You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century

[Starglider]

No, wait, they put the two halves of Kirk back together that one time, and there was the Tuvix incident.

Of course, those were both one-off accidents with risky experimental procedures to fix them, and total scientific nonsense. An actual merge would require advanced cognitive engineering that the Federation doesn't appear to possess (limited mind probes do exist in Trek, so they're not that far off, but they can't reliably read, edit and rewrite memories).

Even the Riker duplication incident required a matter stream duplication that the technology isn't set up to normally do, although they could probably develop it fairly easily if there was no cultural taboo.

[biostem]

There was one episode where they were testing the transporter, (I think it was the one where Barclay saw something mid-transport), where they beamed what looked like a missile or metal canister, and it apparently contained some biological samples, as Crusher was seen taking something out and scanning it w/ her medical tricorder, (if I'm remembering correctly). If I am indeed correct, then at the very least, they do use some living samples to test the transporters with. Just why they didn't, for instance, try to use the transporters to reproduce an item that they could transport but not replicate, is beyond me, (like that season 1 episode where they needed to negotiate for some cure to a disease, (and which ended up getting Yar abducted in the process).

[Batman]

Presumably because transporters can't do it? They're really good at rebuilding what they took apart before but how often did we actually see transporters build something new? On purpose?

[biostem]

Presumably because transporters can't do it? They're really good at rebuilding what they took apart before but how often did we actually see transporters build something new? On purpose?

We know that transporters don't need the energy from the originally scanned/dematerialized object, in order to reproduce it, (when Riker got copied/cloned). We know that transporters can build a pattern without actually scanning the person/object each time, (when they used a hair sample from Dr. Polaski before she got exposed to those genetically engineered kids). Or, at the very least, said patterns can be stored without needing a fresh scan every time. Thus, it should be possible to scan an item, then simply supply the transporters with energy/matter from somewhere else, in order to duplicate what you initially scanned.

[Simon_Jester]

And yet no one does this.

I mean, the applications would be obvious, you could reboot people from backup if they die on an away team mission, for instance.

This strongly suggests that either it is simply not possible to do this. Say, because transporter pattern buffers normally don't store comprehensive detailed records of large, complex objects, and have to be specially modified to do this a la Scotty... modified in ways that would badly or dangerously interfere with transporter operations.

No, wait, they put the two halves of Kirk back together that one time, and there was the Tuvix incident.

Of course, those were both one-off accidents with risky experimental procedures to fix them, and total scientific nonsense. An actual merge would require advanced cognitive engineering that the Federation doesn't appear to possess (limited mind probes do exist in Trek, so they're not that far off, but they can't reliably read, edit and rewrite memories).

Personally I always liked the idea that all the theories advanced about what had happened in the "two Kirks" episode were bullshit, and that the real problem was that both Kirks had incomplete, moderately damaged versions of the original Kirk's brain... but damaged in different ways.

So "good Kirk" appeared with mild brain trauma that got significantly worse, and compromised his executive function, possibly among other things. "Evil Kirk's" damage seems to have been more extensive- a lot of his social skills, instincts, and even memories appear to have been missing.

And then the only way to more or less reconstruct Kirk is to map the two versions of his brain, overlaying functional parts of Evil Kirk's brain over the damaged bits of Good Kirk and vice versa.

So 'in reality' the whole thing is a neurological issue, not some kind of metaphysical good-and-evil thing. Although as a work of fiction it works quite well as a metaphysical thing.

[Welf]

Based on what I remember of the TNG Technical Manual (admittedly not canon), there are no technical issues preventing anyone from using transporters for cloning, backups, or sending expendable copies of personnel on away missions. It seems more like a whole society has a blind spot, probably mostly deliberate, to a lot of potential transporter applications.

I will observe, though, that although the transporter offers a quick and easy way to fork a person, there's no obvious way to merge branches. No, wait, they put the two halves of Kirk back together that one time, and there was the Tuvix incident.

So, the obvious way to do an away mission would be to fork your best team and send one set on the mission, then merge any that return with the instances who stayed behind (after screening them for problematic issues).

The issues with the merging aside, that would also turn your people into commodities. And the people who die still die, even if you get backups. Making death so cheap is not how the Federation rolls. But it makes no sense the Cardassians or Romulans don't use this.

[Grumman]

Has anyone ever come up with an explanation for why it is that transproters aren't used for full on cloning? At least apart from the Riker accident.

It seems more like a whole society has a blind spot, probably mostly deliberate, to a lot of potential transporter applications.

The writers have a blind spot. You can try to find an in-universe solution to this out-of-universe problem but in this particular case I do not think there is a satisfying way of doing so, as the writers have already doubled down on the problem.

(The solution is simple: decide which side of the transporter problem any piece of technology is on and never, ever switch sides. If a technology transports your consciousness or your entire body from one place to another, you can use it the same way Star Trek uses transporters. If a technology creates a doppelganger that shares your memories but is not you, that still has interesting applications that you can build a sci-fi story around. But no technology is ever going to do both, especially not by accident.)

[Ted C]

I suppose it's possible that "transporter cloning" is illegal for the same reason that "genetic augmentation" is illegal. The two concepts are tied together in Federation history because of the Augments that went nuts, so both cloning and genetic manipulation are illegal under Federation law (and despised in Federation culture). The fact that a transporter does it in an entirely different manner is irrelevant to them; it's still cloning and still horrible.

[Patroklos]

That augment thing was a human issue only? I don't remember any other species, specifically those who make up the majority of Federation members, mentioning any phobias about this.

But even if we do say is a trans species phobia, we have the Borg. I suppose you can say they prefer to assimilate over replicate due to the drive to add distinctiveness and thus strengthen themselves, but they don't seem the type to let ideological purity overcome expediency. The Dominion shouldn't have any issues with this either given they already use disposable sentient soldiers.

[Purple]

Given that these events only ever happen in accidents I am inclined to believe that they are in fact unable to replicate them. Given the complexity and number of magical particles and such in their universe this is not too surprising. Consider for a moment the proposal that the federation and its engineers don't actually understand completely the science of what they are working with. They know how to make a transporter and they know how to make it work, most of the time. Just like we know how to make and fly aircraft. But they can no more predict the intricate and erratic whims of their broken down subspace magic particle physics than we can the storm that suddenly out of nowhere brings that airplane down from the sky. So it might well be the fact that for what ever reason all attempts at properly and consistently replicating such incidents fail because the engineers fail to account for environmental conditions.

[Grumman]

Given that these events only ever happen in accidents I am inclined to believe that they are in fact unable to replicate them. Given the complexity and number of magical particles and such in their universe this is not too surprising. Consider for a moment the proposal that the federation and its engineers don't actually understand completely the science of what they are working with. They know how to make a transporter and they know how to make it work, most of the time. Just like we know how to make and fly aircraft. But they can no more predict the intricate and erratic whims of their broken down subspace magic particle physics than we can the storm that suddenly out of nowhere brings that airplane down from the sky. So it might well be the fact that for what ever reason all attempts at properly and consistently replicating such incidents fail because the engineers fail to account for environmental conditions.

That comparison makes no sense. To crash is the natural fate of an airborne object, so an aircraft succumbing to that natural tendency to crash as the result of environmental hazards is nothing particularly extraordinary. If you reduce someone to their constituent subatomic particles, their natural fate is not to be reassembled perfectly healthy, it is at best to rematerialise as a smear only identifiable as human through chemical analysis. If your transporter can accidentally create a doppelganger, that strongly suggests that doing so deliberately should be as easy as deliberately crashing a plane.

[Batman]

Yeah, because there were totally no unusual circumstances in the what, less than half a dozen instances it happened? Freaky mineral present? No problem. Surely every weather storm ever will contain that. Oh wait. Weather interferes with airplane operation in largely known and largely predictable ways. The Feds are at best guessing about how those duplication/merging effects happened. But yeah, totally comparable.

[Grumman]

Yeah, because there were totally no unusual circumstances in the what, less than half a dozen instances it happened? Freaky mineral present? No problem. Surely every weather storm ever will contain that. Oh wait. Weather interferes with airplane operation in largely known and largely predictable ways. The Feds are at best guessing about how those duplication/merging effects happened. But yeah, totally comparable.

Then they would not happen. The only reason somebody can step into a transporter and not die horribly is because of impossibly precise engineering. If anything interferes with that impossibly precise engineering and the system does not know precisely how to compensate, you will never get a functioning human being out the other end.

[Purple]

Yeah, because there were totally no unusual circumstances in the what, less than half a dozen instances it happened? Freaky mineral present? No problem. Surely every weather storm ever will contain that. Oh wait. Weather interferes with airplane operation in largely known and largely predictable ways. The Feds are at best guessing about how those duplication/merging effects happened. But yeah, totally comparable.

Then they would not happen. The only reason somebody can step into a transporter and not die horribly is because of impossibly precise engineering. If anything interferes with that impossibly precise engineering and the system does not know precisely how to compensate, you will never get a functioning human being out the other end.

However it is much easier to make a system that only compensates under a "normal" range of conditions than to make one that does so under every single condition possible.

[Simon_Jester]

The point here is that ANY failure of the transporter, that is not compensated for, should be fatal. Or at least horribly damaging, like "your left arm didn't materialize" or "your brain loses all the molecules capable of detecting serotonin because the transporter accidentally distorted their chemical makeup."

If I were transporting people and wanted to deliberately recreate such a failure, I certainly could. In fact, the transporter IS often used to do more or less that kind of thing- to transport part of an object without moving all of it, or to beam up one object in close physical contact with another, or to selectively beam someone up without beaming up a poison or germ in their body.

So as Grumman points out, making the transporter 'fail' in the way that causes duplication should be quite easy, compared to the challenge of making the transporter 'work' at all.

[Purple]

I disagree. Yes, making it work is hard and thus making it fail is easy. But that's only for a generic failure. What you are talking about is making it fail in exactly the right way to create a living functioning duplicate. Not a 99% accurate but dead duplicate. Not a duplicate without an arm or leg or brain. That probably is no easier than making it work.

[Simon_Jester]

[sighs]

If that were the case, then the 'duplicate two intact copies' failure mode would be rare compared to the 'duplicate a partially intact copy' mode. For every time someone beams up Riker and accidentally leaves a copy of Riker at the transporter site (or vice versa), there would be many cases of someone beaming up Riker and accidentally leaving a pile of red goo at the transporter site.

That does not happen.

So clearly, the "make two intact copies" event is an entirely separate failure mode of the transporter which has nothing to do with any of the normal failure modes. However, it remains a failure mode that can be repeated, done under a variety of different conditions, and whose existence has been documented for many years.

This is basic engineering principles- a failure mode that occurs in the field can be duplicated in the laboratory. A failure mode that occurs repeatedly under a variety of circumstances can probably be duplicated in the laboratory rather easily, once the technicians get their heads out of their asses.

[Purple]

Honestly I think that if you look at ST "science" you'll find it works a lot more like Victorian engineering than 20th century stuff. They know how to make things work, sort of but not why it's a bad idea to wire up all your home appliances to a single uninsulated wire that runs pass your leaky gas pipe. As in, they understand how to make things that work but not all of the underlying principals of why they do. That's the feeling I always got anyway.

[Zeropoint]

That impression probably comes from the fact that the shows are written by writers and other creative types, and not by scientists, engineers, or technicians. To a lot of people, science and technology might as well be magic; the idea that someone had to understand it to make it work in the first place, and that therefore it operates by understandable, predictable principles just doesn't occur to them. I once met someone who appeared to believe that we didn't really know whether electrons have a positive or negative charge . . . despite the fact that he owned a Playstation, built with microchips composed of microscopic transistors which couldn't be made to work without a thorough understanding of electron behavior.