Replicating 'gold-pressed latinum'

[bentbastard]

If Ferengi are obsessed with profit why not replicate their very own 'gold-pressed latinum'?

Is there any physical reason why it cant be replicated?

(I know this could probably be brought up in other forums, but thought since the ferengi play a central role in DS9 thought be alright)

 

[nx1701g]

In "Who Mourns for Morn" it was said that Latinum cannot be replicated.

 

[Lindley]

There's a novel.....Balance of Power, was it?.....in which it's said that latinum can't be replicated due to something unique in its molecular structure. Hence its use as currency in the first place.

 

[Timo]

In "Who Mourns for Morn" it was said that Latinum cannot be replicated.

No, it wasn't. Nothing like that has ever been said in a Trek episode. (Indeed, no substance or object has ever been described as unreplicable.)

We could assume that GPL as a material can be replicated, but that the slips, strips and especially bricks are carefully coded (much like paper money today) to verify their origin, history and validity as currency. The code and the intricate structure make it nontrivial to manufacture these things, just like it's nontrivial to print dollar bills even though the raw materials are worthless as such.

A special reader device might verify the identity and value of bricks, but the slips aren't worth that sort of finesse, so Quark just bites them or listens to the sound they make to verify that yes, they are made of GPL. This doesn't mean that GPL should be valuable as such. Nickel or copper doesn't have high inherent value even though used in coins, while cobolt or iridium is far from worthless even though a coin made of it would not be valid.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[stupidname]

I disagree.

If that was the case then Morn's loot would be all but worthless, the equivalent of paper to print currency onto today... and that clearly wasn't the case.

Also, I doubt the Ferengi, whose society is built around their economy, would leave their currency so open to exploitation. Surely their economy could be flooded by truly worthless slips by some enemy, causing it to crash?!

 

[Kegek]

stupidname has a point. The way Morn stores it suggest it has intrinsic worth of all its own, while the properly formatted gold bricks were next to worthless.

Currencies are frequently based on rare items. I believe in one of PKD's books (I forget which) truffle-skins were a primary form of currency because they couldn't be synthesized. Hence likewise gold currency, as gold has an innate value based on its scarcity. I presume latinum has a similar quality.

Incidentally, it's one of the lousier names on Star Trek. I don't mind names that are stolen directly from Earth for use as alien names, but take a real word and change one letter to make it seem different is, well, blecch.

I am of course referring to platinum.

 

[nx1701g]

Timo said:

In "Who Mourns for Morn" it was said that Latinum cannot be replicated.

No, it wasn't. Nothing like that has ever been said in a Trek episode. (Indeed, no substance or object has ever been described as unreplicable.)

Memory Alpha:
Latinum is a rare silver liquid used as currency by the Ferengi Alliance and many other worlds. It cannot be replicated. For ease of transaction, latinum is usually suspended within gold to produce "gold-pressed" latinum. (DS9: "Who Mourns for Morn?")

 

[Nebusj]

nx1701g said:

Timo said:

In "Who Mourns for Morn" it was said that Latinum cannot be replicated.

No, it wasn't. Nothing like that has ever been said in a Trek episode. (Indeed, no substance or object has ever been described as unreplicable.)

Memory Alpha:
Latinum is a rare silver liquid used as currency by the Ferengi Alliance and many other worlds. It cannot be replicated. For ease of transaction, latinum is usually suspended within gold to produce "gold-pressed" latinum. (DS9: "Who Mourns for Morn?")

Memory Alpha makes many claims and not all of them are as grounded in what has appeared on-screen as may be desired. For what it's worth, and I grant that there are many slips between the script and the screen, the script for ``Who Mourns for Morn?'' as archived at http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/ds9/season6/ds9-612.txt does not contain any claims about whether latinum can be replicated, synthesized, duplicated, photocopied, transported, spindled, sponged, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. Quark wonders about the genius who thought to impress it into worthless gold, however.

 

[Sisu]

But then back in The Outpost, the Ferengi could taste gold and made it sound like gold was a good thing.

 

[James Bond]

^ And also in Little Green Men when Quark is trying to arrange the sale of weapons technology to the US Military.

 

[Timo]

...But, as Nog and Jake go to show in "Progress", anything can be used as currency as long as there's hope of converting it to some other currency as situation warrants. Quark couldn't exactly covet latinum on Earth, but he could collect all the gold he can get, then sell that to somebody who values gold but has dilithium to sell for it, and then convert that to GPL when reaching what he considers civilization. It's likely that many primitive civilizations accept gold, considering that it is pretty, malleable, conductive and rare. And swindling primitive civilizations must be covered in the Rules somewhere.

I'll grant Memory Alpha the benefit of doubt: their paragraph on latinum might only be claiming that the statement "For ease of transaction, latinum is usually suspended within gold to produce GPL" is derived from the episode, while the rest is intended as speculation.

I've only seen "Who Mourns" once, but I'm pretty sure nothing was inserted into the dialogue about nonreplicability. The confusion regarding the reference seems to stem from the Memory Alpha phrasing exclusively, although everybody and his cousin has been suggesting that the substance is somehow unreplicable ever since it was introduced to the Trek universe. Possible, I guess - but it would be pretty strange, considering that very complex things such as living tissue have been successfully replicated in various episodes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[nx1701g]

Nebusj said:
Memory Alpha makes many claims and not all of them are as grounded in what has appeared on-screen as may be desired.

I don't doubt that it may not have been in the episode listed (I also checked on Wikipedia and there isn't a citation for it). I do remember Quark on a rant about Latinum in an episode and complaining because it couldn't be replicated (he hit the replicator with a bar rag in the process), but I'm not sure it was in WM4M myself either. I'll have to go looking through the DVDs.

 

[Fencer]

OhZedMasTree said:
^ And also in Little Green Men when Quark is trying to arrange the sale of weapons technology to the US Military.

But at the time he says that he believes he's stuck in the past and is intending to build a commercial empire on Earth.

 

[Timo]

...Although he also has grandiose plans of selling warp drive to the Vulcans.

Either he doesn't know his Vulcan history very well, or then he intends to have Rom make the shuttle do some additional time travel, because Vulcans by modern accounts already have warp as of 1947!

But since the writers didn't know this at the time, we can probably forgive Quark's ignorance as well.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[James Bond]

Fencer said:

OhZedMasTree said:
^ And also in Little Green Men when Quark is trying to arrange the sale of weapons technology to the US Military.

But at the time he says that he believes he's stuck in the past and is intending to build a commercial empire on Earth.

That's probably correct, but it's also possible Quark intended to settle on the Ferengi homeworld. I remember he said to Rom that they would sell the technical knowledge to Earth, and then head to Ferenginar and sell the ship itself.

Timo said:
...Although he also has grandiose plans of selling warp drive to the Vulcans.

Actually, he said that the Ferengi would have warp technology years before Humans, Klingons, "or even the Vulcans."

 

[votd]

I had the Making of DS9 book (can't remember it's exact name) a few years ago, the premise of the book is to show how a television show was created from premise to final result - theres a discussion in the book on Gold Pressed Latinum where they mention that certain atoms/particles in Latinum have an antispin so they can't be replicated. Of course it's just a way of making it so you can't replicate Latinum.

I might still have that book - may have to dig it out - it only goes up to Season 2 IIRC.

 

[Timo]

I think the same Okuda&Sternbach quote might also be in the DS9 Companion book that covers all the seasons... It's hilarious! I wonder how much of the backstage thinking on treknology stems from random people asking questions, and the tech advisors grasping for the coolest-sounding answer they can think of in 2.8 seconds - and then printing that in the next Tech Manual...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kegek]

^
Ha!

"Transporters? But what about Heisenberg's -"
"Heisenberg compensators."
"They're called that because they compensate for Heisenberg's problem?"
"Basically, yeah."
"And how do they work?"
"Very well."

Anyway, the how is immaterial - for some reason, latinum can't be replicated.

OhZedMasTree said:
Actually, he said that the Ferengi would have warp technology years before Humans, Klingons, "or even the Vulcans."

Same difference. It still implies Vulcans don't have warp drive in the 1940s, while according to "Carbon Creek", I think, they did.

Remember the good old days of "Metamorphosis" when we could say the good folks of Alpha Centauri hitched up the first warp drive? Memories...

 

[Timo]

Anyway, the how is immaterial - for some reason, latinum can't be replicated.

Only according to Sternbach and Okuda. And we know they were dead wrong about transporting of antimatter and use of phasers at warp.

It still implies Vulcans don't have warp drive in the 1940s, while according to "Carbon Creek", I think, they did.

"Carbon Creek" proves Vulcan warp back to 1957, to be painfully exact. But "The Andorian Incident" establishes Vulcan interstellar capabilities as several millennia old, and it would be natural to assume that these capabilities stemmed from warp drive.

Remember the good old days of "Metamorphosis" when we could say the good folks of Alpha Centauri hitched up the first warp drive? Memories...

The good humans of Alpha Centauri, to be exact again.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kegek]

Timo said:

Anyway, the how is immaterial - for some reason, latinum can't be replicated.

Only according to Sternbach and Okuda. And we know they were dead wrong about transporting of antimatter and use of phasers at warp.

Only according to them, and that "Who Mourns for Morn?" would make no sense if this wasn't the case. Sternbach and Okuda might have a nice techie answer, but either way, it's definately not replicated due to the episode's plot.

"Carbon Creek" proves Vulcan warp back to 1957, to be painfully exact. But "The Andorian Incident" establishes Vulcan interstellar capabilities as several millennia old, and it would be natural to assume that these capabilities stemmed from warp drive.

Hmm. In that case, I'd lean on it and say they didn't. It seems unlikely that the implicaton is Vulcans have millenia worth of warp drive. They may have had around three centuries of it, and prior to that used pre-warp engines.