this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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Yes, the current theory on how transporters would work in the real world is duplication and digitization, but in Star Trek it is a literal matter transference. Transporter signals and confinement beams act like radio waves, they can only go so far and through so much before they fall off, and whatever matter got disassembled at point A is what gets sent out and reassembled at point B.
…At least until the transporter chief does something unorthodox like making a second confinement beam around the first to prevent matter leakage, only to have that second beam be unnecessary AND get mirrored back to point A where it used ambient particles to build an effectively complete duplicate of the person being transported without the knowledge of that person or the ship doing the transporting in the first place.
Thomas Riker was given the same memories of William Riker, but he didn’t exist before that incident.
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.