No, because the half-life of Pixie dust is too short.


See above. Pixie dust decay is too fast.


Pixie dust doesn't work that way. And Superman just doesn't do this kind of evil stuff to others. He's the good guy, after all. The baddies need a chance to repent, even if they never take it.


Those were accidents which by definition cannot be controlled. Plus, pets that are "only good" are weak and will die shortly, just like Kirk nearly succumbed until he was merged back with his evil twin.
Haven't you paid attention, son?


The astronaut union will have none of this trans-galactic transport nonsense. Do you have an idea how many well-paid jobs are at stake, even if they are just at redshirt level?

I subscribe to the pixie dust half-life explanation.

Playing the BS card....really?


Ssnake, you said that I was wrong on me thinking and that you needed explanations in sci-fi with hard science, but you said what you wanted was internal consistency and some level of adherence to laws of nature. Your augments follow this statement, so I took them as your honest perception.

But also, here you are, mocking any hypothetical scenarios -because pixie dust-. I think your level or required veracity is what, 99.9%?

Yes, transporters do not exist. Yes, there is no definite explanation on how it all works. No need to wear the t-shirt. It is kind of understood.

But, at least we are shown (even with all the inconsistencies) how it performs. And we can then try to fit the possible mechanics of how it all could work, discuss the why not, and then speculate what will it be required for it to work.

It is not a useless exercise.

And what is "overanalysis"? Can you analyse anything further than your own capacity of analysis?

It's not like we are talking magic wands and dragons (...I know, I know...magic transporter can apply...).

Many technologies have been inspired by these types discussions. The driverless car, the cellphone, the robot-workers that recently had gone viral - it all traces back to sci-fi inspirations. Any of these would had been dismissed as "pixie dust powered" if shown of a movie 75 years ago.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-na...8080674/?no-ist

And no... I am not advocating for taking any of it seriously. But I thought I was in the right place on this forum to get some though provoking hypothesis rolling and get some good discussion on it.

OK, so on with the funnies...

The answer to the discrepancy could be that instead of transporting in a "molecular beam", then the pattern of the transported object (on the atomic level) is stored in the so called buffer TankerWade mentions. Within the context of Star Trek, they seem to have the technology to assemble coherent matter out of energy, which seem to be the same technology in the replicators. The pattern can be projected and reassembled anywhere. A possibility for how the pattern can work under a planet's surface or inside a ship's hull could be the nature of the energy beam itself. The emitter sends the energy as a wave, which frequency is adjusted to match that of the oscillation of the atoms it is going through, so that also explain why they can also traverse shields if the harmonics of that particular type of energy is known. Ships oscillate their shields at unique frequencies so that enemy ships cannot do this with either transporters or weapons.

All the above breaks down, however, because it will always require some sort of receiver. I see it working in a transport to transport setup, but not as depicted in the show. Dr. Brundle had a better idea. (who gets that reference? )

Sprinkle, sprinkle, pixie dust, sprinkle, sprinkle...

Ah BrundleFly..At least he got better eyesight out of the mishap..

This is correct. I'm a science fiction author myself and what you say above is among the rules I follow. What's interesting to note is sometimes science fiction and fantasy skirt the lines between one another. It's entirely possible to have a hard science fiction novel with elements of fantasy in it or vice versa. Take aliens, for example... We've no scientific proof of their existence and at best they are a hypothesis but in reality they are fantasy (for now). If you inject aliens into a hard science fiction novel, it suddenly becomes a sci-fi/fantasy novel, no matter how hard you make it.


As for transporters... I've considered them murder boxes since the late 80s when I theorized they operated in a similar fashion as illustrated in the video. And every single episode of Next Generation I watched when it was new on the air, I thought about it. I still think about it. I often wonder about the vanished consciousness and what the new self feels as they pop out the other side with a blank slate--though, in theory, the electrochemical processes will be copied, too, in the state they were last in. But then we must delve into "what is consciousness, itself." What is consciousness? Do we really know? What about our memories? What is all of this?

It is great stuff to ponder.

See, I've always said I'm not too concerned with how this is supposed to work on a deep level. I've said that already in this thread, if you follow what I actually said, it would seem that I am not someone who does that.

Another way to look at it is if this technology works as explained, why limit it to transporting people- why not use it to transport weapons and the ships themselves- bypass the distances between other ships and instantly transport exploding torpedoes inside the enemy ships. But I don't really care.

So please understand I'm the last person here to get excited about all of this.

Well, Star Trek to me is the ultimate bad example in overexplanation, and thus painting itself into a corner where you are either forced to BS the audience with techno babble, or to entangle yourself in contradictions (and unsurprisingly, Star Trek writers in their unimitable ways, managed to achieve both).

If you really want to discuss transporters outside of the context of Star Trek, then okay: Maybe try it with a large scale quantum tunneling effect. It probably violates a number of know laws of nature, but at least tunneling has been demonstrated to occur and that it can be somewhat controlled. We don't know how far quantum effects may reach (so far we discovered them to reach longer than expected), they are certainly very finicky to handle (but maybe that's because we don't have a good handle on it yet ... although I'm somewhat skeptical that we'll become THAT advanced to tunnel human beings at meaningful distances, and with a low enough energy budget to make it a practical option).

Even then, you'd still have to deal with other laws of physics, particularly the preservation of momentum. Transporting from orbit to the ground with
a) a relative velocity differential of about 8 kilometers per second
b) a potential energy differential of several hundred kilometer within a strong gravity field

The joy!

The problem with extremely advanced projections of developments of physics and technology is that there are cascading effects of difficulties that are progressively harder to explain away. If you want to preserve momentum you at least need to come up with large basins of water into which you can shed the surplus energy (up to a certain limit).


1) I'm mocking Star Trek, and they started it by mocking me
2) Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Refined phrasing, same content. Clarke at least never mocked me with pretend physics, except with RAMA, and at least here he was honest about it when it accelerated out of the solar system and one of the characters said, "There goes Newton's third law".
Clarke didn't explain because he knew very well that he could never explain it in a convincing way, so trying would only set him up for failure.


That would have been ca. 1940.
Transportable radios existed since WW1, so a cell phone is a not too far-fetched extrapolation of an existing technology (extrapolation can also lead you astray, see 1950s concepts of nuclear-powered household robots and flying cars and the Mars colonies that we would have no later than 1980, but hey...). Cars existed, what was missing were computers (but the concept of computers existed about more than a century at that point already). I don't doubt that a lot of people would still have cried "Impossible" and felt just as smug as I do, all right. It's difficult to discuss this from an ex-post perspective, but robot workers at least had been stipulated at least 20 years before (Karel Capek's "R.U.R. - Rossum's Universal Robot") which even invented the word, even though the concept of mechanical slaves appears in fantastic literature even earlier. There was of course no clear concept about how such robots might function, and in fact most writers of the time didn't try to explain them.

Hold the phone...

So, other than the obvious "I strictly adhere to the dates you suggested, and I can dig stuff to discredit your point, never mind that was not the concept proposed in the comment" -

Are you trying to argue that no inspiration for technology and science comes from fiction?

By the way - Thanks to all participating. I do not have many friends or co-workers that enjoy these types of discussions. I have learned a lot by reading some of your posts.

The dangers of Star Trek sci fi in general is that if you justify this level of technology, the factions and characters are godlike, the plots become shaky then, since technology eliminates a need for a plot resolution that requires a test of character or something that audiences can relate with. That's what turned me off from the few episodes of ST:NG that I saw. If there was a situation, it was all settled just by some switch on the console which warped reality or something. There's no real problems to solve and have drama at the same time. It's like using a cheat in a video game when anytime you want you can have unlimited health, unlimited money and so on. No fun.

Even the show introduced that character Q, who was even more godlike just to throw some interesting moral dilemma at them that technology alone doesn't get involved with.

Which is why I still think TOS is best, even with its flaws.

No... but I'm not sure how much useful inspiration is coming from science fiction, or if we fans of SF aren't sometimes taking too much credit for it. Did Boston Dynamics sit down and say "Oh, I'm totally inspired by this obscure Czech playwrite's drama 'R.U.R.' from a hundred years ago, let's go and build robots!"

That's obviously nonsense, yet science fiction fans rip their shirts off and yell "we inspired the inventors!"

There certainly are people who became inventors, engineers, physicists because science fiction stories fueled their imagination in formative years. But more often than not SF writers simply anticipate what kind of technological development may be ahead; be it because they interview the people in the field, or because they are engineers and scientists who also like to speculate and to write (Clarke, Asimov, Clement are good examples of this type of writer). People didn't invent the cell phone because they saw it on Star Trek first. At best you can argue that Nokia engineers designed flip phones because they liked the design that Paramount's prop department for Star Trek developed. In fact, Star Trek never explains the communicators to the best of my memory. Not once do they show that prior to sending a crew to the surface they shovel a dozen small satellites into the orbit for radio coverage (which would be easy enough to if you approach a planed from deep space rather than having to fire everything upwards from the surface). To the best of my knowledge no science fiction story ever actually presented a concept of the underlying technology behind cell phones. It's all about the Star Trek design.
No science fiction author developed a concept of the internet before it happened either. The biggest industrial revolution since, well, the industrial revolution, and nobody saw it coming.

Science fiction writers are like about any other prophet. They gloat about the things they got right, and try to remain silent about everything they didn't see coming, or things that were patently wrong, unless enough time has passed that you can laugh it off (the proverbial 1950s nuclear powered household robot with flexi-arms and a French Maid costume).
That's intellectual fraud. You can't claim credit for the things you got right if you don't admit all the things you got wrong. But once that you actually look at all of it, SF writers aren't better at predicting the future because prediction is not the author's business. Writing about conflict and the human nature is what all writing is about. Science fiction is just one genre among many others that follows certain conventions in storytelling. Just like a crime novel needs some murder mystery, science fiction must tell a story where technology and science plays an important role in the story.

My point is, as much as I like science fiction, I think it works better if the authors manage to apply self-discipline when introducing a tech related idea with far-reaching consequences. Sometimes an author can pull it off and paint the REALLY BIG canvas, e.g. Larry Niven with his Ringworld universe, or Brian Aldiss with his Helliconia trilogy. But usually the authors are better off not to dive too deeply into the science part unless they are really good at it; sadly, few authors are.

Ssnake, I think the inspiration from science fiction happens, but is more circular. I don't think someone saw something in a sci-fi story and then decided to go out and develop it, but I think seeing those devices inspired people to want to invent things, and they never got the vision of what they'd seen out of their heads, so what they invented ended up mimicking what they saw in sci-fi.

Then someone sees that device, takes it to the next level for a sci-fi story, someone else sees that and is inspired, and the loop continues.

Also, Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea of satellite communications, and if I remember right also put a version of the Internet in his novel Imperial Earth.

He also discussed it in TV shows back in the '70s:

I was already a total hard SF fan when Star Trek first appeared on TV,
and it didn't take me long to conclude that it was not exactly hard SF.
I gave it points for trying, but the transporter, like the magic gravity,
was an obvious dodge directly attributable to TV budgeting. So, maybe
not as bad as Star Wars, after all it had some "names" doing scripts,
but I always regarded it as another fantasy in the guise of a science
future. I never regarded myself as a fan of the show because of that.
During its original run, I would watch it if I encountered it, but I
probably still haven't seen all the episodes despite how many times it
appeared in reruns before I abandoned TV permanently.

(I have mentioned once or twice before, the only video portrayal that
I have ever encountered that I would regard as hard SF was Outlander.)

This is not true. Here is one counterexample:

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm

and a plot summary from from wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe

I know there are more, I encountered lots when I was reading prodigious
quantities of SF in the '60s, and most of what I read was from the '40s
and '50s, but I couldn't name them now.

Oh, neat!
And I gotta admit that it's closer to the concept of the internet of today than the usual projected super-sized libraries which are often given as an example to internet predictions.

"Beyond all comprehension" "Beyond imagination"





That's how you skate the problem of explaining things that probably can't or shouldn't be explained, don't even try. It's not pretending to be a science lecture nor does it transplant us into the future with a blueprint on how to get there, so it can't be faulted for junk science, the 70s style costumes and campy robots just get fined for something else, I guess. "This is what I am, take it or leave it baby."

Consumer products aside, does anyone think that human beings are going to look like this kind of thing transporting around the galaxy like in the movies?