14 thoughts on “Star Trek nerdery”

  1. I trust the transporter more, because it’s not spending its spare time plotting to take over the world.

    ‘Sides which, the original me, the one who might have been afraid of the transporter, was destroyed during my first transporter trip and replaced with a reasonable facsimile that (coincidentally, I’m sure) just happens to really trust the transporter.

  2. Are you kidding? There were at least as many transport problems as holodeck problems! And the transporter is just an inherently dangerous concept, with strange moral implications. Plus, it smacks of cosmic hubris. Or something (after 15 hours of work, I’m a little loopy right now). The holodeck is just a bunch of stupid holograms that works 99% of the time. How many people died on a holodeck? I can’t think of any of the top of my head (I’ll grant that there there was opportunity, but I can’t think of any real deaths). And how many people were lost in a transporter beam? At least a few redshirts were lost.

    Then again, the transporter is more useful. Ah who knows?

  3. I would trust the holodeck more, especially if I was accompanied there by Ship’s Counselor Troi! (Rowr!)

  4. holodeck. trust. more. because, scattering a man’s atoms all across the universe is a damn silly way to travel.

  5. Man, there were entire episodes devoted to holodeck insanity. If I were Picard pr Janeway I’d have ripped the damn thing out. Meanwhile, what harm did the transporter ever do? It created a copy of Riker once, but he was stuck on some planet for a while and then joined the Maqui and got banished to Voyager er the Delta Quadrant I mean. And I think it melted some dudes way back in Star Trek The Motion Picture, but that was like 100 years prior to TNG.

    Someone needs to go through the Trek Wiki and compile a roundup of episodes to settle this…

  6. I’d trust the Holodeck more, for one simple reason… you CAN’T have sex with a transporter. Need there be any other reason?

  7. The other problem with the holodeck is this: once you go in, how do you know if you ever came out? There are whole episodes that revolve around this particular ambiguity.

    In fact, a rogue holodeck makes the whole transporter problem easier. You can put cadets in a rogue holodeck during the academy, from which they never escape. Then, instead of dicing them for transport across space, you dice the (virtual) universe and ship it around them. No one has to die and you don’t have to worry about whether the guy who stepped out of the transporter was the same one who stepped in.

  8. A group of Star Trek adventurers steps into the teleporters and their “selves” come out on the planet surface. Split the screen and you see the originals still standing there, wondering when the magic will happen. Then a bunch of phasers come down from the ceiling and blast them all to bits. It’s gruesome and painful. Pan to an anguished Scotty, tears swelling into his eyes for a moment until he hears Kirk’s voice on the communicator. Then he forgets all about it.

  9. Don’t forget the novel “Spock Must Die”, in which the entire plot revolves around a transporter accident that happened during a special setup in which they arranged to not destroy the original. The transporter beam is reflected by a shield around the destination planet, and when the smoke clears they have two Spocks standing in the transporter. How do you tell which is the original?

  10. I like the holodeck more. Both have problems though. Don’t forget the transporter accident that melded Neelix and Tuvok into one person. By separating them, Janeway “killed” the merged entity. So in a round about way, the transport accident resulted in the death of one entity.

  11. true, but the transporter also created an extra copy of Riker who is still running around, so it sort of balances out 🙂

    now I am starting to wonder if there even ever really was a transporter. What if one were to rewatch with the assumption that every “transporter” sequence was really just a holodeck fantasy?

    I think we are onto something here.

  12. Hmm. Maybe we’ve stumbled onto the brilliant marketing campaign for the Star Trek Online MMORPG…

  13. What if all of space exploration was part of a holodeck fantasy? They never invented warp speed or met aliens, but instead, somebody invented a holodeck and all of humanity became addicted to it. This could explain why most of the alien species happen to look human (lazy programming) and why some of the races, like the Klingons, “evolved” in appearance between Kirk’s time and Picard’s time (software patch). 😀

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