Transporter (Star Trek)

Transporter
Transporter chamber aboard U.S.S. Enterprise-D.
Plot element from the Star Trek franchise
First appearance	Star Trek: The Original Series
Created by	Gene Roddenberry
Genre	Science fiction
In-story information
Type	Teleportation device
Function	Allows near instantaneous transport between two fixed points

A transporter is a fictional teleportation machine used in the Star Trek universe. Transporters convert a person or object into an energy pattern (a process called dematerialization), then "beam" it to a target, where it is reconverted into matter (rematerialization). The term transporter accident is a catch-all term for when a person or object does not rematerialize correctly.

According to The Making of Star Trek, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's original plan did not include transporters, instead calling for characters to land the starship itself. However, this would have required unfeasible and unaffordable sets and model filming, as well as episode running time spent while landing, taking off, etc. The shuttlecraft was the next idea, but when filming began, the full-sized shooting model was not ready. Transporters were devised as a less expensive alternative, achieved by a simple fade-out/fade-in of the subject. Transporters first appear in the original pilot episode "The Cage". The transporter special effect, before being done using computer animation, was created by turning a slow-motion camera upside down and photographing some backlit shiny grains of aluminium powder that were dropped between the camera and a black background.^[1]

Gene Roddenberry in 1964 had not seen The Fly upon his first draft of "The Cage", but it was brought to his attention, and this is how the transporter was considered.^{[citation needed]}

According to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, the three touch-sensitive light-up bars on the Enterprise-D's transporter console were an homage to the three sliders used on the duotronic transporter console on the original Enterprise in The Original Series.

In August 2008, physicist Michio Kaku predicted in Discovery Channel Magazine that a teleportation device similar to those in Star Trek would be invented within 100 years.^[2]

Depiction

History

According to dialogue in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Daedalus", the transporter was invented in the early 22nd century by Dr. Emory Erickson, who also became the first human to be successfully transported. Although the Enterprise (NX-01) has a transporter, the crew does not routinely use it for moving biological organisms. (Captain Jonathan Archer once said that he wouldn't even put his dog through it.) Instead, they generally prefer using shuttlepods or other means of transportation before falling back on the transporter if no other means of transportation were possible or feasible. The capability is very rare; in "The Andorian Incident", the Andorians, whose technology is far superior to Starfleet's in many regards, are explicitly stated not to possess the technology, and in "Chosen Realm", a group of alien religious extremists who hijack the ship is unaware of it to the point that when Archer, choosing himself when their leader insists on sacrificing a crew member, takes the captain at his word when told that the device disintegrates matter rather than teleporting it. The crew aboard the 23rd century USS Enterprise frequently use the transporter. By the 24th century, transporter travel was very reliable and "the safest way to travel", according to dialogue in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Realm of Fear".

According to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Homefront", Starfleet Academy cadets receive transporter rations, and the Sisko family once used a transporter to move furniture into a new home.

Despite its frequent use, characters such as Leonard McCoy and Katherine Pulaski are reluctant to use the transporter, as the characters express in the Next Generation episodes "Encounter at Farpoint" and "Unnatural Selection", respectively. Additionally, Reginald Barclay expresses his outright fear of transporting in "Realm of Fear", where he states "One atom out of place and, POOF!, you never come back. It's amazing people aren't lost all the time." Chief O'Brien responds by saying "I've been doing this for 22 years, and I haven't lost anybody yet".

Capabilities and limitations

The television series and films do not go into great detail about transport technology. The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual claims that the devices transport objects in real time, accurate to the quantum level. The episode "Realm of Fear" specifies the length of a transport under unusual circumstances would last "... four or five seconds; about twice the normal time". This calculates the length of a typical transport as between 2 and 2.5 seconds and possibly less. Heisenberg compensators remove uncertainty from the subatomic measurements, making transporter travel feasible. Further technology involved in transportation include a computer pattern buffer to enable a degree of leeway in the process. When asked "How does the Heisenberg compensator work?" by Time magazine, Star Trek technical adviser Michael Okuda responded: "It works very well, thank you."^[3]

According to The Original Series writers guide, the effective range of a transporter is 40,000 kilometers, although thick layers of rock can reduce this range (TNG: "Legacy"). The TOS episode "Obsession" however, appears to indicate that the Transporters maximum range, during that time period in Star Trek history, is actually around 30,000 kilometers. Transporter operations have been disrupted or prevented by dense metals (TNG: "Contagion"), solar flares (TNG: "Symbiosis"), and other forms of radiation, including electromagnetic (TNG: "The Enemy"; TNG: "Power Play") and nucleonic (TNG: "Schisms"), and affected by ion storms (TOS: "Mirror, Mirror"). Transporting, in progress, has also been stopped by telekinetic powers (TNG: "Skin of Evil") and by brute strength (TNG: "The Hunted"). The TNG episode "Bloodlines" features a dangerous and experimental "subspace transporter" capable of interstellar distances and the Dominion had the ability to transport over great distances (DS9: "Covenant"). The 40,000 kilometer limit is also referenced in ENT: "Daedalus".

Starfleet transporters from the TNG era onward include a device that can detect and disable an active weapon (TNG: "The Most Toys"), and a bio-filter to remove contagious microbes or viruses from an individual in transport (TNG: "Shades of Gray"). The transporter can also serve a tactical purpose, such as beaming a photon grenade or photon torpedo to detonate at remote locations (TNG: "Legacy", VOY: "Dark Frontier"), or to outright destroy objects (TNG: "Captain's Holiday").

Whenever a person or object is transported, the machine creates a memory file of the pattern. This has been used at least once in every Star Trek series to revert people adversely affected by a transport to their original state.

Various episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager have introduced two anti-transporter devices: transport inhibitors and transporter scramblers. Inhibitors prevent a transporter beam from "locking on" to whatever the device is attached. Scramblers distort the pattern that is in transit, literally scrambling the atoms upon rematerialization, resulting in the destruction of inanimate objects and killing living beings by perverting them into masses of random tissue; this was gruesomely demonstrated in the DS9 episode "The Darkness and the Light".

Transporter operations can also be curtailed when either the point or origin and/or the intended target site is moving at Warp velocities. In the TNG episode, "The Schizoid Man", a "long-range" or "near-warp" transport was required as a Transporter beam cannot penetrate a Warp field. In order to deposit an away-team on the planet Gravesworld while at the same time responding to a distress signal, the Enterprise would only drop out of Warp drive just long enough to energize the Transporter beam. Geordi LaForge personally performed the delicate operation, which involved compensating for the ship's relativistic motion. After materializing, one of the away-team members commmented that for a moment she thought she was trapped in a nearby wall, to which a colleague replied, "For a moment, you were." In later stories ("The Emissary" and "The Best of Both Worlds"), it was confirmed that the Transporter would work at Warp only if the sending and receiving sites were moving at equal velocities.

The transporter is susceptible to unusual anomalies and environmental conditions that can cause unexpected results. An unknown magnetic ore created a physical duplicate of Captain Kirk (TOS "The Enemy Within") and an enhanced beam attempting to transport Lt. Riker through an unstable atmosphere 'reflected' and split into two identical beams, creating a physical duplicate that remained undiscovered on the planet's surface for eight years (TNG: "Second Chances").

Transporter accidents

Aside from external influences causing disruptions in the normal operations of transporters, the technology itself has been known to fail on occasion, causing serious injury or usually death to those being transported. This was demonstrated in Star Trek: The Motion Picture when a malfunction in the transporter sensor circuits resulted in insufficient signal being present at the Enterprise end to successfully rematerialise the two subjects, and Starfleet were unable to pull them back to where they had dematerialised from. The transporter system attempted to rematerialise what little signal was available, and despite the efforts of Kirk and Scotty, the system failed and both subjects vanished from the transporter pad. Kirk, visibly shaken by what he has witnessed asks "Starfleet, do you have them?", to which the response is made "Enterprise, what we got back didn't live long, fortunately".

By the time of The Next Generation, transporter technology has advanced considerably, meaning that accidents are now remote, if not near impossible. In fact, in the episode "Realm of Fear", Geordi La Forge states that there have been no more than 2-3 transporter accidents in the preceeding 10 years. Reference is also made to the advancement of transporter technology in the same episode, where Chief O'Brien states that each individual transporter pad has four redundant scanners, and that in the event a scanner fails the other three will take over.

In the Voyager episode "Tuvix", a transporter accident combines both the physical and behavioral aspects of Lt. Tuvok, Neelix, and a plant into a single being.

Technological and Scientific restrictions

While several characters have asserted that transporters cannot transport through a ship's shields or planetary defense shields, there are instances of this "rule" being broken through a technobabble solution (TNG: "The Wounded", DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations") or disregarded by the show's writers (VOY: "Caretaker").

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Vice Admiral James T. Kirk and Lieutenant Saavik carry on a conversation during rematerialization. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Dr. Gillian Taylor jumps into Kirk's transporter beam during dematerialization, and rematerializes without any apparent ill effects,except for a tongue-lashing from Admiral Kirk. This is probably due to the "annular confinement beam", a component of the Transporter mentioned in the various television episodes, which serves to keep patterns separate from one another. In the same movie, Mr Spock is beamed in a cloaked ship while walking.

According to the TNG Technical Manual, the transporter cannot move antimatter, but in the VOY episode "Dark Frontier" Voyager transported a live photon torpedo equipped with antimatter onto a Borg ship. The TAS episode "One of Our Planets is Missing" has the Enterprise beaming a chunk of antimatter into a stasis box.

Transporter chamber and control console aboard U.S.S. Voyager.

In the original series, beaming to and from the transporter chamber was a necessity. This is explained in the TOS episode, "Day of the Dove". Spock and Scotty had said that doing a site-to-site transport, as they are referred to on the show, on board the ship could be risky. They could "beam into a deck" or an inanimate object and get stuck there. However, there are apparently safeguards in place to prevent people from being beamed into hostile environments such as under water and into lava pits, although it is possible to override this safety feature; for example, in the TOS episode "And the Children Shall Lead", two security guards are beamed into open space. In the following series, however, the actual transporter room seems to become mostly obsolete, the actual equipment notwithstanding. Characters are shown activating the transporter from ordinary consoles and beaming from place to place without apparent trouble. The main operator can likewise send those in transport anywhere with ease. A possible explanation for this is put forward in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual, where such site-to-site transports would probably use twice as much energy as would be required for transport to or from the transporter room itself, since the subject would have to be beamed to the transporter, stored, then shunted to their destination. In addition, the six circles on the platform are generally used as targets for the subjects to stand on, but they do not appear to represent any limitation of the hardware to six or fewer people. People have been transported carrying others, in a coffin style transport, and once animals, hay, and other inanimate objects.

Although never seen, dialogue in "Deep Space Nine" indicates the existence of portable transporters, though the Next Generation episode "Timescape" features emergency transporter armbands (although these may have served only to activate a remote transporter). To confuse things more, "Star Trek: Nemesis" featured the prototype "emergency transport unit". Tom Paris uses a portable transporter in the VOY episode "Non Sequitur".

For special effects reasons, in TOS, people generally appear immobilized during transport, with the exception of Kirk in the episode That Which Survives. However, by TNG, characters can move within the confines of the transporter beam while being transported, although this is rarely shown.

Scientific note

It has been calculated that about 10⁴⁵ (2¹⁵⁰) bits is the number of bits of information required to perfectly recreate the average-sized U.S. adult male human being down to the quantum level on a computer—specifically, 2.0057742×10⁴⁵ bits (see Bekenstein bound for the basis for this calculation). Today a common 1 Terabyte device can store about 10¹² bits.

This figure represents the lower bound of information capacity necessary for the Transporter on Star Trek starships to function—enough capacity to teleport one person. Obviously, several times this information capacity would be necessary to teleport several people.

In popular culture

The famous catchphrase "Beam me up, Scotty" refers to the transporter device, which was often operated by Montgomery Scott during the original series. The phrase was never uttered by anyone in the original series, although "Scotty, beam me up" was spoken by Admiral Kirk in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. On the special edition DVD of Star Trek IV, the text commentary provided by Micheal and Denise Okuda (co-authors of The Star Trek Encyclopedia and The Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future) indicates that this was the only time anyone came close to that catchphrase.

See also

• Personal identity
• Physics and Star Trek
• Replicator
• Quantum deportation
• Quantum energy deportation
• Deportation

Notes

1. ^ Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside Star Trek the real story, 1996, ISBN 0-671-00974-5.
2. ^ Gary Sledge, Discovery Channel Magazine Issue 3, ISSN 1793572-5.
3. ^ "Reconfigure the Modulators!". Time Magazine. November 28, 1994. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981892,00.html. 

References

• Krauss, Lawrence M; Stephen Hawking (1995). The Physics of Star Trek. ISBN 978-0-06-097710-8. 

External links

• Transporter at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)
• Transporter psychosis at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)
• The Duplicates Paradox
• "Transporters, Replicators and Phasing FAQ" by Joshua Bell
• startrek.com description
• Teleportation method proposed by Australian scientists