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Star Trek Transporter Technology, What would change?

 
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Tom
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Joined: 07 Nov 2014
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Location: Gulf Coast

PostPosted: Fri Nov 07, 2014 10:47 pm    Post subject: Star Trek Transporter Technology, What would change? Reply with quote

Lets look at Star Trek's Transporter technology. Keeping in mind that the global society is no longer wealth based and that transporters are widely and commonly used.
What types of changes might occur to our common lives right now.

I think the most apparent change will be the lack of needing roads.
What would happen to the roads and highways?
Some might be converted to parks
A lot might be converted to farmlands
We have long stretches of highways that might be used for solar or wind power.
Some local streets might be reduced to small paved pathways for local foot or bike travel but in this future teleportation is widespread and common so there may not be a need to walk or travel over a surface. Cars and gas stations would have been dismantled and recycled hundreds of years earlier.

If you had a transporter unit in your foyer, your house may not even have a door!
Your transporter might be programmed with a speed dial of destinations you frequently use but where would you go? Not the market, You could just transport items you needed right to your home. Not your job, You could just work right from your own home office. You might have family & friends dialed in for visiting. Buildings would be built without doors. Whole warehouses might exist as hollow cubes without loading docks, ramps or doors.

Since transporter and replicator technology is basically dissolving and reconstituting matter at a molecular scale there would be no need for anything to be produced. Food, clothing and objects might be constructed in the transporter and materialized right to you.

There would be no need for stairs, hallways, hatches, airlocks, gangways or stuff like that. Try to imagine an environment where you didn't need to physically move yourself from one place to the next.

What do you see?
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Pye-Rate
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 08, 2014 3:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow! You make the case for the ultimate hermit.
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Tom
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 08, 2014 3:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

LOL - Too funny!

You wouldn't be a hermit unless your transporter broke down. But in that universe there are always triple redundancies so worst case scenario you break out your portable transporter to go out and find a repairman.

Or, since money is no longer used, just transport a new unit in.
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Randy
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 08, 2014 4:10 pm    Post subject: Re: Star Trek Transporter Technology, What would change? Reply with quote

Tom wrote:
Since transporter and replicator technology is basically dissolving and reconstituting matter at a molecular scale there would be no need for anything to be produced. Food, clothing and objects might be constructed in the transporter and materialized right to you.

I always wondered how replicators worked. Since you can't create matter out of thin air, I realized that replicating food, clothing, and other objects would be possible by reconstituting matter from transporter accidents. The more transporter failures that you have, the more spare molecules you would have to create other things. If you were transporting and incurred a failure, you might be restored later as a chair or even a table.
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Tom
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 08, 2014 4:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

HaHaHaHa - Good One!

Replicators are transporters that have constitution instructions.

There is actual scientific theory and research that resembles this technology. Nanobot Assemblers!

If you enjoy reading Eric Drexler composed a book about Nanotechnology that is very easy to read and oh so Science Fictiony!



His website for the book is in HTML format and
completely readable and there is also a PDF version
suitable for downloading to read offline.

The subject matter deals with the creation of nano-assemblers and disassemblers that take apart molecules and reconstruct them atom by atom. All that is needed is matter.

There is a whole science dedicated to developing nano-bots. They are the holy grail.

I highly recommend reading his book. Very interesting and so fun. I would like to see more Science Fiction featuring Nanotech.


Chapter 6 wrote:
Since nanotechnology lends itself to making small things, consider the smallest person-carrying spacecraft: the spacesuit. Forced to use weak, heavy, passive materials, engineers now make bulky, clumsy spacesuits. A look at an advanced spacesuit will illustrate some of the capabilities of nanotechnology.

Imagine that you are aboard a space station, spun to simulate Earth's normal gravity. After instruction, you have been given a suit to try out: there it hangs on the wall, a gray, rubbery-looking thing with a transparent helmet. You take it down, heft its substantial weight, strip, and step in through the open seam on the front.

The suit feels softer than the softest rubber, but has a slick inner surface. It slips on easily and the seam seals at a touch. It provides a skintight covering like a thin leather glove around your fingers, thickening as it runs up your arm to become as thick as your hand in the region around your torso. Behind your shoulders, scarcely noticeable, is a small backpack. Around your head, almost invisible, is the helmet. Below your neck the suits inner surface hugs your skin with a light, uniform touch that soon becomes almost imperceptible.

You stand up and walk around, experimenting. You bounce on your toes and feel no extra weight from the suit. You bend and stretch and feel no restraint, no wrinkling, no pressure points. When you rub your fingers together they feel sensitive, as if bare - but somehow slightly thicker. As you breathe, the air tastes clean and fresh. In fact, you feel that you could forget that you are wearing a suit at all. What is more, you feel just as comfortable when you step out into the vacuum of space.

The suit manages to do all this and more by means of complex activity within a structure having a texture almost as intricate as that of living tissue. A glove finger a millimeter thick has room for a thousand micron-thick layers of active nanomachinery and nanoelectronics. A fingertip-sized patch has room for a billion mechanical nanocomputers, with 99.9 percent of the volume left over for other components.

In particular, this leaves room for an active structure. The middle layer of the suit material holds a three-dimensional weave of diamond-based fibers acting much like artificial muscle, but able to push as well as pull (as discussed in the Notes). These fibers take up much of the volume and make the suit material as strong as steel. Powered by microscopic electric motors and controlled by nanocomputers, they give the suit material its supple strength, making it stretch, contract, and bend as needed. When the suit felt soft earlier, this was because it had been programmed to act soft. The suit has no difficulty holding its shape in a vacuum; it has strength enough to avoid blowing up like a balloon. Likewise, it has no difficulty supporting its own weight and moving to match your motions, quickly, smoothly, and without resistance. This is one reason why it almost seems not to be there at all.

Your fingers feel almost bare because you feel the texture of what you touch. This happens because pressure sensors cover the suit's surface and active structure covers its lining: the glove feels the shape of whatever you touch - and the detailed pattern of pressure it exerts - and transmits the same texture pattern to your skin. It also reverses the process, transmitting to the outside the detailed pattern of forces exerted by your skin on the inside of the glove. Thus the glove pretends that it isn't there, and your skin feels almost bare.

The suit has the strength of steel and the flexibility of your own body. If you reset the suit's controls, the suit continues to match your motions, but with a difference. Instead of simply transmitting the forces you exert, it amplifies them by a factor of ten. Likewise, when something brushes against you, the suit now transmits only a tenth of the force to the inside. You are now ready for a wrestling match with a gorilla.

The fresh air you breathe may not seem surprising; the backpack includes a supply of air and other consumables. Yet after a few days outside in the sunlight, your air will not run out: like a plant, the suit absorbs sunlight and the carbon dioxide you exhale, producing fresh oxygen. Also like a plant (or a whole ecosystem), it breaks down other wastes into simple molecules and reassembles them into the molecular patterns of fresh, wholesome food. In fact, the suit will keep you comfortable, breathing, and well fed almost anywhere in the inner solar system.

What is more, the suit is durable. It can tolerate the failure of numerous nanomachines because it has so many others to take over the load. The space between the active fibers leaves room enough for assemblers and disassemblers to move about and repair damaged devices. The suit repairs itself as fast as it wears out.

Within the bounds of the possible, the suit could have many other features. A speck of material smaller than a pinhead could hold the text of every book ever published, for display on a fold-out screen. Another speck could be a "seed" containing the blueprints for a range of devices greater than the total the human race has yet built, along with replicating assemblers able to make any or all of them.

What is more, fast technical AI systems like those described in the last chapter could design the suit in a morning and have it built by afternoon.

All that we accomplish in space with modern bulk technology will be swiftly and dramatically surpassed shortly after molecular technology and automated engineering arrive. In particular, we will build replicating assemblers that work in space. These replicators will use solar energy as plants do, and with it they will convert asteroidal rubble into copies of themselves and products for human use. With them, we will grasp the resources of the solar system.
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Pye-Rate
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 09, 2014 4:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

For a sample of how you don't want to see nanotech to work see Stargate replicaters.
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Tom
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 09, 2014 11:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Great example!

The 'Grey Goo' disaster is fodder for many scifi storylines.

Most famously The Blob remake explores a type of gray goo disaster as an entity.

Looking at Drexler's work I think we will have much more control over the nanobots and the Grey Goo wont be a real issue. That is, as long as humans are controlling the programming. Who is to say what an AI Singularity might do if given the chance.

Some other Nanotech phrases are
Self-reconfiguring modular robot
Programmable matter
Utility fog
Smartdust
Claytronics
Ice-nine
Alkahest

Exit Mundi has a scenario on Gray Goo annihilation.

That reminds me, Exit Mundi has lots of End of the World
Scenarios that are fun to read, Check it out
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm
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Krel
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2014 9:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The problem with a ST Transporter, is that it is going to use a lot of resources. To destroy an object, break it down, then transmit it to another location, then duplicate it is going to take a lot of computing power. The amount of computing power and memory it would take for an inanimate object, much less a living one boggles the mind. Also energy. A lot of energy.

It is not going to take the place of doors, halls, corridors, stairs, elevators, escalators or ramps. Transporting in most of those instances would not just be incredibly lazy, but a massive misuse of resources.

No matter what, you will eventually suffer power or equipment failures. No matter how many backup systems you have. No matter how much redundancy you have. Eventually you are going to have a catastrophic failure. No device is perfect, and no device lasts forever. And the odds are that the failure will happen at the worst possible time.

Try making it out of your windowless, door-less house or building when the worse happens. You have no transporter, and the building is in flames. Your own personal oven.

Larry Niven has already written about the problem of having a teleportation booth in your home. Just imagine how bad it will be if someone can not only beam into your home, but into any room of your home, at any time!

There will still be ground and air vehicle, because people will want them, and because it will be less expensive. The Transporter will still be inefficient for some purposes and tasks.

Considering that the Transporter works by destroying the original item, then creating a copy. I predict that when a person gets transported, eventually changes are going to be made that, that is not the original person. But rather a duplicate as the original person was killed by the Transporter. Is it murder or suicide?

Inheritance issues are going to be a nightmare.

The Transporter will be a criminal's dream. Why bother to enter to rob a house, when you can just transport EVERYTHING from the house. Same for stores, jewelry stores, banks or any business. Safes will be a joke. It will be a boom to kidnappers. They could grab a person in their home, in an office, off the street. Practically anywhere. And murderers, the Transporter will be the perfect device to kill, then dispose of evidence.

Tom, thanks for the link to the book. I had read the spacesuit part years ago on a space travel site. I had no idea that it came from a book.

David.
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Tom
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 10, 2014 10:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You're welcome David.

All very sound and valid points as well. The same can be said about just about all of Star Trek's technology.

That's why Star Trek is busted.

But we wont tell anyone....
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 16, 2019 1:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Krel wrote:
No matter what, you will eventually suffer power or equipment failures. No matter how many backup systems you have. No matter how much redundancy you have. Eventually you are going to have a catastrophic failure. No device is perfect, and no device lasts forever. And the odds are that the failure will happen at the worst possible time.

I just re-read your remarkable essay on Star Trek transporter technology and I was impressed anew! Very Happy

There's no denying that what you said above is true and probably always will be for all human technology. Hopefully it will improve dramatically until the breakdowns become so rare people will feel reasonably comfortable using transporters.

After all, nearly 40,000 Americans die in auto accidents annually (an average of about 100 a day), and yet people don't refuse to ride in cars because it seems too risky.

You also made a clear case for the tremendous amount of energy and computing power a transporter would use, so unless we discover an almost unlimited cheap energy source, the use of transporters will be restricted.


Krel wrote:
Larry Niven has already written about the problem of having a teleportation booth in your home. Just imagine how bad it will be if someone can not only beam into your home, but into any room of your home, at any time!

Niven did his usual fine job of thoroughly thinking through his "transport booth" version of transporters, and his novels address some of the same genuine concerns you described. But your list of transporter misuses mentions a few things I don't remember reading in Niven's books, although he probably thought of them, just as you did. Cool
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johnnybear
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 16, 2019 8:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

To be honest I doubt the average Joe will have access to transporter technology! I think that is in the hands of the military and science departments of the twenty third century!
JB
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