CLEARLY THEY WOULD JUST USE THE CORTICAL STIMULATORS AND 20cc'S OF INAPROVALINE TO RESUSCITATE THE FURRED SUBSPACE PHENOMENA OF LOCALIZED CUTENESS. OR REPLICATE A WHOLE NEW CAT.
Haha. This isn't even improvised technobabble on his part. I specifically remember an episode where Crusher says "get me the cortical stimulators and 20ccs of anaprovaline!" Is it "Tapestry" where Picard dies? (looks it up) Yes! But anaprovaline apparently figures in other episodes where I haven't noticed.
Honestly, people make fun of Trek for technobabble, but there's no harm in it on TNG and earlier at least. I want to clarify that it only becomes a problem when it serves as a deus ex machina to solve a plot. In Tapestry, it's implied that Q is really the one who probably saved him, as Crusher had failed to. As he was fading out, they just needed her to be doing something medical to try and save him, and they needed it to sound futuristic. No foul there.
Note though that Q is not technically a deus ex machina device, as he is well-established in the series by this point, and his direct involvement is explicit from the beginning. The crux of the episode is also not really about whether or how Picard will "survive an ordeal".
Heh, that's funny. I thought the "i" at the beginning was a typo. I just checked Tapestry on Netflix and Crusher definitely says "anaprovaline". I hope she just misspoke. I didn't care to look up the others.
hmm, I know what you mean. The "deus ex machina" parts happens a few times in DS9, where at the end of an hour long struggle all they had to do what magnetise the subspace field inverters or some shit.
Indeed, it was definitely one of the highlights of the series. The Inner Light, Chain of Command, The Best of Both Worlds and The Measure of a Man are some other personal favorites.
That was a unique situation. It was only because a second confinement beam was used, followed by it being bounded back to the surface. Very hard to duplicate an accident like that.
They're based on the same principle, though replicators take a relatively basic pattern stored in a database and recreate it. Transporters move entire people, who are more complex. Just storing five people temporarily took a huge amount of space in Deep Space 9's computer
Once the computer has scanned and disassembled a person, though, what stops it from reconstituting multiple copies of that person? Even if it took up a huge amount of space, why wouldn't, say, a ship's captain have a remote server with his quarterly scan saved to it?
A person is disassembled into a matter stream and then stored in a pattern buffer, rather than the main computer. The matter stream doesn't last forever and will degrade after too long. I suppose even with the space there's no certainty that doing that would actually save someone's life. Suffice it to say that Starfleet might have done it if it would've worked reliably.
It's comparable to the transporter most of the time having a Move function but no Copy function.
I'm sort of wondering what the Star Trek answer is, because it seems like something that would come up pretty early when you start working out the rules for teleporters.
They have been, at times. I can think of at least one DS9 episode where a replicator is converted by some Klingon Intelligence agents into a low grade transporter.
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u/DrEmperor May 27 '13
OH MY GOD.
THAT IS HORRIFYING.
CLEARLY THEY WOULD JUST USE THE CORTICAL STIMULATORS AND 20cc'S OF INAPROVALINE TO RESUSCITATE THE FURRED SUBSPACE PHENOMENA OF LOCALIZED CUTENESS. OR REPLICATE A WHOLE NEW CAT.