Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Rewatch: "Treachery, Faith, and the Great River" - Reactor

I can excuse the replicator question for Sisko’s desk, since it was the specific unique item that was wanted and because the pattern might not have been available; and for Martok’s bloodwine, since there’s presumably a difference between real and replicated foodstuffs (which makes some sense given that the aging of an alcoholic beverage is an ongoing chemical reaction over time). But that shouldn’t be the case for Starfleet equipment like the graviton stabilizer, induction modulator, and phaser emitter. By all rights, those should be standardized components available in any Starfleet industrial replicator’s database. And the “they contain substances that can’t be replicated” dodge doesn’t work that well, because if that’s the case, Starfleet should’ve long ago redesigned those components to rely on substances that can be replicated. Especially in the middle of a war, where supply issues are urgent, you’d think they’d want to emphasize ease of mass production over reliance on scarce materials.

It would’ve been better if the trades had been for items where only the original was valuable (like the desk, the bloodwine, works of art, autographed pictures, etc.), or if the trades had been for favors rather than material objects (although they already did that in “In the Cards”).

Come to think of it, this episode was probably an attempt to do “In the Cards” again, and like most of DS9’s attempts to recapture past glories, it isn’t as good as the original. Still, it had its moments, with some new worldbuilding for both the Ferengi and the Vorta.

I elaborated a bit on the Great Material Continuum in my sole work of DS9 fiction, “…Loved I Not Honor More” in the Prophecy and Change anthology — adding a “Law of Conservation of Property” in which wealth is neither created nor destroyed but merely transferred from one owner to another.

@2: Movies take a long time to make. If the episode aired a year before the movie was released, then it was well after the movie was written and probably after it was filmed. Besides, the trope is hardly original to Galaxy Quest and can probably be found in fiction going back thousands of years.

@13: The replicators we usually see are food replicators. We’ve heard mention of industrial replicators, which are no doubt considerably larger.

@17: “So I have no trouble believing that specialized engenering parts have tolerances or fabrication issues that make the replicated versions not acceptable fur military use.”

But that sounds like a fundamental design flaw in the replicator technology itself, then, or else in the design of the components. By now, they’ve been using replicators for decades. They’ve had plenty of time to come up with ways to redesign either the components or the replicators so that this wouldn’t be a problem.

@26: Voyager‘s references to replicator rationing pretty much ceased after the second season. Presumably they repaired or adapted their power systems enough that they no longer needed to ration energy.

@28: Yes, a phaser strip is a linear array of emitters. And while a complete emitter may be too big to fit in an industrial replicator, that doesn’t mean its individual components wouldn’t be. It would only make sense in a replicator-based society that large components would be designed to be made out of replicable pieces.

@39: “Besides, if everything can just be *poof* replicated it removes a lot of the tension from the series. The loss of 40 ships doesn’t matter if the exact same ship can be instantly materialized.”

Aren’t you forgetting something? The loss of 40 ships means the death of thousands of people. That is the irreplaceable loss. That is the source of the tension. The ships are irrelevant.

And of course replicators still need raw materials and energy. Those are available in nigh-limitless supply for any starfaring civilization, since every star is a gigantic source of free fusion energy and there are kajillions of asteroids just waiting to be mined; but it still takes time and effort to gather and use them, and if your replicators are overworked, they could run out of materials for a time. And of course you could replicate the individual parts for a starship, but you’d still need many person-hours of labor to assemble and test them, as we saw on Voyager when they built the Delta Flyer. So it’s hardly “poof.” Just because technology is more advanced than what we have today, that doesn’t automatically make it pure magic. It just has different limitations.

@42: “Mercantilism” sounds just like something the Ferengi would embrace. Ferengi capitalism has always been portrayed as a more rapacious and exploitative system than the theoretical ideals you guys are discussing.

Anyway, in the story, the Law of Conservation of Property said that wealth is only transferred from one owner or source to another. Perhaps what human capitalists see as the “creation” of wealth is seen by the Ferengi as the harnessing of potential wealth that already exists within the Continuum — analogously to converting potential energy into usable energy. If you drop a rock off a cliff, it may seem that it’s gaining kinetic energy out of nowhere as it accelerates, but the gravitational potential energy was already there due to its altitude, just unrealized. The same with a fire or explosion extracting chemical potential energy that already existed within the materials, or a nuclear reaction extracting potential energy from the nuclear bonds of the reactants. What appears to be the creation of new energy is simply the conversion of unseen potential energy into a usable form.

To the Ferengi, wealth is a force of nature, a law of physics and metaphysics. It’s already there throughout the universe, just waiting for them to exploit it. “Opportunity” may be the equivalent of potential energy in this analogy. We see a business opportunity as a way to “create” new wealth, but in Ferengi metaphysics it could be seen as potential wealth that already exists and just needs to be converted into a usable form.

@51: I don’t think Voyager “pushed it” at all with the replicator’s capabilities. I think the rest of 24th-century Trek downplayed them too much. I mean, if you have transporters, replicators are easy. If you can record the exact subatomic pattern of an object, disassemble it, transmit it, and reassemble it with the exact same pattern, then you should be able to store that pattern and assemble it out of a different set of particles. The fundamental technology is exactly the same. Replicators are transporters — they’re just transporters that are fed stored data rather than live data.

So anything that can be transported can also be replicated. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be. Sure, for dramatic reasons, Trek has fudged things so that living beings can be beamed but not replicated, but that limitation doesn’t apply to inanimate objects. We’ve seen Voyager beam entire shuttles into its shuttlebay. If you accept that it can do that, then replicating all the components of a shuttle must be acceptable too. It’s just a matter of having enough raw material to build the parts from.

@54: Again, I’ve never understood why people find the shuttle replacement so implausible. It’s a logical consequence of the existence of replicators that manufacturing becomes simple, and our present-day assumptions about the difficulty of making replacement parts would pretty much cease to apply. The only limitations are energy and raw materials, and Voyager‘s energy and supply shortages seemed to end by the third season. And no shuttles were lost in season 1 and no more than three in season 2.

@56: Granted — and I’ve always felt that “Extreme Risk” was a belated effort to address that very issue. But it seems that most people just don’t think through the ramifications of replicators and don’t realize that they could be used for more than food. It helps to be shown it happening, but it’s not that hard to deduce if you think about the ramifications of the technology. Replicators are to transporters as DVRs are to live TV. If it can be beamed, it can be replicated — that shouldn’t be hard to figure out. So it’s very, very odd to me that out of all the improbable and ill-considered things about Voyager, it’s the shuttle replacement issue that so many people can’t get past.

Honestly, I have a harder time believing that shuttles could be beamed up than believing that they could be replicated. Presumably, the denser and stronger a material is, the more energy it would take to break down the bonds between its particles. So something durable and armored like a spacecraft should be harder to beam up than something like a humanoid body. Sure, it would take a lot of energy to replicate such materials too, but presumably you’d have time to produce them slowly, gradually build up the particle bonds until it was done (and indeed, by all rights, replication should allow revolutionary new types of materials engineered on the atomic level). Beaming a whole shuttle up in five seconds, on the other hand, is much more implausible. It shouldn’t be that easy.

Not to mention that if transporters are powerful enough to disintegrate any spaceship components almost instantaneously, then that makes them a superweapon more potent than phasers, so why not use them instead of phasers? Sure, they can’t get through shields, but neither can phasers. It would make more sense for them not to be used as weapons if there were limitations on what they could beam, e.g. people but not ships. (Although in that case there’d be no reason the technology couldn’t be the basis of an anti-personnel disintegrator ray.)

@58: Don’t blame authors for the mistakes made by their characters. Ferengi are greedy and amoral. Why is it so hard to believe that their ideas about economics are based more on providing excuses for their cutthroat, piratical methods than on more objective standards? Ferengi social values, their gender values, have been consistently shown as screwed-up and in serious need of reform, so why should their economic theories be any less dysfunctional?

@68: What are you even talking about at this point? The “Law” is the premise that property cannot be created or destroyed. So your post is a total non sequitur, as well as profoundly inappropriate. I don’t understand where this hostility is coming from.

@74: Thank you.

@78: The whole molecular/quantum resolution thing is only meant to explain why replicators can’t produce living beings. A desk isn’t a living being. There’s no reason it couldn’t be replicated down to every detail on a microscopic, molecular scale, far finer than any human’s ability to discern a difference.

@83/ebyronnelson: Actually the Heisenberg compensator idea was more plausible than even its creators thought. At the time they came up with it, it was just a handwave to get around the Uncertainty Principle. But later work on quantum teleportation came up with an actual way around it, by quantum-entangling the object to be teleported with a reference object that would be entangled in turn with the matter supply at the receiver. By measuring the difference in positions and momentums between the teleported object and the reference object, you can recreate them precisely without actually needing to measure them both. Which is, essentially, Heisenberg compensation.

This is why there’s a difference between informed handwaves and pure fantasy. In the former, you know and acknowledge the physical laws that create an obstacle to what you’re depicting, and suggest that some future science may find a solution to that obstacle, even if you leave it as a black box. In those cases, it’s not uncommon for that prediction to come true, for future science to find a solution after all. So acknowledging the known physics and extrapolating beyond them is still much less fanciful than just ignoring physics altogether and treating technology essentially as magic.

(And just to nitpick, I don’t think replicators require Heisenberg compensators, because they don’t use quantum-level resolution, which is why they can’t replicate living beings. There’s enough uncertainty in the positions and momenta of the particles they assemble that they couldn’t perfectly recreate the entire physical and neurochemical state of a living being sufficiently to retain its life and consciousness.)

@85/ebyronnelson: Yes, quantum teleportation is the transmission of information, but as far as quantum physics is concerned, the information that defines a thing is the thing.

A transporter does transmit the actual original particles of a person and reassembles them at the destination according to the original pattern, which is how it’s able to beam people and things to remote locations with no transporter station. However, this really doesn’t have any bearing on whether the original person survives, because what defines you as an individual is the pattern of quantum states of your particles, not the individual particles themselves, which are just interchangeable building blocks. After all, your cells keep taking in nourishment and expelling waste, so the actual particles that make them up largely change over time anyway. It’s the way those particles are organized that defines who and what you are.

As for the question of whether you retain continuity of self when you go through a quantum teleporter, I’ve come to the conclusion that you would, for reasons that I explain in this blog post. Although there are practical hurdles that I covered in a followup post.

The reason replicators don’t require Heisenberg compensators, as I said, is that it isn’t necessary to get around the Uncertainty Principle. They work at “molecular resolution” rather than “quantum resolution,” which means they don’t need to exactly duplicate the state of a pre-existing object. Really, a replicator is basically more an advanced form of 3D printing rather than teleportation. The goal isn’t to create an exact duplicate (or quantum continuation) of a thing down to the last particle state, just to create an item that is structurally and chemically equivalent to it. I believe food replicators work with a pre-existing supply of molecular compounds that can be restructured with a minimum of difficulty into just about any compound found in food or drink, so its basic building blocks are mostly molecular rather than subatomic. All it has to do is plug them into the right positions to bond chemically with each other. So it doesn’t need precise position and momentum information for pre-existing particles. It just needs a molecular-level assembly pattern to follow. (Which is why a lot of Trek characters find replicated food and drink to be different in quality from the real thing. There’s enough artificiality in its structure that it doesn’t taste exactly like the real thing.)

@91/ebyronnelson: “However, I think that you are still making a philosophical argument that is very close to the one Derek Parfit makes (and to one David Hume makes, for that matter), and that your quantum entanglement considerations are not enough to carry you out of the realm of philosophical metaphysics and into that of scientific certainty.”

I was not claiming scientific certainty. Science is not about claiming certainty, but about asking questions. More importantly, it’s about formulating questions in such a way that they can be experimentally tested, rather than just argued over endlessly in the abstract. This was my purpose — to move beyond the dead end of philosophical debate and try to redefine the question in terms that could potentially be tested scientifically someday.

“For one, opponents to Parfit’s position point out that there is an “interruption of service” problem with even teleportation in which the original particles are preserved: when I am beamed up, at the beam out point I cease to be, and then at the beam in point I am reconstituted and exist as such again, but what am I in between the moment I cease to be and the moment I come to exist again? Am I dead during that time?”

Time is not an absolute. The apparent passage of time is subjective and dependent on the observer. Any question that assumes otherwise is improperly formulated to begin with. And quantum entanglement is independent of both space and time. Two quantum-entangled particles separated over any distance will still affect each other instantaneously. Separation in space has no relevance to entanglement, and space and time are aspects of the same thing. To the teleported individual, no time would have passed in any meaningful sense.

Think of it as equivalent to passing through a wormhole into the future. As far as outside observers are concerned, you “cease to exist” between the time you enter the past end of the wormhole and exit the future end. But as far as you’re concerned, you had a continuous and uninterrupted existence that simply skipped over the intervening time. It’s exactly the same here. Indeed, that might be literally true, since there’s a theory that quantum entanglement may be the result of quantum wormholes connecting the particles (“ER = EPR,” in physics-speak).

“Also, what are we to make of poor Tom Riker? If a transporter could work by transporting quantum information alone, then it should be able to produce a Riker duplicate/original at the beam in point every time. (You say in your post that the quantum teleporter would need to annihilate the beam out person, but since even in present day experiments, the original photon is preserved, let’s assume this problem could be overcome.)”

Clarification: I did not use the word “annihilate” (literally “make nothing”), but “destroy” (literally “unbuild,” remove the structure from). Again, remember that what matters quantum-mechanically isn’t the particles, but their state information. The destruction of the teleported subject does not mean that the physical particles cease to exist, since that would violate conservation of mass. Rather, the information that defines the larger structure they belong to is removed and teleported onto a different set of particles, and conservation of quantum states requires that only one ensemble at a time can contain that information. The photon may still exist, but the specific quantum state that it had has been stripped from it and teleported onto a different photon. So it’s destruction in the same sense as if you cremated or vaporized someone — all the particles still exist, but they’re broken up into a state that bears no resemblance to the person they used to belong to.

Something like Tom Riker or “The Enemy Within”‘s duplicate Kirks doesn’t work within the rules of quantum teleportation theory, because an exact quantum-level duplicate of an entity violates conservation of information. It’s a fictional conceit that goes beyond the physics. Maybe the Kirk situation can be rationalized since neither duplicate is exactly the same as the original, so it’s not quite the same set of information. But I can’t think of a real-physics fix for Tom Riker.

The thing about individual definitions of “self” is that it’s scientifically useless. Science is about getting personal opinion and bias out of the way altogether so that we can determine what’s actually happening on a physical level. Sure, observers in different frames of reference will derive different results, but that’s because they’re actually getting different physical measurements, not just having different opinions or idiosyncratic definitions of words. All that subjectivity just contaminates the science, and it’s the exact thing I want to get away from. Philosophy is fine if you want to debate abstract things like morality, but it’s totally the wrong tool to use for questions of physical reality, things that can actually be measured and tested and known rather than just wondered about.

@93/ebyronnelson: Well, “what satisfies a philosopher” means nothing to me, since philosophers would seem to have a vested interest in avoiding definitive answers, otherwise they’d run out of things to argue over. Personal satisfaction is irrelevant. Science, again, is about eliminating subjective opinions and viewpoints as much as possible.

To us, teleportation is just a hypothetical question. But if it ever became real, then society would need more than just an endless, circular philosophical debate about the nature of identity. The continuity of self would become a real, concrete question that would need to be answered if possible. And that’s why I’m trying to move beyond the same old endless philosophical debate that’s been going on for generations and add something new that’s actually measurable and quantifiable. What is identity? What is continuity? In a physical sense, my brain is just an ensemble of separate subatomic particles. What makes me perceive those particles as parts of a continuous entity in the first place? The interaction between them. Their correlation. My perception of myself is an emergent property of the quantum correlation among the particles of my brain and body. Therefore, questions of the continuity of self are more fundamentally questions about the preservation of quantum correlation, and that is a physically quantifiable phenomenon.

And that’s important, because all physics is interlinked. The same basic principles operate on everything, so a principle that is understood in one context can be extrapolated to a different context. That’s what makes physical laws useful — because we can follow the links from a known phenomenon to an unknown phenomenon and gain insight into the latter through our understanding of the former. It’s like gravity. Philosophers argued the nature of planetary motion for centuries, based on their beliefs and ideals and fabricated conceits, and got nowhere. Then Newton figured out that planetary motion was governed by the same laws of gravitation as the fall of an apple, and thus, by observing the way objects fell on Earth and calculating the underlying laws that shaped that phenomenon, we could apply those laws to a different phenomenon and get the kind of real answers that philosophers never had a prayer of providing. It’s the universality of physical laws that makes them so powerful. Understand how they cause one phenomenon, and you can understand a more remote phenomenon that’s governed by the same laws. So if we can understand that the thing we call identity is an outgrowth of some more basic physical phenomenon that we can test and learn about in other contexts, then we can use that broader understanding to address the question, rather than just relying on subjective opinions that are never going to resolve a definitive answer.

@95/ebyronnelson: But that’s just my point — today, we see identity as being a purely subjective question, but it’s arrogant to assume that our current viewpoint of things is the exclusive and perpetual arbiter of reality. Before Newton figured out the mathematics of gravity, the motions of heavenly bodies were seen as a purely abstract, unknowable matter that was the exclusive province of philosophers and priests. Science found an answer to a question that was once believed unanswerable. So it’s short-sighted to assume that just because we don’t currently have a scientific answer to the question of identity, that means it can never have one. Science is constantly discovering new things that we never could’ve imagined on our own.

And no, I don’t yet know all the answers about how you could measure it. I’m just suggesting a direction to start looking in. Science isn’t about having all the answers, it’s about asking the right questions.

@97: No, it’s totally different from philosophy. Philosophy is about asking questions that can’t be answered, so that philosophers have an excuse to just go on arguing endlessly so they can continue to have a job. Science is about asking questions that can potentially be answered and thereby improve our understanding of reality. That’s why I said it’s about asking the right questions. As I clearly stated earlier in the thread, the goal of science is to formulate testable questions.

And I’m not “stipulating” anything. To stipulate something is to assert or accept it as an axiom so it isn’t questioned any further. I’m suggesting a possible new way of asking the question, to find a property of identity that can actually be tested rather than just debated in the abstract. As a philosophical issue, the question of whether teleportation is murder has just been going back and forth without resolution for decades. Clearly that’s a dead end. Philosophy can’t help here. So a new angle is needed if there’s any hope of actually answering it, and that’s where science has the advantage. As Mark Twain said, “Supposing is good, but finding out is better.”

@103/Keleborn: That’s actually what the word “replicator” means in the Stargate franchise and in other science fiction — a self-replicating robot, a machine that can reproduce and proliferate like a living being.

And life and intelligence are two different questions. Microbes can reproduce, but you don’t see them getting a seat on the Federation Council. (Well, there are probably billions of them on the actual seats, but you know what I mean.)

@105/wizardofwoz77: You’re right, they were food synthesizers on TOS. The Making of Star Trek explained that they rapidly prepared meals from real ingredients that were kept perfectly fresh through advanced preservation techniques, although the word “synthesizer” implies a different process in which the food was put together from raw chemical ingredients. The concept of transporter-based food replication was introduced by David Gerrold in his 1980 Star Trek novel The Galactic Whirlpool, then later incorporated into TNG, of which Gerrold was an uncredited co-creator.

Really, though, replicators are a logical extrapolation from transporter technology, in much the same way that recorded video is a logical extrapolation from live television. If it’s possible to take objects apart at the subatomic level and then reassemble them back into their original pattern, then it follows that it should be possible to store that pattern and make copies out of raw material. (Arguably the first portrayal of the concept in Trek was “The Enemy Within.”)