Comic Discussion > ALICE GROVE

Alice Grove MCDT - January 2015

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Kugai:
Don't be silly, all you need to do is say "Energise."

Neko_Ali:
The implications of matter transport and replication technology are huge, in the social, philosophical, legal and technological sense. And most of it was ignored in Star Trek. Even the most basic question of.. if you are destroying a person's body and rebuilding it at the destination, how is their consciousness transferred? Does this mean that the consciousness of a person is merely electrochemical impulses? How does this impact the concept of the soul? Patterns of people can be saved in the transport buffer, does that mean you could make multiple copies of a person by just providing the energy to churn out duplicates? What about medical  uses? Could you alter someone's transport pattern to change how they are reassembled? Couldn't that eliminate most diseases, injuries and possibly even old age by 'resetting' a person's pattern in the transport buffer?

And then there are the social and financial implications of replicators. That was only ever glosses over in the most vaguest of terms in the shows. Mostly by saying everyone's physical needs were taken care of, leaving people to pursue their interests, rather than slave away at jobs for the sake of survival. Star Trek was just very good at handwavium and junk science to fix plot problems, rather than technology and science driving the plot, most of the time. It was pretty much in the state of 'any advanced science is indistinguishable from magic'. And it never took a very close look at the magic.

ReindeerFlotilla:
Exactly. When Dr. Pulaski got infected by the antibodies from the perfect children, there's a throwaway line about how the Transporter should filter out disease vectors like bacteria or viruses. That's just amazing right there. If the transporter can filter out things, why can't it add things? Lose an arm? No problem. Step into the transporter with this bucket of organic matter.

Let's say the Transporter is all or nothing. That is, it can always assemble you as you are when the sensors read you. We'll handwave the ability to remove vectors as super special snowflake circumstances. But we'll assume that the pattern from the last time you used the transporter can't be combined with the one generated just now (ignoring the fact that the Dr. Pulaski issue I mentioned was solved by doing just that). So it can't just add back an arm. It reassembles you exactly as you were the last time you used the transporter. So if you used the transporter 3 days ago, you become you 3 days ago. Everything you learned/experienced in those 3 days is lost.

So obviously you don't want to do that to fix a paper cut. But what about a more serious injury. Like death.

From your POV you're dead either way. But from the POV of the people who know you, from your contribution to society, your death can be fixed!

Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga has this idea of implants that track your experience. Then you go to a shop and and download your life. If you die, you can be brought back from your backup. A transporter pattern is a backup like that, except it's not just your memory/personality. It's you, right down to the clothes you had on at the time.

There's a lot of story potential there. Such a story would be kinda difficult to tell, since we are used to death being a serious thing--it's the same problem as creating a truly alien intelligence, writ small. But it is writ small, so it's actually do able. Some of the theories about why Gavia was so cavalier about using (seemingly) deadly force relate. if death isn't a permanent thing, people behave a little different.

(Hamilton's world, with the fact that body-loss also equals losing everything since your last trip to the back up--though, IIRC recovering your chip allows you to be restored right up to the time of you death. So if I shot you in the head, I've caused you a body-loss. If I then shot you in the chip, it's murder, even though you have a an earlier backup--has interesting results. Like a character is declared legally dead due to disappearance, so they restore him from backup. Not knowing if the other him is still alive somewhere gives him an anxiety complex. I think there's a side plot where a person has faked their death so that they'll be restored from backup and the backup will have to deal with the repercussions of their actions and debts. Been a long time since I read those books.)

BenRG:
Alternative Possibility - The transport volunteers fly stealth shuttles to drop off supplies for Alice and the other Caretakers (as well as do  things like cloud seeding). This is done exclusively at night. Not wanting to wander into (or even find) the town at night, Ardent just decided to take 40 winks at the point where the pilot dropped him off and that's where Jack and his uncle found him.

This doesn't entirely explain Ardent's actions. One explanation is that he didn't entirely trust the guy and he half expected to wake up on the wrong planet or in the exercise yard of one of the Praeses' prisons for those who are persistently naughty (for example by trying to break into Preserves).

jwhouk:
Some of the transporter issues were discussed in TNG. Biggest one was Scottie's idea of saving his transporter pattern in his doomed ship, which resulted in him suddenly appearing - still at the age he was in ST:G - on Enterprise D.

Transporter use was glossed over in TOS because of the expedience of telling the story. They couldn't have the captain and crew fly down via shuttlecraft every single episode, as that would increase the budget of the show. So, they developed the idea of a transporter which would allow the actors to just "suddenly" be in the place where they could start telling the story.

However Jeph wants to explain it is fine, but I think the similarity is clear - in developing the story, we need to get all the characters in the same place, while indicating that this isn't the world of QC (or even the Real World) that we're dealing with.

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