Logline
Captain Pike and his crew welcome a Klingon defector aboard the USS Enterprise, but his presence triggers the revelation of some shocking secrets.
Written by Davy Perez
Directed by Jeff Byrd
Captain Pike and his crew welcome a Klingon defector aboard the USS Enterprise, but his presence triggers the revelation of some shocking secrets.
Written by Davy Perez
Directed by Jeff Byrd
@RootBeerGuy @startrek The transporter is essentially magic. If you think too long about it, you’ll wonder why, for example, *everyone* doesn’t “store their pattern”, and thus become effectively immortal. Or why a pattern can’t be materialized multiple times, to generate an army of clones.
I love Trek, but it’s much more space opera than hard sci-fi, and often the “sciencey” bits are purely for narrative convenience (see also “holodeck”).
Yep, particularly with the Riker clone, it seems like the safest way to do away missions would be to send down an instance of the crew rather than the actual crew. But then what would they do with all those extra red shirts?
David Brin’s book ‘Kiln People’ explores this idea.
The problem is, as we saw with Tom Riker, the duplicates have their own existence and experiences. Should they just be destroyed like Tuvix in order to restore the originals?
Transporters essentially destroy and recreate people anyway, you have to imagine it is already something that most folks in Starfleet have made peace with, somehow.
Tom Riker is proof that we’re just bags of meat, and consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. The only difference is that instances copies have a divergence point in their experiences. The Bobiverse books explore similar ideas.
But it is hard to imagine those instances wouldn’t want to avoid getting merc’d Tuvix-style. The handwavium way you’d probably try to approach it would be some sort of memory reintegration. Not implausible in Star Trek