This nicely leaves open the question of whether the pattern has "resolution". Degradation could mean piecemeal loss of an infinitely sharp pattern... The survival time of a pattern might be a feature rather than a bug, and related to the energies used in pushing the pattern into the "phased realm". Perhaps that realm involves energy loss, so that sooner or later the pattern will "drop back" to our realm - say, on the planet below. But if it's not sent to the planet below, it will drop back anyway, and that would happen either on the sending platform (which is why our heroes flicker on and off there when something goes wrong) or then deeper in the bowels of the machine (in which case permanent harm would be done to the pattern). In this interpretation, "Lonely Among Us" would involve Picard leaving his physical self in the pattern buffer (where it would ultimately pop back from the phased realm and die) and using the carrier energies ("Energy only!") to beam out his alien entity self which was using its alien abilities to carry some of Picard's mind with it. The alien would know that sending an "empty beam" out there would serve its purposes, but our heroes would not immediately figure out what this weird misuse of their technology meant, hence they'd consider Picard lost forever. But Data insists his physical pattern still resides in the machine, which may refer to the phased matter stream that was never sent anywhere (and never mind the misguided writer intention that every beam-out involves leaving behind a reproducible physical pattern)... Timo Saloniemi
Timo's theory has popped up elsewhere on this board and it's one that covers a lot of the blanks in Transporter-tech (the amount of energy needed, information storage, immortality etc). With reference to the term "molecular transporter" it was actually Spock that first mentioned it, in That Which Survives: Interestingly (in reference to the OP), the crew are very much alive! It's also worthy of note that Spock feels the need to qualify the term as a "molecular transporter" instead of just "transporter" or "transporter beam", this last was a very common term in TOS. Is a Molecular Transporter different or special in some way? Perhaps they were actually disassembled, molecule by molecule, and then reassembled? Or perhaps not - but whatever happened during the process, they did end up out of phase slightly - further strengthening Timo's assertion that phasing is a part of the Transporter process.
Good point Mytran. TOS and even TNG seem to only talk about "molecular transporter" and TNG specifically beams someone at "molecular resolution". Is the OP referencing DS9's "Our Man Bashir" and the misplaced "neural energy"? If that's the case, I just figure that neural energy is already energy, they don't need to do any scanning, just grab it along with the matter that's been converted to energy... From "The Savage Curtain": LINCOLN: A most interesting way to come aboard, Captain. What was the device used? KIRK: An energy-matter scrambler, sir. The molecules in your body are converted into energy, then beamed into this chamber and reconverted back into their original pattern. and "The Empath" SPOCK: Residual energy readings indicate we were beamed here by a matter-energy scrambler, similar to our own transporter mechanism. and "The Gamesters of Triskelion" MCCOY: Then what the devil is happening? Does that mean their atoms are just floating around out there? SPOCK: No, Doctor. Even that would show up on our sensors. ... MCCOY: It's been nearly an hour. Can people live that long as disassembled atoms in a transporter beam? and in TNG: "The Masterpiece Society" MARTIN: We have no idea how molecular transport will affect her DNA. LAFORGE: It won't affect her DNA at all. There's been over a century of evidence to prove that. and "Realm of Fear" seems to be all about molecules being transported at molecular resolution. BARCLAY: Energise. O'BRIEN: Molecular resolution at sixty percent. Engaging static mode. His pattern is locked and holding.
Very interesting! Molecular resolution certainly doesn't seem to be the opposite of quantum resolution, but rather a concept relating to the standard mode of personnel transport operations... I'd take McCoy's rants on technology with a seaful of salt, and Kirk's explanation of what a "matter-energy scrambler" is as an oversimplification. But I guess the name of the device itself must be accepted as such, given how Spock uses it as well. I'd just prefer to think that the device takes your matter, phases it, then scrambles/mixes it with a "carrier wave" of energy that flings it across space, and then allows it to phase back... Timo Saloniemi
Maybe the matter automatically phases back once the anular confinement beam is released. This explains how people can reform on planets with no receivers. It could also mean that a person loses 'resolution' because their matter is leaking back into the real world while being projected to a destination and that really isn't good for you. A power surge might juggle up the quantum entanglement links leadingthe wrong matter to be phased in the wrong place which would explain Sonak's fate and why Starfleet couldn't undo the disaster despite presumably having their patterns on the buffer. Our Man Bashir is an oddity. However, if 24th century computers are quantum computers I suppose its possible that the holographic people were somehow formed as mirror images of the people who were still phased i.e. the holodeck programming took over from the confinement beam but allowed the quantum information to manifest as hard light images. I can see how the chemical signatures in the brain could be recorded, converted to equivalent electonic signals, and stored but it would be a copy, not the original person. It also seems unlikely that holodecks were designed to produce quantum level resolution images. It looks like a dodgy episode to me.
Well, who knows - if the holodeck transporters were jammed chock full of people and the programming itself got confused, perhaps the holodeck transported the people into the program but kept thinking that they were holocharacters? That is, Dr Noah really was the flesh-and-blood Sisko, but the computer treated him like a character - meaning, if Garak shot him, the holodeck would create a lethal wound, and if Garak shut him down, the holodeck would erase him like it would erase any real, replicated item that is part of a holosimulation... A particularly perverse predicament, that. Your body being co-opted as a meat puppet in a gaudy charade, with the real you waiting in the death row - possibly conscious of the events? The technobabble side of the events would then stay in the transporter context, without mixing holograms and hard light into it too much. Timo Saloniemi
Nope - their physical patterns were stored on the station, but storing "everything else" required the wiping of virtually the whole of the station's computer systems: Incidentally, this appears to answer the OP's question - beamed at the molecular level, you'd be intact and nominally alive, but to all intents & purposes actually brain-dead...
But luckily it doesn't completely discount the notion that their physical matter could be phased. If you want to avoid the kill and copy machine the the reference to nerual energy could refer to the quantum entangled energy that forms the pattern needed to rephase their neural pathways. This does conjure up other wierd possibilties though. If it is possible to separate out the physical from the neural you could beam somebody else's mind into a body. We've already seen the wierdness of Tuvix and we know that it is possible to create a transporter duplicate if the entangled energy can somehow be linked to convert some other matter source but can evil Kirk be explained this way?
Seems to flow from it naturally enough. Although the basic premise of being able to separate the "brain patterns" from the physical person is dubious at best. Something fishy about the technobabble there: Why? It is a normal transporter pattern - five of them, to be exact. It's weird that Odo should know anything about transporters, let alone unusual ways of operating them, such as severing the neural patterns from the physical beings. Is crime down on the Promenade, so that he can read up on other things besides odor-seeking bombs (on which he became an expert between "The Nagus" and "Improbable Cause")? Timo Saloniemi
We also know that a significant portion of our behaviour is created by our genes and that our memories are chemical signatures stored in our brains. I don't think neural pathways have much to do with anything - they are just the means by which our brain functions to allow us to access and store the chemical signatures. Seems to me that molecular transportees would, as postulated earlier, just be brain dead with their chemical memories intact. If somebody's memory signatures were placed in someone else's brain, only a small proportion, if any, of that person's personality would be transferred. It's just another example of science overtaking the story-telling. A person could presumably be brainwashed by foreign memories into thinking they are a different people I suppose, much like Seven's access to memories in a localised Borg node in Voyager. From that perspective nice and nasty Kirk shared the same chemical signatures (so an element of duplication)but elements of their genetic code must have been altered - that doesn't really chime in with rephasing an individual using quantum entangled energy. How did the alien pollen facilitate the acquisition of additional matter to create two individuals each possessed of slightly mutated genes?
How do you explain TNG: "Rascals" in that case? (both the problem and resolution) It is and it isn't - a "normal transporter pattern"s are held in the buffer. Here, they have a set of five intermingled, degrading, transporter patterns to store somewhere - anywhere - else while trying to disentangle them...
It may be that a degree of signal bleed is inevitable and so every transport involves adding a certain percentage of matter back in using replicator style technology using the pattern in the pattern buffer as a guide. Perhaps there is a threshold at which this ceases to be viable or at least where the risks are unacceptable. Maybe transporter accidents like in Rascals (and I don't recall the technobabble explanation) occur when the transporter crosses the safe threshold, and something goes wrong when adding in extra matter. Did they use adult DNA to adjust the pattern in the pattern buffer in the end? That would still work I suppose as the DNA is the same - it's really just cell damage that ages us isn't it? It would be hard to re-age somebody as old as Picard I would have thought though. I think there would have to be risks associated with that kind of replicator procedure otherwise every transport could repair cell damage and stop people from aging.
That's the main shortcoming of plot solutions like "Rascals" or "Unnatural Selection": if the limits to the ability to adjust the results of transporting are set at things like restoration of age, then immortality automatically follows. "Rascals" could just as well have chosen to show our heroes being sent back into the anomaly that altered them in the first place, possibly with some sort of technology that allows them to use the anomaly in the reverse direction. Much like they did in "One Little Ship". Or, since the episode was comedic to begin with, the Ferengi might have been coerced to give to our heroes free samples of their most infamously unsuccessful product ever: the Aging Potion. In "Unnatural Selection", we at least got the extra entertainment value of the transporter being the solution to everybody else's problems but the transporter-phobic Pulaski's! Timo Saloniemi
More than that - all four of them were substantially shorter, besides everything else! ("40% drop in mass") The technobabble was pretty much in-line with what you say, however, ignoring that little point: Digressing for a moment, I never quite bought Picard's decision to return to "normal" anyway. The others, okay - Guinan's virtually immortal anyway, Ro was in her mid-twenties and so the extra years wouldn't necessarily have been worth the enforced sabbatical/puberty and Keiko had her kid to worry about - but Picard was in his early sixties (Patrick Stewart's actual age + 10, although I forget where that was established). Even if he needed to take a few years off to go on sabbatical until he was physically an full adult again (indulging his passion for archaeology in the meantime, perhaps, as Troi suggested?), that's an extra 40 years plus in the prime of his life...
Cool - that actually seems reasonably consistent with the phasing theory after all, although eew 40% of their human tissue was left all over the shuttle? Given that Michelle Forbes wasn't keen on doing more Trek, they should have kept teen Ro around instead. I really missed her character and the young actress was really good!
That's the beauty of 'dematerilisation' actually phasing the whole person into another dimension - you sidestep issues like that. Apart from Thomas Riker, I think Realm of Fear tends to be the most polarising episode for the debate but I haven't seen it for years so I can't remember the technobabble. I do remember that a partially phased Barclay was able to interact with other phased matter somehow. Breaking down the actual molecules into energy doesn't allow for that sort of interaction.
It also shouldn't easily allow you to interact with yourself, either - yet the way "transporting" is achieved by Desilu, Paramount or CBS fundamentally requires the "transportee" to be able to move and act while within the beam. After all, in 99% of the transporting spots, the actor moves between "departure" and "arrival" - sometimes by dozens or even hundreds of kilometers, possibly over several days or weeks. It's impossible for him or her to hold the same pose at both ends of the process. In some cases, the movement is a minor, almost unnoticeable "bug". In others, it's a blatant "feature". It would be an immense relief for consistency if it always were a "feature", the one natural way in which all transporting processes take place. Personally, I think the transporter moves the body and the soul into the phased realm and back, and in the meantime there is spatial movement in phased form, both from A to B, and among the phased elements. It's just that the transporter is unable to move your mojo into the phased realm, so everybody who has ever used the device is without mojo. And at the end of the day, the transporter operator can empty the drawer of leftover mojo and bring it home with him. Timo Saloniemi