this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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I always wondered about that. Where do all the extra atoms come from?? Most rooms don't have ~80 kg of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen lying around. (Yes, some of those are in the air, but nowhere near enough.)
Unless, by coincidence, Thomas was beamed into existence next to a walk-in freezer full of meat.
Inb4 Star Trek / Delicious in Dungeon crossover.
Air is more stuff than you would think. If you were able to isolate a cylinder of air around the Eiffel Tower the air would weigh more than the tower.
Okay, now I have to actually do the math.
Per this Wikipedia article, the average human is about 65% oxygen, 19% carbon, and I'm going to ignore the rest.
Per Wolfram Alpha, a typical cubic meter of air has 270 grams oxygen and 160 grams carbon. Comparing to the ratios above, oxygen is the limiting factor.
One Riker (80 kg) requires all the oxygen from (80 kg x 65%) ÷ 0.27 kg/m^3 = 192 m^3 of air. So if you beam Thomas Riker into a very large living room (8 x 8 x 3 = 192 m^3), it would have enough atoms to build his body, but then he'd asphyxiate because all the oxygen was used up. That said, a tennis court (~800 m^3) would be sufficient.
‘Riker’ is officially a unit of measurement now.
Yes, but that kind of subjective comparison doesn't work when you do a little math. The density of air at 1 atmosphere is about 1.2 kg/m3. According to Jonathan Frakes he weighed about 90kg when they shot TNG, so assembling Riker would require about 17 cubic meters of air - about how much is in a 16x16-ft room with a 10-ft ceiling - which is about the size of the transporter room. And that would use ALL the air in the room, i.e. making the room a vacuum, which doesn't happen.
And that's just for one guy, not a whole landing party. Of course the air could be supplied through vents - but it would have to rush in like a hurricane, which doesn't happen, and this doesn't cover how people beam into places that aren't equipped like that.
On the flip side, we know people's atoms don't turn into air when they beam away, because there's no violent outward whoosh from where they were standing. The effect would be as if they asploded.
Seems to me the transporter would have to operate on principles that just aren't known to us right now. Maybe the fabric of spacetime itself can somehow spawn and absorb matter, enabling a person's atoms to appear seemingly out of nothing when when they materialize - as well as local air disappearing to get out of their away. Vice versa when the person dematerializes. In fact instead of just information being beamed up, maybe the person's actual atoms are transported through a special spacetime medium, not just radio waves. The idea of sending your original atoms might clear up the philosophical/moral dilemma about whether the transporter kills you.
But then where did Tom Riker come from? I dunno, maybe the transporter glitch forked Will through the spacetimes of two separate multiverses, and both of them got reassembled in our universe? Or maybe it wasn't technically a transporter glitch but a weird wrinkle in spacetime, where it folded onto itself and he got sent through both folds.
I love speculating about this stuff!
It probably all came from the distortion field around the planet that caused the issues in the first place. It was strong enough to disrupt a transporter beam, so it might have been made up of physical matter swirling around in the upper atmosphere.
Having the beam reflected back to the surface took with it enough junk for the transporter signal to repurpose into a new Riker. :P
We’ll say that’s the reason Thomas acted a little cockeyed compared to William.
Isn’t that essentially what Neelix’s cooking was?
Finally we learn the terrible truth behind "leola root". 😸