If we had replicators and transporters...

Or 7-of-9...

Not for handling them as exhaustively or as interestingly (IMO) as did George O. Smith in _Venus Equilateral_.

a?

Ye ghods Rich, buy a Tech Manual already.

Replicators don't have the resolution to make living things; they work at molecular level, transporters at the quantum level. Replicators make dead meat, transporters make living tissue.

Yeah, I know it's treknobafflegab, but context is everything. Assume it means that replicators can't duplicate all the ongoing, synchronized interactions of the atoms of tissue, just their relative locations. I suspect a piece of freshly replicated meat would immediately begin to undergo autolysis (enzyme degradation of cell contents seen in just-killed tissues).

Bypassing that (provide data storage adequate for all the extra interaction information), yes it'd be a live copy of the person, mechanical instant cloning. Same personality as the subject *at the time of transport*, different thereafter per different experiences. Telepathy possibility is dependent on identifying a mechanism. That'd be in RL; in Trek, who knows?

Trek has tangled with the ethical considerations of having two of somebody walking around due to transporter boo-boos. Contrast with the Star Wars Universe; if they had Trek replicator/transporter tech they'd have much larger "clone" armies with no ethical quibbles. Just another flavor of slave...

Replicators are part of the holodeck package; they provide consumables in simulations like restaurants.

We've already seen that the holodeck can support an AI with Moriarty and that pretty Riker-bait. Trek is quite happy separating software from hardware and letting the viewers worry about souls. Now, I presume you're thinking about DLing a transporter buffer trace into the holodeck computer with the safeties off? Sure, why not? It'd still be an exact copy of the original, with the same psychological restrictions, but not "alive" in the meat-suit sense. You'd need to supply a human or android body for it to leave the holodeck.

All the above should also be true for android Data; but I don't think his type of brain could support a human mind. OTOH, IIRC the VOY(?) episode involving offering aliens android bodies instead of their usual theft of others' bodies suggested a different technology.

Either mine's better than yours or I've already spent far too much time thinking about this stuff...

Mark L. Fergerson

If she was a 7, can you imagine what the 9 looked like !!!

I always preffered T'Pol myself.

Ah! Consumables! What would happen if you took, say, a whole weekend off and spend it on the Holodeck. First, on Friday Night, you enjoy a big "welcome to the fantasy" repast, and get all stuffed and stuff. Then, through the course of the weekend, you digest this holographic foodstuff, and it gets incorporated into your body's proteins - would it disappear, an atom at a time, when you leave the holodeck? =:-O

Thanks, Rich

We have them. Turn around and look behind you.