I don’t accept the premise – the pattern is read on transport, yes? Rather than a fixed record of one’s composition. Therefore, the only aging you won’t be doing is for the duration of the transport process itself. Chump change.
They regularly allude to the idea of “pattern buffers” that hold on to a copy of you for as long as the plot requires.
Sure, but I don’t think those are used as a matter of standard practice. The idea of some immutable, archival pattern being used for each trip doesn’t track.
This happens in the episode where everyone prematurely ages, and they are sent through the transporter to make them their “normal” ages. There’s no reason given why they couldn’t do that all the time.
Even more relevant there was that episode where a transporter accident turns Picard, Guinan, Ro and Kiko into twelve year olds and nobody points out they just discovered transporter induced immortality.
What really gets me about that episode is all of the effected characters immediately want to return to their normal age and nobody says “Hold up, I’m very okay with a couple extra decades of life” or centuries in Guinans case I suppose.
(Hope that sounds convincing, cause hell if I know)
That’s kind of the premise of the John Scalzi book “Old Man’s War”. In the book, they take elderly people (aka Wise people), and put their minds/memories into young fit bodies. This, in theory, creates soldiers who are both Wise, and Young/Fit.
John Scalzi is an amazing author. You’ll love it. Another good one by him is The Dispatcher. There’s even an audiobook of this narrated by Zachary Quinto
Huh. A lot of the Keiko/ O’Brien squabble episodes of DS9 are going to be easier to watch, with that idea in place. He’s not divorcing or fixing his marriage, because he can simply outlive her and do better next time.
There are multiple answers, with different degrees of truth
The patterns aren’t (typically) stored long term, something implied about transporter buffers seems to indicate they can hold incredible amounts of data that starts to degrade very quickly. New patterns are taken each time they transport AFAIK.
But, instead maybe that “cell damage” is just part of the details you get when you retain enough pattern detail to include peoples recent memories.
But, instead maybe the actors age in real life and keeping track of making them look perpetually youthful with makeup would be really hard so whatever the excuse is it’s just an excuse.
something implied about transporter buffers seems to indicate they can hold incredible amounts of data that starts to degrade very quickly
Exactly. I always understood the difference between replicators and transporters to be the level of detail in the scan. The replicators don’t need as much detail to make a convincing steak or a cup of tea. So they can store those scans at a much lower resolution and have a full, permanent library.
The transporters need an immense amount of detail to perfectly store your pattern, to avoid messing with your brain chemistry and causing transporter psychosis. It’s too much data to keep on hand for every crew member.
Is it a copy or are the molecules sent?
