this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Whatever star date he was generated on.
Which is… sometime in 2361, approximately 26 years after William Riker was born.
no man, that would mean it's William Riker's birthday too. Thomas' birthday is the same as Wills , it doesn't matter how many times they died and got "revived" by teleportation.
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.
Okay but whatever matter materialized as Thomas Riker wasn't sucked up from the planet by the transporter. The beam is just information. Everything transported gets assembled from new matter - or plasma or whatever - which means they could deliberately replicate as many Rikers as they wanted to. Or brilliant scientists, philosophers, redshirts, etc. To duck this reasoning they decided to make it a moral issue, like they did with cloning and genetic enhancement in Strange New Worlds.
The transporter is a great example of sci fi tech that isn't fleshed out and applied in ways that would be obvious if it were real. That happens a lot when something is invented for production reasons - in this case to avoid shooting too many shuttle takeoffs and landings.
I disagree that the transporter is creating matter. Didn’t Gene himself go to the trouble to say that transporters and replicators are not the same tech (even if they share a lot of the same principles of operation)?
If a transporter was creating people, it would have to also be an industrial replicator, tech that didn’t exist during Kirk or Archer’s day. It would also mean that replicators can create (complex) life, which is repeatedly said to be impossible. The episode Ship In a Bottle had to trick Moriarty into thinking it was possible to beam him and his partner off the holodeck and into the real world, because it wasn’t possible by any stretch of the imagination.
Thomas Riker is a miracle. The rogue transporter confinement beam and the accidentally duplicated pattern signal should have failed every step of the way but somehow didn’t. AND it miraculously acquired the necessary matter to resolve the signal into a living person. The matter belonging to William Riker proper made it back to the Potemkin. Who knows, maybe neither of them are pure. Maybe William is 1% planetary dust and Thomas is 1% William.
I’m sure Starfleet R&D ogled over Picard’s report to Starfleet Command for a long time. But I think the fact that the Moriarty program was still just a hologram in a lab at the turn of the 25th century suggests they couldn’t find a way to replicate that accident.