Excellent format for dealing with science in ST:TOS. I look forward to more. (BTW, Galileo 7 is one of my favorite episodes. Objectively it may not be among the best, as you say, but I've always liked it, probably because of the exploration of Spock's "humanity."
Reminds me of this little poem by Douglas Adams: I teleported home one night with Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Maggies heart away and I got Sidney's leg.
“Cold Equations”… thank you! I remember watching this in the 90s but could never recall the name of the movie and could ∴ never search for it… I remember really liking it.
6:10 I love the sense of humour you have, never change, I am not studying hard science but still enjoy hearing you break down these subjects (pun, in this case, intended).
Yep, the simple fact that they _could_ simply reverse the order of taking someone apart and reassembling them elsewhere (since it's essentially just particles and the information of how they are put together at a specific moment) means that it's simply a perfect copy. Which also means that they don't need to take the 'original' apart in the first place, which means that I could have a conversation with the "beamed" me, which means that it wouldn't be me that arrived at that destination. Though I _have_ heard an interesting take on that. The "me" that sits here in five minutes is also an unknown person for me - it'll have my memories and everything, but the current me has no 'access' to that future me, in a sense, one could argue that 'current me' ceases to exist and 'future me' starts to exist, only to cease to exist again... So it wouldn't make any real difference to get beamed around instead. It's not a take I'm on board with, but I don't have any real arguments against it, I have to admit that it's simply an emotional gut reaction...
I've heard that speculation as well, and had a similar reaction. I think the visceral objection it is that, if you dig into that line of thought far enough, it begins to call into question our fundamental notions of individuality. The best I have come up with is that we are best understood not as a particular collection of physical material at a given point in time, but as the dynamic but continuous system represented by that matter, moving through time. Interrupt the continuity, and it's not the same system. The obvious objection: does that mean people brought back by resuscitation are not the same person? Maybe? It's woolly, but it's the closest I've come to a counter-argument.
As an engineer that is one of the most interesting things I learned in school is that there is always a trade off. The more energy you generate the higher the resistance. The faster you charge a battery the shorter the battery life. About transporters I don't think they disassemble a person then reassemble them elsewhere. Or create a duplicate from in situ atoms creating a transporter clone. My personal theory is based in string theory. They retune all of your constituent matter to a higher frequency until it becomes waveforms, then they transmit the waveforms and retune it to matter at the destination point. It just now occurred to me that you would be like a symphony being broadcast through space. That's also how they know how to put you back together, because they know each notes starting position in the symphony that is Michael Siegel. Perhaps the transporter chief must have to study music theory and is a master musician. If you think about it Scotty played the bagpipes, Spock the Vulcan harp, and Chief O'Brien the violin. And they all performed in public. What a beautiful grand idea that is. From now on I'm going to be disappointed that the transporter room doesn't sound like a symphony orchestra when people are beaming down. Of course I know almost nothing about string theory so now, all you physicists out there, now you can shred me in the comments. And ... Go.😊
The Transporter is an example that perfectly illustrates my definition of Science Fiction: A genre of storytelling in which A: You are expected to have a reasonable amount of science in your fiction...BUT B: You are also permitted to have a reasonable amount of fiction in your science.
This actually is one of my favorite episodes. But the thing that always bothered me about it is how, after the Galileo's crew is rescued, Spock takes a lot of abuse for making an "emotional" decision. As Dr. Mike points out, it was the only rational decision! Any other decision leaves the shuttle's crew dead. Spock's choice was a long shot, but the only one with a potential positive outcome.
There's even some situations in the card game of Bridge where on occasion a declarer will find himself or herself in a spot where the only way the contract will be made is if the opposing cards are split a certain way. The best option is often to assume that's the case and play it as such. If the cards are unfavorable, the contract was going to fail anyway. But on occasion, the contract is successful in the only way possible.
Regarding the consciousness issue - there is an episode of TNG where it’s shown that canonically there is a continuation of consciousness through the entire process. In the episode for technobabble reasons the process takes longer than normal and we’re shown one character’s perspective and they remain aware while they’re still disassembled. On the subject of all the information you’d need to keep track of, while how it works is not explained, there is a component of the transporter that gets mentioned once or twice called ‘the Heisenberg Compensator’ which presumably is part of the system dedicated to overcoming the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. As for power requirements, it’s probably worth keeping in mind that their ships are powered by matter-antimatter reactors which are sufficient to allow them to travel orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light while still powering everything else on the ship, so within the context of the setting, the energy requirements are likely a non-issue. Now, whether such reactors are possible is another matter…
Great episode of star trek that one, one of my favourites. As for the transporter, I get what you mean about the crazy energy needed and the complexity to track every atom. Just wouldn't work. However, I bet there is a short cut method that no one has thought of. Maybe something to do with moving a whole intact person without ripping them apart. Sort of a mini worm hole. Of course, that's not how they say it works in trek 😁
I've also thought about this idea, it would have dovetailed somewhat with warp drive technology, since both involve the manipulation spacetime. I wonder what the transporter room might have looked like if that was their explanation, maybe more of a portal/tunnel looking thing.
The encoding process of moving the physical matter into the buffers is what releases the energy required to rebuild the item at the destination. The transporter device is just a conduit that uses a small amount of power (relatively) to aim and re-encode the item using (mostly) the energy released during the atomic splitting during encoding.
Awesome, I would love to see more on the original series. Phazers were the thing that always bothered me. How does this device detect the outer boundary of the object it's "phazing". When used on a living creature it seems kinda plausible but they use the things to heat up rocks in several episodes and the phazer always knows exactly what to hit. Is it possibly based on the same technological breakthrough that gave birth to the transporter, just without the put-it-back-together part?
Love your videos looking forward to seeing more.I remember reading a Sci-fi war story many years ago where their way of instant transport to get troops on the ground was to basically open a worm hole from the ship to the destination. I always wondered if that would be a better option than the matter transporter. No destroying of bodies or transplanting consciences. Any ideas?
Dr. Siegel, I love the chanel and look forward to every episode. The way you take our favorite shows and movies and explain what might be possible and what's just plain fantasy is truly enlightening. I love it. I hope you continue the Star Trek examination. 🍻
I really enjoy your posts and subscribed to your channel quite some time ago., because I think you do a great job. But, I have to tell you, this episode of ST TOG is actually one of my favorites! LOL I suspect my reason for considering it a favorite is because t reminds me of the problems and solutions so often encountered/derived by the two main characters often appearing in Asimov's "I Robot" short stories.
Funny enough, in one of the 40k books called Know No Fear Gulliman and his space marines use a teleporter to get to another ship faster and while some lived through the process others were meld to the metal ground of the opposite teleporter and meshed into it with some screaming in pain.
i always got the impression that the information required was more of a multilayered boot strap process, taken out of the person on the transporter than in some sort of bohmian process reconstructed on the ground
Thanks Mike. I would love to get your take on the sensors and scanner technology that the Enterprise crew uses routinely to detect life signs, energy patterns etc. This aspect has not been thoroughly analyzed yet in the format you present. I would love to hear more about that topic. Also, how would a practical cloaking device work? Best wishes.
They ended up getting shuttles due to, would you believe, merchandising:) A hugely famous (though their name evades me now) model company wanted to sell models of the Enterprise to the general public. The producers told them they could do that if they could provide the show with a full scale model of a shuttle for them to use on screen. As selling models was big business back then the company agreed and in fact delivered two shuttles, one which was just the outside of the craft and one for interior shots only.
Thanks Mike. I always thought that IF we can get matter transportation to work, it would ONLY be for inanimate objects, cargo and stuff. Oh and I liked how you quoted Cat Stevens....
Love your videos! Keep it up! Alcubierre apparently was inspired by Star Trek when he modeled warp drive mathematically (whatever that's worth for the real world) in a way that doesn't violate Einstein's relativity. Could you share your thoughts on it? Also, may I reccomend to you the Expanse? I'm sure others may have already done so, but that just speaks to the shows' wonderful reputation and personally I think it's well deserved.
What I would like to know is if I am correct in claiming that, in the same moment a functioning warp drive are demonstrated, we also know we are alone in the universe
Of course, as is demonstrated by this episode, the only thing less reliable than Star Fleet transporters were Star Fleet shuttle craft. Once or twice a season they had an episode where the transporter didn’t work, but 90% of the time they go anywhere in a shuttle craft, it crashes.
For me, the oddest thing about TOS was that at the end of each episode, they never left at HIGH warp speed! Even when they've been beyond the edge of the Galaxy(twice) and still get back in time for the next episode. Remember their warp speed is slower than the TNG's
Regarding the dilemma between thrust and weight, we can see how some airplanes and cars deploy a parachute to stop faster, could a spaceship somehow use a solar sail in the same way? Does that create sufficient "friction"? Depending on conditions of course
Janeway murdered Tuvix! They had the tech to separate the two, without ripping Tuvix apart. They have a frigging transporter buffer that saves the info. That always sat wrong with me.
One other point… the actual logical move would be to leave an automated probe to do the research Spock and crew was actually sent. Kirk, after the emergency, returns for the probe. Or leave a probe beacon and notify Starfleet to send out a research vessel specifically to study this anomaly. However, I realize this would negate the whole episode.
I loved this episode. It's the first time we get to see Spock in command and making life and death decisions. The worst thing you can say about any episode is that it was boring and this episode definitely was not boring. There were some stupid elements but stupid is ok, boring is not.
This episode scared the crap out of me as a little kid. The fact that the natives of this planet were giants throwing enormous 12-foot-long spears was really frightening to me as a child. But I do love this episode!
The dumb thing about the transporter is that the ship bent space-time in order to travel. Having already used that McGuffin, they could have just doubled down and stated that the transporter warped space in such a way that two locations were congruent momentarily and then we're nudged to a new location as the power was shut down. You could come up with reasons like extreme power consumption to prohibit transmission of large masses and inherent fluctuations in space-time across distances to prohibit interstellar teleportation.
I liked the idea that they lost there fuel by attempting a repair that didn't work. It shows that things don't always work out as expected, even in the federation.
I'm wondering if you can in a future episode deal with the columns in space that were recently detected. They were apparently ejected from black holes and light years in length. I am curious about them and if they were in visible light or just visible by other means. Just a suggestion. But, thank you for the insight regarding the soul and people being more than just flesh.
Nobody ever pretended it was The Expanse, much less real science fiction. TV has to be relatively cheap and fast and appeal to mass audiences. Yes, it did help push a few mundanes into the sciences, but just as many people were already there and shaking their heads... but thankful for getting anything at all from TV. The transporter and food replicator were like warp drive: hand waving to get the story moving. Valid discussion, but one already argued to death 45 years ago.
I like the metaphysics of the question of the life and death of people who are transported as much as the next guy, but I think we have to admit that in all practicality it does not murder people, create new people... ship of Theseus be damned. Before the transport there is one person. After, there is one person. That person recognizes themselves as having continuity of consciousness. So no, it's not a fax machine. Or a murder machine.
Actually the whole "the monsters were the remnants of an alien race that crashed there centuries ago" is a good idea. I don't know if you've read H. Beam Piper's "Little Fuzzy" series, but it kind of goes down that route (sorry, that's kind of a spoiler since you don't know that until the third book ... but hey, its over 60 years old so i'm sure most that would be interested in it have read it).
Setting aside the metaphysical problems of transporters (these things really could only work on living creatures without souls. Basically the Star Trek universe is full of undead synthetic people). The bigger problem is that transporter (and even replicator) tech is several millennia more advanced than every other aspect of Start Trek tech. Frankly transporter tech is a Kardaschev Type III or the mythical Type IV level technology. The United Federation of Planets is a strong Type I or maybe burgeoning Type II civilization at best. 23rd century humans using transporter tech (or for that matter a 21st century guy right after a global cataclysmic war inventing warp drive) would be like medieval knights carrying phasers. Also, if you had transporters, why would you ever need a sick bay and a large medical staff? Just run people through the transporter and "fix" whatever is broken ... remove whatever disease is in them (since you have to recreate it to put it back during reassembly) for that matter there should be no fat, weak or disabled people since you could fix those problems with a simple trip through the transporter. And if you can store patterns, you'd have effective immortality. All you have to do is beam yourself back into your 33 year old body every year.
Don't forget that Heisenberg says that you can NEVER know exactly where something is and how it is moving. The transporter is dead in the water (if it is actually in water anyway).
Another possible explanation for the natives - the planet could’ve had a more hospitable environment but had undergone some sort of climatic disaster recently. Although this explanation likely fails as in such an event, larger animals such as the natives would’ve been amongst the first to die off. Alternatively, been a while since I’ve seen this episode, but did they specify that the entire planet was like that, or just the local area to where they crashed? You mentioned that the atmospheric pressure cited would be analogous to that in the Himalayas, so maybe they just crashed on top of that planet’s equivalent mountain range, in which case the natives maybe be from the lowlands and have just come up the mountain for whatever reason (not as if the crew had chance to ask them if they were actually locals).
Wow you are younger than you look, judging by your disks :) When I started _working_ with computers, 1GB disks were something new and powerful. When I was a teen and just played with computers for fun, GB was not a term anybody used, and there were articles discussing if 1 GHz processor is even possible.
So, beaming is going to be quite expensive, it may cost you an arm and a leg! Sorry captain, there's not enough storage, I'm ganna have to beam you up a limb at a time! In the transporters' schematic, you will see a little box called a "Heisenberg compensator". It is a reference to Werner Heisenberg was a scientist who theories about it being impossible to simultaneously map every atom of a human body. So, when a TV executive was asked "How does the Heisenberg compensator work?". The executive replied "Very well thanks!" 😊 🤔 what's your thoughts on warp drive?
Dr Siegel, if you are planning to review some movies sometime in the future I would suggest Capricorn One. You have most likely seen it. There are certainly many errors and absurdities in that movie which I am not able to see. I would like you to tell us the many reasons why a mission to Mars ( or to the Moon ) would be impossible to fake. On almost all space forums there are many people who agressively promote the idea that there have not been any moon landings and everything is just a huge hoax.
So.... questions: How to beam a physical object would, as Mike talked about, require something in the order of a Ronnabytes...10 to the 27th power... of information, very likely even much more...and that would be for just one person. So even when our technology gets to that level, we then have to understand an even more complex question of how to beam thought...consciousness. Is consciousness just another grouping of electrical charges in the brain that we will eventually be able to gather up and put in a 'file system' and then just transport the file? And then the Soul. Is a Soul just another name for consciousness or is it something different and separate from consciousness? Yep...we jump right into the deep end when talking about consciousness and a soul.
I love the idea of a transporter, but I wouldn't be caught dead in one. It is an execution machine, what comes out the other end would be a perfect copy of you.
Always the little things,well really a big thing, for example how does the gravity on the Enterprise work?In reality Spock 🖖 and Kirke would be floating around the ship which wouldn't be such good viewing or easy to make.
In order to matter transport a something, you you need to know the exact position and velocity of particles like electrons. My understanding is that the better you know the position of an electron the less you know of it's velocity and vice versa. So if you transport someone you really can't put the electrons back where they were originally because they're going to be either moving at random mixed up velocities or random positions or both. And frankly I don't want a bunch of electrons from my brain wandering through my body not forming the proper chemical connections in brain cells. Seems to me something you kind of need.
Could you make copies of people using the transporter? Sure. But people often discount the idea that it may be taboo to do so. Capability is one thing, but willingness and purpose are also in play. For example, do you ever see them use genetic medicine to make superhumans? No. Because in their history when that was attempted it lead to horrible wars and genocide. So, they have a strong cultural taboo against it. Duplicating people might have a similar prohibition.
And bravo for pointing out how impossible such technology would be in terms of the physics we understand today! Build space ships to move people instead? Why are we sending people to dangerous environments and uncertain fates?! Surely they could manage some robots to do this! But no, we're sending the highest rank, most important people without any protection and hardly any tools to unexplored planets. It's a good thing transporters have "biofilters" i guess or they'd all be dead from space plague.
Michael, your argument against capturing all possible data about a body would seem to be equally well used against proponent's of living in a simulated existence.
I guess the technology in star trek where they "beam" people around are the same as how they instantly make a cup of coffee or food out of thin air, so for the machine we are like a slice of apple pie, nothing more
I don't care. Star Trek is a SCIENCE FICTION show. It doesn't need to prove to me how things work in its universe. Just entertain me. And it does that supremely well.
If you really want to take the show into the realm of "believable science", the transporter obviously can't simply disintegrate and reintegrate matter somewhere else. The representation of it in Trek is unreliable and, thus, misinterpreted. IMO, what it does is open a non-destructive wormhole to a preprogrammed destination and vice-versa when beaming back to the ship in a 13 Monkeys sort of way. That's also not very scientifically viable, but it's a helluva lot better than the Prestige-esque alternative (Tron also comes to mind). Deep Space Nine obviously ran with the whole stable and traversable wormhole thing and nobody complained. I suspect Robert Wise understood just how absurd the concept actually is, as the Enterprise's transporter is only seen being used three times in TMP and doesn't even work when Kirk wants to board the ship. And when the transporters are supposedly fixed, it instead critically malfunctions to absolutely ghastly effect (seriously, TMP should've gotten a PG rating just for that nightmarish scene alone). You could even make the argument that transporter-like tech is what killed Ilia (she was scanned before being "derezzed"). It's a fun narrative device to have around if you've got writer's block and need to crank out an episode script. And TBF the show does a remarkably decent job of surrounding it with verisimilitude, with pattern buffers, enhancers, signal boosters, biofilters, and the like. Plus, it really showed us what a sociopath Janeway was (seriously, don't turn your back on that woman).
@@MichaelSiegel14 Sorry, the show is actually called 12 Monkeys. I keep thinking 13 because the characters endlessly pontificate about the importance of "primaries". It's a decent show, but My God, the speechifying.... Yeah, I know, but Trek has lately gotten into the habit of retconning itself (see STD and SNW), so the whole "matter into energy into matter" thing is getting a bit long in the tooth. At least there are some wild-haired theories as to how to achieve FTL travel, but the transporter specifically seems to be a non-starter. This also dovetails into the replicators, which is a direct fork of transporter tech. Of course, the big canary in the coalmine is the timeline. We're suppose to have all this stuff perfected by the 23rd century, which just ain't gonna happen. We probably won't have even a sliver of these devices in a thousand years. We'll likely discover the key to immortality before we can starship our way to Zeta 2 Reticuli in just under 10 seconds.
Star Trek takes place 200 years from now stop and think what 200 years the past past was like. If you said to someone one day we’ll be walking on the Moon they burn at the stake. So who knows what 200 years from now will be
