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Thoughts on Star Trek's hand-wavy technologies - Replicators
wombat140
Member Posts: 971 Arc User
in Ten Forward
The replicator and the transporter in Star Trek are usually just used as hand-wavy devices to make the plot work, the things themselves aren't discussed. That's a pity, since they're fascinating ideas themselves. It doesn't have to be like that when we do them.
I was thinking about the practicalities of how replicators might be used while I was writing "Keeping the Feasts" (my entry for ULC18), and thought of these. I've been thinking about what some of the constraints might be on a replicator in practice (of course, I know the point of them is supposed to be that there aren't any constraints - but frankly, something that can produce anything you want with no limits is ONE story, and all other stories require some other arrangement). It's my belief that these kind of practicalities, arising from some technology or other, are what provides half of the stories in science fiction, and science fact.
* Thinking about it, if a replicator actually copied the original item atom for atom, the size of any pattern file would be astronomical. Twelve grams of pure carbon contain around 6 x 10^23 (Avogadro's number) atoms; that is, 600,000 billion billion - a terabyte, the size of a good hard disk these days, is 1000 billion bytes. And that's twelve grams.
Of course, computers in Star Trek are known to be so powerful it's silly, with quantum processes and everything, so they could be capable of dealing with that, but it'd also be entirely plausible that even they aren't, which would be more interesting. A raw file would be so big that transferring or transmitting it anywhere would be impossible, you'd have to use it on the spot, and even then it would probably be deleted after use because it was hogging disk space. Compressing files would be possible, in a similar way to JPEG picture files: specify a small bit of molecular structure and then say "fill this area with that repeating pattern of molecules". But that would reduce quality, which would account for why some people in Star Trek insist that replicated food isn't as good as the real thing. (Of course, some people will always be like that, but they'd have more excuse for thinking so this way!)
* I can think of three possible kinds of "replication", which might all exist side by side:
1) Mechanically putting together various substances, like a 3-D printer. That might be what's meant by a "fabricator", a term I sometimes see mentioned in the game.
2) Molecular scale, rearranging one molecule into another. So you could take a supply of organic rubbish and use the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen etc. to make other substances.
3) Atomic scale, rearranging one atom into another. So you could take a supply of any old kind of matter and turn it into energy, or even just feed in energy from outside if there was enough of it (but it would have to be a huge supply, rememember E=mc^2), and create any kind of matter, solid gold if you liked.
It may be that there actually isn't 3), i.e. it can't transmute elements. That wouldn't square with the idea that it's related to transporters, which clearly just turn out whatever kind of matter it says in the pattern. And in some ways it seems no harder to imagine how you'd fish out a few stray atoms of cobalt, say, from a mass of old cabbage stalks than how you'd create them from another kind of matter. But it would account for the numerous mineral substances that Plot Says can't be replicated. Dilithium might have a difficult crystal structure that the replicator couldn't do, possibly incorporating some kind of exotic matter too, but what about latinum? It's apparently just a metal, and is liquid in the pure state and therefore shouldn't HAVE any particular structure.
You'd expect 1) to take much less energy than 2) which would take less than 3). I get the impression that replicating does take large amounts of energy, hence why it was rationed on Voyager - or was that simply because they had only a few replicator units and could do only so much at a time? I'm running with the idea (thanks to Jonsills whose "Academy Teachings" piece I got it from) that in fact, replication is cheap only in a few places where energy is plentiful enough - on Earth, a few other old and advanced worlds like Vulcan, and aboard starships, which have to generate (literally) astronomical amounts of energy anyway to power the warp drive; it's Earth that has the post-scarcity civilisation, other parts of the Federation still have limits to their goods and may or may not use money.
Finally, and funly; you'd expect there to be some kind of CAD programs to exist, in which you could design objects and have the replicator make them - for instance, draw a 3D shape and have the replicator do it in steel, or copper, or titanium - or diamond, if you were in that kind of humour. (Perhaps all the drinking glasses on a starship are made from replicated diamond! That would be one way to stop them all getting smashed every time the ship lurches!)
Got mighty carried away there. Anyway, those are my working theories. What's anyone else think?
I was thinking about the practicalities of how replicators might be used while I was writing "Keeping the Feasts" (my entry for ULC18), and thought of these. I've been thinking about what some of the constraints might be on a replicator in practice (of course, I know the point of them is supposed to be that there aren't any constraints - but frankly, something that can produce anything you want with no limits is ONE story, and all other stories require some other arrangement). It's my belief that these kind of practicalities, arising from some technology or other, are what provides half of the stories in science fiction, and science fact.
* Thinking about it, if a replicator actually copied the original item atom for atom, the size of any pattern file would be astronomical. Twelve grams of pure carbon contain around 6 x 10^23 (Avogadro's number) atoms; that is, 600,000 billion billion - a terabyte, the size of a good hard disk these days, is 1000 billion bytes. And that's twelve grams.
Of course, computers in Star Trek are known to be so powerful it's silly, with quantum processes and everything, so they could be capable of dealing with that, but it'd also be entirely plausible that even they aren't, which would be more interesting. A raw file would be so big that transferring or transmitting it anywhere would be impossible, you'd have to use it on the spot, and even then it would probably be deleted after use because it was hogging disk space. Compressing files would be possible, in a similar way to JPEG picture files: specify a small bit of molecular structure and then say "fill this area with that repeating pattern of molecules". But that would reduce quality, which would account for why some people in Star Trek insist that replicated food isn't as good as the real thing. (Of course, some people will always be like that, but they'd have more excuse for thinking so this way!)
* I can think of three possible kinds of "replication", which might all exist side by side:
1) Mechanically putting together various substances, like a 3-D printer. That might be what's meant by a "fabricator", a term I sometimes see mentioned in the game.
2) Molecular scale, rearranging one molecule into another. So you could take a supply of organic rubbish and use the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen etc. to make other substances.
3) Atomic scale, rearranging one atom into another. So you could take a supply of any old kind of matter and turn it into energy, or even just feed in energy from outside if there was enough of it (but it would have to be a huge supply, rememember E=mc^2), and create any kind of matter, solid gold if you liked.
It may be that there actually isn't 3), i.e. it can't transmute elements. That wouldn't square with the idea that it's related to transporters, which clearly just turn out whatever kind of matter it says in the pattern. And in some ways it seems no harder to imagine how you'd fish out a few stray atoms of cobalt, say, from a mass of old cabbage stalks than how you'd create them from another kind of matter. But it would account for the numerous mineral substances that Plot Says can't be replicated. Dilithium might have a difficult crystal structure that the replicator couldn't do, possibly incorporating some kind of exotic matter too, but what about latinum? It's apparently just a metal, and is liquid in the pure state and therefore shouldn't HAVE any particular structure.
You'd expect 1) to take much less energy than 2) which would take less than 3). I get the impression that replicating does take large amounts of energy, hence why it was rationed on Voyager - or was that simply because they had only a few replicator units and could do only so much at a time? I'm running with the idea (thanks to Jonsills whose "Academy Teachings" piece I got it from) that in fact, replication is cheap only in a few places where energy is plentiful enough - on Earth, a few other old and advanced worlds like Vulcan, and aboard starships, which have to generate (literally) astronomical amounts of energy anyway to power the warp drive; it's Earth that has the post-scarcity civilisation, other parts of the Federation still have limits to their goods and may or may not use money.
Finally, and funly; you'd expect there to be some kind of CAD programs to exist, in which you could design objects and have the replicator make them - for instance, draw a 3D shape and have the replicator do it in steel, or copper, or titanium - or diamond, if you were in that kind of humour. (Perhaps all the drinking glasses on a starship are made from replicated diamond! That would be one way to stop them all getting smashed every time the ship lurches!)
Got mighty carried away there. Anyway, those are my working theories. What's anyone else think?
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However, I think your idea of replicator patterns being compressed for storage makes perfect sense. That explains the frequent complaints about the inferior quality of replicated food, while still making it superior to the reconstituted food used in earlier generations. ("On Earth, today, it's Thanksgiving. If the crew has to eat synthetic meatloaf, I want it to look like turkey." - Capt. Kirk, "Charlie X")
The effect used when replicated material appears does imply that it's an offshoot of transporter technology, which seems reasonable to me - a stored pattern, even with data compression, should work acceptably, so long as you're not dealing with living matter. I am impressed, and somewhat disturbed, by the fact that small alterations can be made to the pattern during the process - you can specify, for instance, the temperature of a liquid to be disbursed, which requires altering the energy input during the process. One can imagine the effect if this were used as part of the transporter mechanism. <shudder>
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device." - David Langford
Seriously though... replicators seem to reside on the principle that matter and energy are interchangable and likely actually convert energy into matter. However, Latinum (which is really just "unobtanium" in order to have capitalists in our post-scarcity economy).
So, if you need some sort of rationalle why you can't replicate latinum, assume it's an element we don't even know about. Since we know all elements up to a specific atomic mass, it must be extremely high atomic number. Perhaps replicators can't produce anything past the sixth period on the periodic table and hence are confined to simple metals and organic molecules. Why? who knows! Something to do with the resolution of the ionization energy of valence electrons on the heavier atoms, I'm sure...
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
You cannot create matter from nothing - in order to replicate something you always need something else "recycled". Maybe molecules can be transmutated, but you need some matter in stock to create other matter. Then the transporter/replicator will assemble those molecules, but if they replicate complex systems like computer chips they will be faulty which in conclusion means you can replicate raw materials but everything needs to be assembled manually/mechanically in order to asure quality and function (imagine replciatons of faulty torpedo warheads - ouch). Also, starships and shuttles need also be wielded/built traditionally/manually, you can't simply replicate whole ships or anything.
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It's not giant ball of red matter, I'll give you that.
Yeah, ST has never been all that internally consistent (why wouldn't they have non-sentient robots doing this stuff? At least they tried putting some holograms on mining duty once as if these people had never heard of machines. I imagine earth will have fully automated mining in the next 50ish years as computer visual/spacial recognition and processing algorithms have been making vast strides.)
Because Star Trek isn't that internally consistent technologically, I usually don't care all that much about technologies in it as some of them are completely absurd to begin with. I care enough that "red black hole goop!" bothers me and comes off as extremely lazy when you could just as easily make something more convincing sounding by paying a physics professor or even undergraduate $100 to come up with some magic black hole generating hypothesis that is at least somewhat grounded in reality or at least esoteric theoretical physics - even if the technology and its effects end up being a work of fantasy.
But, honestly, if you're just calling it "red goop" you might as well just throw in wizards in space as it does little more to break a sense of immersion (JJ has made it clear he loves space wizards and not space pseudoscientists). Space telepaths were kind of bad enough as it is.
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
Yes, anyone here could have given them a better explanation, and probably done it for free just so we could point at the screen and say, "Hey, they used my idea!", but keep your ill-educated hacks straight here.
As for how big replicator files are, im going to assume that the file consists of the bare minimum of information. Like not the entire structure of the object, but a list of materials that composes the object, followed by either a complex algorithm, or list of instructions on how to construct each component. Followed by another set of algorithms or instructions (if I remember algorithm means list of instructions but you know what I mean) that say how each component interacts with each other. That would explain why Janeway was always "burning" her food, she wasnt programming it correctly. If she actually had to set exactly how to construct a pot roast molecule by molecule, it would have taken much longer than a few hours.
Anyone want to give me a Temporal Heavy Dreadnought pack? I'll be your friend
One of the problems it creates, of course, is that any existing sort of currency becomes instantly worthless (you can duplicate as many bank notes or gold coins as you like), so Smith's team devote much ingenuity and some violent explosions to coming up with stuff that couldn't be duplicated. (The science gets a bit hand-wavy around this point, but the solution is ultimately a metal they call "identium", which has artificially overloaded electron shells which explode violently at the touch of the duplicator's scanning beam.)
It's amazing (possibly even Astounding, also) how many of these cutting-edge SFnal concepts have been done before, back in the good old days....
one thing of note is that during voyager there was an episode where repicator energy needed to be conserved and janeway was forced to take on neelix and his coffee. that implies that it is an energy using device that uses its transporter tech to reorganise atoms and moleclues into a form from its databanks that produces an item.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
That's one of the things that contributes to it being a post-scarcity society - there's literally nothing you can collect that can't be gotten in replicated form by others. Sure, you might have the original - but as purveyors of mass-market art can tell you, that matters only to some people. So you wind up with literally no money, no medium of exchange aside from original art pieces or ideas. (Then you get out on the frontier worlds, where things aren't quite so easy and folks need to use latinum to buy necessities, and then Sisko has to rage impotently with Kira in the room because he can't just speak his mind to Admiral Necheyev...)
one can, others can't; elaborate
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Yeah yeah, but I wanted to take a stab at Star Wars which JJ really likes and which is very hand-wavy for most of it because it simply wasn't made to even resemble sci-fi. One way to make fun of Star Wars is to point out that Jedi are actually wizards in space which makes it seem a whole lot more juvenile.
Most of my flak all gets directed at Orci - but I'm not really sure how much creative control the director has over a final product.
Sigh - it's a shame this guy keeps getting money from people. He got money from me for Star Trek 2009, other than that he's never sold me a ticket to anything. Still - detail stuff like that doesn't bother me so much, although even the most action-y spy thriller usually seems to understand it's a different time of the day on the other side of the Earth. What does bother me is when your core plot doomsday weapons is called "ball-o-death-goop" or, you know, "death star" (what reasonable political organization is going to not come up with some crazy euphemism for a planet killing WMD? Like "Imperial Orbital Defense Platform")
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
That's really something we don't necessarily know. Anesthetic "severs" most of the neurons of higher brain functions from one another. Much of your brain ceases to be able to communicate with itself for a period of time. I don't feel like I might have been a different person before anesthetic. If consciousness is an emergent property of the physical structure of the brain there's really no way to be sure that a transporter doesn't actually reassemble the same person and not a duplicate.
Regardless, the transporter was invented because they didn't have the budget to make what they regarded as very credible "ship to shore" transitions.
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
Oh, I agree, replicators themselves are not hand-wavy necessarily. It's the way Star Trek used them that's hand-wavy - they're just there "because plot" and that's all, ignore them from there onwards! (Yes, I've heard that story about the transporter!) That's why I thought they deserved a bit better than that.
Did they ever refer to "replicators" as such in TOS? The food out of the little slot generally seems to be referred to as "synthesised", which may be a more primitive version.
<Shudder>.
You could be right about latinum. I mean, with the right equipment you could make as many pound or dollar coins as you wanted to - they're no longer made of metal that's worth anything like their face value, so there's no raw material restriction on that. The only slight problem is that you'd get arrested. But, of course, with the sheer number of replicators that are about in the Star Trek universe, it would be a lot harder to police. Maybe there is something funny about latinum - or at least, as MustrumRidcully says, something funny enough that, though you CAN replicate latinum, the Ferengi would be able to tell what you'd done.
I can think of a third possibility that would be more useful and fit better with what the Star Trek ones are seen to do: take matter as raw material, then convert it to energy as it goes along and instantly back into matter - only, different matter.
I can imagine, sounds excellent! So in a different way do the "Venus Equilateral" stories, thanks Shevet.
It seems that they can't just convert any old matter into whatever they want, though, or else they would just be feeding any old dirt and rock that they dig up into the converters, and not care about whether it contained anything in particular. It is probably vastly cheaper in energy terms to at least have the necessary atoms of the desired elements (hydrogen, oxygen, iron, whatever) and chemically re-arrange those. Replicators are usually spoken of as functioning at "molecular-scale resolution" as opposed to the "quantum-scale resolution" used for transporting living organisms, which probably also cuts down the memory and processing requirement by about three orders of magnitude--anybody remember "Our Man Bashir", where storing the brain patterns of a few people took up so much of the memory in the station's computers that the whole system was thrashing due to running out of space to run anything else? I think that's a good illustration of just how much computing resources would be needed to store quantum-scale data on a whole object.
You dont need to cleverly "think of" possibilities on how it works.
"A replicator was a device that used transporter technology to dematerialize quantities of matter and then rematerialize that matter in another form. It was also capable of inverting its function, thus disposing of leftovers and dishes and storing the bulk material again. (TNG: "Lonely Among Us"; DS9: "Hard Time", "The Ascent"; VOY: "Year of Hell", "Memorial")"
-first paragraph of Memory Alpha article on replicators.
As for energy, you do need energy to take thing apart, persumbly by nadions, and then reassemble them again.
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Hast thou not lacked vigor
Hast thou exerted all possible efforts
Hast thou not become slothful