On the ethics of transporters

[Durandal_1707]

This comic on the topic is great:

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

[Crowley]

Considering the transporter purely in the Star Trek universe, a thought just occurred to me: Since it is possible to produce exact duplicates of a person under the right circumstances, why has there never been an instance of a ruthless militaristic power using this to quickly churn out clone armies?

[TGLS]

Well obviously because at least half the time they do it, they get a pile of paste instead of a duplicate, and they can't travel back down to collect the original.

[The Romulan Republic]

Considering the transporter purely in the Star Trek universe, a thought just occurred to me: Since it is possible to produce exact duplicates of a person under the right circumstances, why has there never been an instance of a ruthless militaristic power using this to quickly churn out clone armies?

Do we actually know the details of how the Dominion produced their Jem Hadar? Is this a possibility?

Apologies. I haven't watched a lot of DS9 lately.

[MissKittyFantastico]

Do we actually know the details of how the Dominion produced their Jem Hadar?

There was that young Jem'Hadar Odo adopted, so we know at least they're created/born as babies, and then mature to adulthood super fast.

I'm trying to remember how many times the transporter has properly 'cloned' someone - 'Second Chances' of course, are there any others? There was the Good Kirk/Evil Kirk incident, but even if that could be duplicated, neither copy was really viable. It reconstituted Picard in 'Lonely Among Us', but I got the impression they were beaming back whatever energy-stuff he beamed himself out as (it's early TNG anyway, it's inherently iffy). I feel like the general impression is that a transporter can't (in normal operation) create anything, the matter stream needs to come from somewhere external. In the case of the Rikers, perhaps the electromagnetic whatever they were trying to beam him through somehow got reformatted into the duplicate - it got reconfigured into a perfect Riker, but the 'subspace stuff' making up that second matter stream originated as the storm? Maybe barring freak events it's just not possible for current (24th Century) science to 'generate' a viable matter stream for a person any way other than dematerialising a person to start with.

[Robovski]

Because it has been accidentally done, I would imagine it could be done on purpose if someone wanted to. I imagine some form of signal splitter; and if it is a matter of additional energy that could be amplified into the signal.

[MissKittyFantastico]

Because it has been accidentally done, I would imagine it could be done on purpose if someone wanted to.

Perhaps not, at least not with 24th Century science. The window allowing safe beaming only happened every eight years - the conditions necessary for the duplication might occur only then (perhaps only just as the window is closing), and at other times the distortion field may be different enough not to offer useful clues no matter how much Starfleet studies it, and the overall planet-sun interaction be too vast and complex to recreate in a lab or simulation with the necessary precision.

It may also be something that's 'impossible' according to current understanding of science behind the transporter. It's not canon, but there was a bit in Dark Mirror, the TNG Mirror Universe book, where they expressed surprise that Kirk and co. were beaming through an ion storm in the first place, and the explanation was that the transporter wasn't quite so well-understood back then, and they just used to build them overpowered to ensure successful transports in spite of not quite understanding some of the principles at work. I can buy that as a possibility, for any technology that advanced - certainly the transporter occasionally surprises them ('Tuvix', 'Realm of Fear', and so on). Geordi (or Data, I forget which) may have proposed the deflected-second-beam theory not because Federation science believes such a thing could happen, but just because there were two beams and they've got two Rikers, so it's the best guess they've got.

Adding to that, given the ethical issues surrounding duplicating a person (or just to prevent Ferengi from trying to multiply their latinum and/or wives) Starfleet may have classified the incident, so even if they did continue to study it, it's going to be researched by a far more limited field of scientists, consequently narrowing the odds of someone having the Eureka moment needed to figure it out.

(Or - not entirely seriously - Starfleet concluded that the necessary circumstances were too fleetingly rare to be reproducible, and abandoned the project on the recommendation of that nice Professor Sloan who stepped in when the original project administrator fell ill. And a few years later he's raising a quiet glass to his duplicate who sacrificed himself on Romulus for the sake of the Federation, and chuckling at Julian believing that "beamed away at the last second" nonsense.)

[Dînadan]

Because it has been accidentally done, I would imagine it could be done on purpose if someone wanted to. I imagine some form of signal splitter; and if it is a matter of additional energy that could be amplified into the signal.

Theoretically anything that's done by accident could be done on purpose, the problem comes with being able to replicate all the variables and whether those could be done in a controlled way. The reason the handful of instances the transporter has caused duplication are only a handful of cases is likely down to it only being possible due to certain exact circumstances which latter attempts haven't been able to recreate.