we have this:



Replication technology: The ability to convert matter into energy and back again implies the ability to replicate objects. This is done in the ship's food service units which instantly recreate any dish in the computer's memory.



(I am not using selective quotations or hiding anything relevant, so this is not a game I'm playing by revealing only selected information from the guide.)



The problem here is that, as described in the tech manual itself, the transporter does not convert matter to energy. It creates a stream of matter and reassembles it at the destination.


As I understand this, it would mean that the replicators could replicate material made of the same molecules of whatever is in storage. For example, if you have enough raw carbon molecules, they could be re-assembled into a diamond or graphite, but they could not be broken down through energy/matter conversion and used to make a piece of iron.


Is this (using a matter stream for transport) totally incompatible with replicator technology? Or is there a way, using the transporter technology as described, to still provide replicator technology as we've seen in Star Trek?



Answer



Replicators don't need matter-energy conversion. K. Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation describes building up objects atom by atom using nanoscale assemblers. It isn't much of a stretch to believe that complex objects can be created this way, since our own bodies were assembled from the inside out by molecular processes driven by random events. We have crude replicators already called 3D printers, that will build up complex shapes, but the materials you can currently use are severely limited.


So there are at least two answers to your question. One way is an assembly line of atomic scale manipulators, putting together objects atom by atom. We can already manipulate single atoms directly; I seem to remember IBM researchers writing "IBM" on a surface by positioning single xenon atoms.


Another way to replicate objects is the way nature builds complex living things, i.e. using a compressed programmatic description called a genotype that when placed in the proper medium will produce a phenotype, a finished organism. Everything from birds to electric eels are all produced via this process, so there's no obvious limit as to what could be created.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Did the gatekeeper and the keymaster get intimate in Ghostbusters?

According to TVTropes ( usual warning, don't follow the link or you'll waste half your life in a twisty maze of content ): In Ghostbusters, it's strongly implied that Dana Barret, while possessed by Zuul the Gatekeeper, had sex with Louis Tully, who was possessed by Vinz Clortho the Keymaster (key, gate, get it?), in order to free Big Bad Gozer. In fact, a deleted scene from the movie has Venkman explicitly asking Dana if she and Louis "did it". I turned the quote into a spoiler since it contains really poor-taste joke, but the gist of it is that it's implied that as part of freeing Gozer , the two characters possessed by the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper had sex. Is there any canon confirmation or denial of this theory (canon meaning something from creators' interviews, DVD commentary, script, delete scenes etc...)? Answer The Richard Mueller novelisation and both versions of the script strongly suggest that they didn't have sex (or at the very l...

Why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize Missy right away?

So after it was established that Missy is actually both the Master, and the "woman in the shop" who gave Clara the TARDIS number... ...why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize her right away? I remember the Tenth Doctor in The Sound of Drums stating that Timelords had a way of recognizing other Timelords no matter if they had regenerated. And Clara should have recognized her as well... I'm hoping for a better explanation than "Moffat screwed up", and that I actually missed something after two watchthroughs of the episode. Answer There seems to be a lot of in-canon uncertainty as to the extent to which Time Lords can recognise one another which far pre-dates Moffat's tenure. From the Time Lords page on Wikipedia : Whether or not Time Lords can recognise each other across regenerations is not made entirely clear: In The War Games, the War Chief recognises the Second Doctor despite his regeneration and it is implied that the Doctor knows him when they fir...

story identification - Animation: floating island, flying pests

At least 20 years ago I watched a short animated film which stuck in my mind. The whole thing was wordless, possibly European, and I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine it... It featured a flying island which was inhabited by some creatures who (in my memory) reminded me of the Moomins. The island was frequently bothered by large winged animals who swooped around, although I don't think they did any actual damage. At the end one of the moomin creatures suddenly gets a weird feeling, feels forced to climb to the top of the island and then plunges down a shaft right through the centre - only to emerge at the bottom as one of the flyers. Answer Skywhales from 1983. The story begins with a man warning the tribe of approaching skywhales. The drummers then warn everybody of the hunt as everyone get prepared to set "sail". Except one man is found in his home sleeping as the noise wake him up. He then gets ready and is about to take his weapon as he hesitates then decides ...

warhammer40k - What evidence supposedly supports Tau as related to the Necrontyr?

I've heard of rumours saying that the Tau from Warhammer 40K are in fact the Necrontyr. Is there anything that supports this statement, in WH40K canon? I just found this, on 1d4 chan 1 : Helping Necrons? Or are they Necrontyr descendants? An often overlooked issue is that Tau have no warp signatures, just like Necrons, hate Warpspawns and Warp in general, just like Necrons, have the exact same skull shape,stature and short lives, and the overwhelming need for Technology and beam weapons, JUST LIKE NECRONS. GW may have planned a race that simply prepares a pacified, multiracial galaxy for Necrons to feast upon, supported by Ethereals that have a C'tan phase blade. Then there is a reference of "dark seed in east" by the Deceiver, so the tricky C'tan might give Tzeentch the finger in the JUST AS PLANNED competition. Or maybe GW just has so little creativity that they simply made a new civ conforming to an Old One's standards without knowing it. Is this the connec...