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Federation Transporter Facilities?
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Timo: [QB] A couple of counterpoints: Mars could probably be terraformed by Trek tech, but I can't think of a NEED to do so. Terraforming is for people who cannot travel to the stars, or who can but happen to live in a galaxy where each and every star does NOT contain class M planets, most of which harbor no native life that would hold a credible previous claim or would otherwise hinder colonization. Or then terraforming is for people who want to show off. Or for people who desperately need a food source right next to their own planet. Trek does a lot of showing off, but Earth isn't suffering from hunger and does not need a farming world next door. And whoever wants to leave Paradise for some reason is free to do so aboard a warpship that will take him far, far beyond Mars. Transportation is indeed best equated with air travel, I guess. But the argument that professionals run the aircraft and that individuality is suppressed sound hollow to me. Surely "private" commuting is a step to the worse, while commuting by buses or trains that are run by professionals (sometimes by remote control) liberates you from a need to pilot a vehicle or park it or take care of it. I can easily see a role for transporters-operated-like-subways in commuting, in addition to transporters-operated-like-airliners in long-distance planetary travel. Use of transporter relays probably presents safety hazards or it would be more aggressively pursued in interplanetary applications. But I don't think the range of a Starfleet shipboard transporter ought to be representative of transporters in general. There are cars that are faster than an Abrams tank, airliners that take aboard more people than an F-15, houses that offer better accommodation than an NBC-secure bunker. I trust there could be superior-ranged civilian transporters as well, through tradeoffs the military is not willing to make. Perhaps Earth transporters use landlines instead of beams, and a long enough landline can take the signal across a million kilometers, not just X0,000? Perhaps one could run a landline to a geostationary anchor and an outreeled relay beyond that, and reach the Moon that way? Timo Saloniemi [/QB][/QUOTE]
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