Why a Star Trek replicator will never be possible

[DaveofDefeat]

Btw this thread might as well be named why everything in star trek is impossible. The phasers that can disintegrate an entire human body while magically negating the recoil that would be strong enough to send you around a planet. The inertial dampeners that apparent don't work the moment the ship gets shot. The big cushy seats that seem to have forgotten how important seat belts are. The ship consoles that are made out of Nitroglycerin and explode at the slightest vibration. The magic impulse engines that can propel a ship by glowing really hard. The transporter, with its "Heisenberg compensator".

[SargeRho]

Phasers are particle cannons. As far as I know, those don't have a whole lot of recoil (ehem...Ion engines? Plasma rockets?).

The "magic impulse drives" are fusion rockets.

[DaveofDefeat]

Ion engines have recoil, that what makes them move, an ion engine that can vaporize a human being would make something move a whole heck of a lot faster.

Though ill accept that the phasers are firing some mass less particle.

[Kryten]

Some massless particle that makes people disappear. 'Vapourises' doesn't really work, given people being hit by them don't tend to cause surrounding areas to burst into flame or bystanders to get their lungs burned out or anything of that sort.

[Dunbaratu]

What do you guys think of this?

You appear to be making your analysis on the assumption that the way the replicators work is to convert energy to matter via E=mc^2. I don't believe that was how they were described as working on the show. They were described as *rearranging* matter rather than creating it out of nothing. (as if somewhere behind the machine there's a big hopper of magic space goo that gets fed in as source material and the replicator has the ability to recombine the matter into other molecular structures. That's not making mass out of pure energy, but rather rearranging it through super chemistry. Like how a digestive system can break down food into simpler molecular subassemblies to be recombined to make other molecules, only more so.

Still pretty hokey to imagine the level of CONTROL over the process needed to do that, especially when it doesn't merely recombine matter into new molecules but can in fact direct WHERE they get put so it can build 3-D shapes to fit a plan.

But as hokey as it is, I don't think they went so far as to claim they were operating on the uphill side of E=mc^2 and doing it that way.

[Nibb31]

One word: Magic.

[ZetaX]

Accually we use up more energy then you'd think. Think of all the energy required to heat our bodies to 99 degrees and all the energy we use in all our muscles every day to keep us breathing, our heart beating, ect...

No we don't use up more than I'd think: I know how much I eat and that+oxygen is about the energy I get, and it's from a purely chemical and rather inefficienty form of energy. Do the calculation yourself if you don't believe my word for it, but the mass of the human energy consumption over a day, even over life, is very neglegible.

[magnemoe]

Btw this thread might as well be named why everything in star trek is impossible. The phasers that can disintegrate an entire human body while magically negating the recoil that would be strong enough to send you around a planet. The inertial dampeners that apparent don't work the moment the ship gets shot. The big cushy seats that seem to have forgotten how important seat belts are. The ship consoles that are made out of Nitroglycerin and explode at the slightest vibration. The magic impulse engines that can propel a ship by glowing really hard. The transporter, with its "Heisenberg compensator".

Do not see why an phaser should have recoil, however I have no idea how the disintegrate an body without leaving traces, my only guess is that it works a bit like the teleporter?

Add that its a pretty pointless complicated weapon, why does it not simply disintegrate, teleport, dispel a narrow beam, it would be just as lethal has the benefit of working trough cover.

For more effect transform a tiny part of the target into antimatter.

Far to much poor screenwriting and quick fixes has become cannon leaving a lots of mess. Now to cover up the mess you create more.

[Starwhip]

If a race has discovered the ability to travel faster than light, without thrusting (warping space time), then they would probably be able to assemble objects out of protons/neutrons/electrons. Which is plausible. You just take waste matter, convert it to subatomic particles, then reassemble said particles to make objects.

Not quite sure how it works in Star Trek (I'm not so obsessed that I know every detail!) but the above process would work.

[SuperWeegee4000]

They actually have something called Heisenberg Compensators, which if I recall are a very important part of the transporter system. I imagine they're part of the replicators as well.

[lajoswinkler]

Um. Replicators do not create mass, they just transport and arrange stored mass into the desired form. So they don't have particularly huge power requirements, though they're obviously still power hungry since rationing replicator use and using a real cook was an important part of Voyager's survival strategy for the first few years.

Now what is impossible were the DS9 replicating mines. The Dominion should have been able to wear that field down, but somehow the mines are able to replace expended mines using their on-board replicators. Supposedly they use 'zero-point extractors' to generate matter from nothing, which is a particularly weak bit of technobabble even by star trek standards.

Star Trek replicators do create mass from energy. That's the whole point of their concept. The ship provides lots of energy and they make food and other stuff from it.

[SuperWeegee4000]

Star Trek replicators do create mass from energy. That's the whole point of their concept. The ship provides lots of energy and they make food and other stuff from it.

Well, it's complicated. According to the canon, they rearrange molecules to create anything within their limit.

[maltesh]

No we don't use up more than I'd think: I know how much I eat and that+oxygen is about the energy I get, and it's from a purely chemical and rather inefficienty form of energy. Do the calculation yourself if you don't believe my word for it, but the mass of the human energy consumption over a day, even over life, is very neglegible.

To expound on this, based on an adult human male needing 2500 kCal every day means the total conversion mass energy of 5 mg (about the mass of two mosquitos, according to wikipedia's Orders of Magnitude (Mass) article) would power that body for about 117 years.

[Anton P. Nym]

Couldn't this energy be recaptured with some more science magic?

Possibly in story canon, but the thread is titled "Why a Star Trek replicator will never be possible" and I was addressing the real-world likelihood... which is nil. (In this universe, we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics! /homer)

-- Steve

[Skyler4856]

IRL the waste energy would be converted into matter which could be used later on

[Wheffle]

Assembling matter using protons is nuclear fusion, which releases quite a bit of energy up until iron. After that, energy is absorbed when fusing to heavier atoms. (all of this... IIRC)

I guess all the nuclear explosions are being absorbed and recycled. That's pretty epic.

[Seret]

At the risk of stating the obvious: there is no connection between the technology dreamed up by the scriptwriters of Star Trek and the real-world, so arguing about it is a bit pointless. Things like the transporter beam were famously invented to avoid the expense of effects shots, not because there was any chance they'd work in real life.

[Dunbaratu]

At the risk of stating the obvious: there is no connection between the technology dreamed up by the scriptwriters of Star Trek and the real-world, so arguing about it is a bit pointless. Things like the transporter beam were famously invented to avoid the expense of effects shots, not because there was any chance they'd work in real life.

True, but it's also pretty silly for someone to claim that the reason the replicators can't work is because of a feature that the show never once implied was true about them - that they use E=mc^2 to make matter from energy. That was never stated nor implied anywhere. What *was* implied was that they can somehow rearrange matter, not create it out of nothing.

[lajoswinkler]

At the risk of stating the obvious: there is no connection between the technology dreamed up by the scriptwriters of Star Trek and the real-world, so arguing about it is a bit pointless. Things like the transporter beam were famously invented to avoid the expense of effects shots, not because there was any chance they'd work in real life.

Exactly. Many people think everything they see in the series is possible because "hey, they had communicators and table computers, and we now have smartphones and laptops".

A whole lot of stuff in the series was pulled out of ass just to make the story go on.

[Wheffle]

At the risk of stating the obvious: there is no connection between the technology dreamed up by the scriptwriters of Star Trek and the real-world, so arguing about it is a bit pointless. Things like the transporter beam were famously invented to avoid the expense of effects shots, not because there was any chance they'd work in real life.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's not entertaining to discuss the science. As long as the discussion doesn't get heated and it's in good nature... beyond that, an argument about Star Trek science is stupid.

[Seret]

Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's not entertaining to discuss the science.

Sure, you could discuss the "science" of dragons too. Just how do they generate all that fire, and how do they not burn themselves?

[Wheffle]

Sure, you could discuss the "science" of dragons too. Just how do they generate all that fire, and how do they not burn themselves?

Well, yeah. Exactly. That would be quite entertaining haha.

[ZetaX]

Has been done in the discworld series already ;-)

[Magasaki]

guys  i think u forget  the fact u dont need to have ur energe  based on  energy won by mass u can get energy also by huge  solar panels and for anyone saying  well there is so much  room for these in a planet surface or a dome or  sats... ever heard of a dyson swarm  or  to go more extreme the dyson shell that is popularised in star trek as dyson sphere?

[Beowolf]

No fair ninjaing a thread that raises my blood pressure! Two pages of argument and not one poster bothered to look up how replicators are supposed to actually work. Every post makes wrong assumptions.