So… and I’m in no way a Memory Alpha-level ST nerd, caveat lector:
- transporters are matter-to-energy-to -matter transformers; which implies
- they have both energy-to-matter conversion technology, and matter-to-energy technology; which means
- assuming the conversion process itself isn’t using vast quantities of energy, they could easily be turning energy into matter, and powering it with matter to energy, losing some energy in the conversion tax; which means
- they may as well be turning humanoid waste into food
It would imply that transporter and replicator technology are, basically, the same thing.
However, there are cannon issues.
- Even assuming metaphysics beyond what we know, they’d have to be violating the laws of thermodynamics to get more efficient energy production than matter-to-energy conversion. Which would make dilithium crystals and such less efficient than the technology they use to create food… so, why use it? Well, because
- The conversion process isn’t low cost. They can transport people, and produce from from energy, but it’s a super-expensive process. Like, you lose 90% of your energy in the matter:energy:matter cycle, out something. Which would mean
- Transporter technology isn’t converting things to energy and back; it’s using some cheat that does the same thing effectively, but with constraints, such as limits on how much you can alter the source object to destination object in the process; and getting pure energy out of matter is really lossy. But if you go from baseball to baseball, but in a different place, you avoid the energy penalty.
My head cannon is that this is how both replicators and transporters work. If you take a Riker and turn him into Riker somewhere else via a conversion loophole, it’s pretty cheap. If you take a 236g of lead and turn it into a cup of Earl Grey (hot), it costs you some energy loss but you’re using basically the same loophole. But if you try to turn Riker into pure energy to power the Enterprise because the warp core is offline, really you only get a couple of grams of usable energy because you can’t use the loophole and most went into the conversion process – which is why they still need an efficient fuel like dilithium.
Like, matter-to-energy requires antimatter, which is expensive to produce; but the loophole lets you skip over the antimatter part as long as, in the end, you have basically the same sort of matter.
Cephalotrocity@biglemmowski.win 1 week ago
Yeah, they are. Waste matter is reclaimed as energy/supplies for food production
Ah I think I see the confusion. They are using antimatter for energy creation. Energy to matter for transport or replication is ‘paid’ for by the matter to energy destruction of the og material (whether it be the transported individual, waste matter collected from the crew, equivalent amounts of reactor fuel, or some combination of these) and the excess cost of thermodynamics is paid for by the matter-antimatter reactions in the reactor.
Is the efficiency miraculous? Yes, ofc. Is it breaking thermodynamics? No. It’s easy to see how they are paying for the excess costs with reactor fuel and that is without any hand-wavium of subspace or dilithium crystals being involved.
sxan@midwest.social 1 week ago
I was saying that there’s nothing, within our current physics, that is not efficient than a matter/antimatter reaction. You get 100% of the energy. Whether or not it’s useful energy is another question, and I’m doing some hand-waving around the topics of containment, manipulation, etc. However, nothing we know of is a more efficient use of matter to generate electricity. Not fission; not fusion; not radioactive decay. If we could wrap a black hole in a Dyson sphere and capture Hawking radiation, it’d still be less efficient than M/AM annihilation.
I was saying that - barring a magic technology such as capturing usable energy from quantum fluctuation, saying ST has a form of energy production that is a matter-based energy production that is more efficient than M/AM annihilation would violate our known laws of physics, because introducing a hydrogen atom to an anti-hydrogen atom is 100% efficient and costs nearly nothing to effect.
ST is full of magic technologies, and carrying around a bunch of AM as part of a way to play Mozart in the ready room is really dangerous, so - maybe they use it a bit, but they rely on more stable, less dangerous energy sources like dilithium. Anyway, trying to mix hard science and Star Trek is a dangerous endeavor. ST is more hard-sciency than the Space Wizards in Star Wars, but there’s still a vast amount of speculation required to make things work.