Why I'd never use a Star Trek transporter

Every fan of Star Trek is familiar with the transporter, which 'beams' people into a new adventure every week.

Gene Rodenberry invented the transporter as a plot device to get the 'away' team down to a planet's surface before the prop makers had delivered any shuttles for filming. He was also concerned at the time needed to show, each week, the crew embarking on a shuttle, traveling, landing and disembarking, before moving the story on.

Gene never intended to explain how the transporter works, in the same way that the warp engines are just so much technobabble. However, program episodes have included enough detail to give some idea of how the technology is supposed to work.

And I, for one, will NEVER step into a transporter. Why?

Well, the machine scans every molecule in your body and uses advanced computer tech to map their 3D locations. It then destroys your body and converts the atoms into an energy beam ("Beam me up, Scotty"). Now, hold on a second... you die when that happens. I know it sends your energy/atoms and instructions to another location to reconstruct your body, BUT YOU HAVE ALREADY DIED. That's enough for me. And Doctor McCoy speculated on exactly this point on more than one occasion. He said he'd died the first time he used a transporter, and only a copy of him had been around ever since.

So what happens at 'your' destination? The energy and instructions reconstruct an exact duplicate of your body with all the molecules, brain synapses, a complete consciousness, etc, all working fine. So you've arrived? Well to my thinking, a COPY of you has arrived. An incredibly detailed copy, but still a copy. It thinks like you did, everyone thinks it's you, but it's a copy.  Do you remember the episode of ST:TNG when they discovered a duplicate Riker? He'd been copied in a transporter malfunction. So there were two of him, both thinking he was the original.

Supposing you had a laser photocopier which produced exact duplicates of any page put in it, but which destroyed the original during the process. To create a copy of, say, a letter, you would actually need two copies as the original is destroyed. Now, would you refer to one of those copies as the original letter, the original piece of paper you started with? Of course not.

It's the same with the transporter. The original object (or person) is destroyed, and a copy produced elsewhere.

You won't get ME using one of these machines!

By the way, I still love Star Trek, even if the tech is impossible.

Klingon Software

Klingon Software

• Specifications are for the weak and timid!!
• This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code.
• You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.
• Indentation?! I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
• What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software escapes, leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake!
• Klingon function calls do not have "parameters" - they have "arguments"- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
• Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
• I have challenged the entire Quality Assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest! They will not concern us again.
• A TRUE Klingon warrior does not comment his code.
• By filing this bug report you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
• You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
• Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
• Klingon multitasking systems do not support "time-sharing". When a Klingon program wants to run, it challenges the scheduler in hand-to-hand combat and owns the machine.
• You humans call this thing a 'cursor' and you move it with 'mouse'! Bah! A Klingon would not use such a device. We have a Karaghht-Gnot - which is best translated as "An Aiming Daggar of 16x16 pixels" and we move it using a Gshnarrrf which is a creature from the Klingon homeworld which posesses just one, (disproportionately large) testicle... which it rubs along the ground... uh, do we really need to talk about this?
• Behold the keyboard of Kalis! The greatest Klingon code warrior that ever lived!
• Klingon programs don't do accountancy. For that, you need a Ferengi programmer.
• Klingon software does NOT have BUGS. It has FEATURES, and those features are too sophisticated for a Romulan pig like you to understand.

Star Trek Where's Wally?

This is something that I found on the Movie Moron website. It made me laugh out loud:




Go to this site to see it animated: Movie-Moron.com

Captain's Blog

... Stardate 2161...

Old pointy ears and Scotty givn me a rite pain... set fazer on stn!

Give me Klingons ne day.

Uhuru h@t tho.

- J.T.K.

(with apologies to Private eye - http://www.private-eye.co.uk )

CCTV in Star Trek

According to urban myth, when you move around London, you will be caught on CCTV (close circuit TV cameras) up to about 300 times in any one day.

So why is there no CCTV in the USS Enterprise? When Geordi laForge calls the Bridge to say that there is something strange on the sensors when he scans Cargo Bay 2, a team of security red-shirts is dispatched to go and use the Mark 1 Eyeball to investigate, and they probably get sucked into an interdimensional vortex, get eaten by something that transported itself onto the ship, or they find another one of Wesley's damned nano-robot experiments gone haywire again. Either one of those OR there's nothing wrong, expect for Geordi's stupid sensors. He should have gone himself and used his fancy sunglasses-gadget to see what was going down.

HOWEVER, if the bridge crew had simply switched the CCTV on in Cargo Bay 2 - probably Ensign Bored's job - they would have seen the pile of tribbles, or whatever, and known if it was safe or not to send a red-shirt to arrest them.

See, makes so much sense. Oh wait, I forgot... it's a plot device. It's only a TV program after all.

So there you go, Rosemary, why CCTV isn't deployed on the Enterprise.