The transporter has a failsafe to replace missing atoms or molecules that didn’t make the trip by pulling from reserves. It got a lock, attempted transport, then got an error saying 7x10^27 atoms didn’t make it and replaced them, leaving the original Riker on the planet and constructing an entirely new Riker on the Potemkin’s transporter pad. Thomas is the original, Will is the clone.
PC LOAD MATTER? What the hell does that even mean?!
Anyone got a spare matter cartridge?
There’s not an ounce of Cyan in Riker’s body, but this thing still refuses to materialize without a new cartridge!
How do you think that they deal with all the waste on ship? It’s all just kept in a big vat for the replicators. And replicators are just small specialized transporters with preprogrammed buffers.
They’re both clones, as is the fate of anyone who uses a Star Trek transporter.
Found Bones.
Bones died that day. I’m just what you remember of him.
Pfft. Uh, hello reversed polarity?!
This one gets it.
It’s the same way replicator technology works. They’re reassembling matter that’s been stored for that purpose. Two Rikers just means less matter is left in the storage buffer.
Just send a couple of Red Shirts on an away mission. There’s plenty more where they came from.
Recycling tragic accidents is just good policy, and necessary to preserve the ecosystem on visited planets.
If we happen to get a few cloned bridge officers out of the bargain…that’s just good fortune.
Can you imagine how much energy is stored in a transporter buffer?
I mean, they’re flying around in a big engine that bends the fabric of space, so maybe it’s not such a big deal a few hundred years in the future. I guess it’s like comparing a furnace and bellows with a nuclear reactor.
I imagine there’s all sorts of backup systems and contigencies in place. Just wanted to see what serious, creative, or silly answers I’d get.
The same way you killed Tuvix.
If I didn’t have need for Tuvok and Neelix, I’d have exchanged Tuvix for a sack of coffee and a cute little puppy.
Maybe just 2 sacks of coffee.
Oh boy now I’m vaklempt
They cached 1 oz of 💩 from each of the previous 3000 transports.
Wasn’t there an energy fluctuation, so more energy could be entered into the system.
But also, Banach Tarski. On the subatomic level, maybe these types of shenanigans could manifest.
Edit: it turns out that copying a person requires a lot of energy, more than a heavy storm would have over years.
Possible, I suppose.
Conservation of mass-energy only really applies if you rely on the old 21st century idea that the universe’s fundamentals consist of time, space, matter, and energy.
Anyone who’s had a secondary school education knows that that’s an outmoded view of the universe. They didn’t realise that subspace existed, in much the same way that they did not realise that surviving records show that 21st century humans did not know the Earth was round until Cochrane took to orbit in the late 2000s, and proved it.
E=mc^2
Energy and mass are just different measures of the same thing. The transporters job is to take mass and turn it into something that it can more easily move around (a wave? Particle stream?) and back. So as long as the transporter is connected to the ship’s energy supply it should theoretically be able to use that energy (instead of the energy from your body) to reassemble any pattern it wants without breaking the law of conservation of mass.
Riker is 6’4 let’s say 200lbs, which is 8,153,369 terajoules.
DATA: Imagination is not necessary. The scale is readily quantifiable. We are presently generating twelve point seven five billion gigawatts per (an alarm goes off)
One watt is one Joule per second, there is some debate out there about the “per” part of the quote since watts already implies per second, but we probably assume the ship is capable of generating 12,750,000 terawatts, or 12,750,000 terajoules per second.
8,153,369/12,750,000 gets us about 0.64 seconds of the ships output to create our duplicate Riker.
However the quote above was when the ship was basically idling, (not actually at warp) so the actual output of the ship is likely exponentially larger.
Basically they have so much power available, that they can just rearrange it into whatever mass they want.
