Anyone know when the Transporter, the version that was used for cargo originaly, was created. From what I can tell off Enterprise, it seemed sort of new, but I'm not sure. Any reference anyone has would also help. Thanks
Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
Definitely before 2151.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
But not necessarily by much.
The transporter "theory" has probably been around for awhile. We've got vaguely teleportational-like effects going on in the lab today. (NOT, I should point out, that those can or will lead to anything even vaguely resembling a Star Trek transporter.) It's possible the theory behind transporters in the Trek universe goes back as far. On the other hand, I think it's somewhat clear that transporters (like most of Star Trek tech) utilize subspace in some way, in which it would have to wait at least until Zefrem Cochrane or shortly before. (Which is an interesting side point. Was Cochrane an engineer, taking some wild predictions of theoretical physicists and turning them into an FTL drive, or was he a physicist, perhaps the guy who discovered subspace physics in the first place, and only later becoming a hardcore postapocalyptic Thomas Edison of the stars?)
But transporters themselves, as working devices, can't be that much older than "Broken Bow."
Posted by Hunter (Member # 611) on :
Well given Cochranes involvment in the Warp 5 facility I'd guess that he was the physicst type, whilest Lily was the engineering type.
Agree that the transporter were invented before "Broken Bow", but does anybody want to take a guess as to how long it would take for something to become rated for uses by humans?
Drugs for instance can take 2-3 years to be cleared for human use, there was a gap of 4 years between the launch of the first satellites and Yuri Gagarins first flight. So a date of 2147-48 for the first relible use of a transporter and 3-4 year process to clear it for humans would be my guess.
Posted by EdipisReks (Member # 510) on :
the transporter could have been invented much earlier than 2151, but it may have taken a long time to make it reliable.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
I dunno. I can see a massive gap between the first cargo transporter, and the first human transporter. After all, if it's a chair, who cares if some small molecules get mucked up? If 90% of it gets through okay, it'll be fine.
They might have progressed from that, to more complex stuff like chemical supplies, where they would have had to have been more accurate.
But for humans, I'd imagine that they'd want a 99.999999999999999999999999999% minumum guarantee that the human will be fine before anyone would even think of using it.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
I don't think any transportation real or imaginary has ever been that reliable.
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
Transporters need not be a human invention at all. We haven't seen enough of the other contemporary species in ENT to tell whether they have the tech or not. We didn't even know the Vulcans had tractor beams until we saw them in use.
If the tech is alien, it might take decades for the innate suspicions to evaporate. Add to that the time the Earth government(s) would keep the thing secret from the GI Joes, and you could say that the Vulcans already brought it with them in 2063. They could then have invented it in 2829 B.S. for all we know.
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sol System: I don't think any transportation real or imaginary has ever been that reliable.
Yeah, like all those times walking failed me.
Posted by Woodside Kid (Member # 699) on :
quote: Originally posted by Hunter: Drugs for instance can take 2-3 years to be cleared for human use, there was a gap of 4 years between the launch of the first satellites and Yuri Gagarins first flight. So a date of 2147-48 for the first relible use of a transporter and 3-4 year process to clear it for humans would be my guess.
Actually, it would probably be a lot longer. In the case of spaceflight, a better starting point would be the launch of the first successful liquid-fueled rocket. That took place in March of 1926, thirty-five years before Gagarin's flight. Given that we're talking about taking a person apart down to the subatomic level rather than sitting on top of a giant skyrocket, I'd want a hell of a lot of testing done before I'd step into the bloody thing.
Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
Could someone please explain to me the logic of estimating the time it took to perfect transporters using completely unrelated real-world examples? From what you've said, I could've just as well researched the amount of time it took my socks to become approved for human use and used that as "evidence".
Transporters of any kind cannot be much older than the 2150s because of evidence in "Masterpiece Society", where a 200-year-old colony didn't know of transporters. The theories could go back as early as the 1960s, which is when the Star Trek and our universa diverged. "Enterprise" will probably nail down the exact dates, but until then, it's better to rely on official sources than resort to such meaningless speculation using unrelated real-world examples.
Boris
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
Again, *human knowledge* of transporters is the only thing we have data on at this point. And even humans are in the habit of concealing stuff from each other. Perhaps the Moab folks were from a nation that was kept in the dark when a competing nation began to use the things? Perhaps it was only with the final big crunch where nations were abolished that one of them confessed "oh, and we invented teleportation in 2072" or "and BTW, this is what the aliens dropped on our laps in 1947".
It is by no means sure that the 1960s would be the divergence point, really. I mean, we thought the Trek universe of the 1980s was pretty much like our own, until we learned Bill Gates was replaced by Henry Starling and integrated circuits by isograted ones. We might yet find out that they had transistors in the 1930s (even if Spock had access to none in "City on the Edge") and telegraphs in the 1600s. And that a nation called Austria never existed, but one called Syldavia did. The earliest known divergence point is about four billion years in the past, after all - at the point where natural evolution was replaced by that seeded and preprogrammed DNA.
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
Timo, you'd have to present evidence for the alleged scientific and technological secrecy during a period of relative prosperity, technological progress and stability under the sponsorship of Vulcans (even if 2079 was a somewhat different story).
The 1960s are a pretty safe date for the divergence point because the alterations with respect to real history were made to bring Star Trek in line with the real world, and not the other way around. Sure, the various time travelling could've influenced this, but we're talking about things that are as fixed as the edge of the galaxy -- the boundaries are not precise, but they exist.
Nothing is ever certain in these discussions, but some things are more likely than others, having more evidence to support them.
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
Fair enough.
The next transporter datapoint is probably coming in ENT "Marauders", for which spoilers are out at Trekweb and Trektoday...
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Not to go wildly off topic here, but with regards to the whole "divergence" thing, I firmly (well, fairly firmly) that where ever possibly, TPTB will want to make our universe and the Trek universe match each other, because to do otherwise would cause audience confusion. They no longer say "There was a big war in 1996 where genetically engineered supermen took over 2/3rds of the Earth", because the casual viewer will just say "what the fuck are they talking about?"
On the other hand, in "Future's End", they can replace Gates with Starling, because Starling is suppossed to be an obvious send-up of Gates, and therefore most people will get what is going on.
But, er, transporters. I do think there would have been a hell of a lot of testing and double testing and triple testing before people used them. More than any other mode of transport I think, simply because of the massive relucance people will have. If McCoy still has it 100 years after the first "approved for human transport" one, then imagine how many people were terrified of them when they were first invented?
Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
I agree; while the Trek- and our timelines may have differed slightly before the 1960s, evidence suggests that this was nothing compared to what came later.
As for the testing -- I'm not saying there wasn't a lot of testing, but only that we can't use unrelated real-world technologies as benchmarks. It could be that my car took a year to approve for human use, but what does this have to do with transporters? They're unrelated technologies, with different levels of complexity. Even if we knew how long Klingon or Romulan transporters took to develop, we wouldn't be quite certain that human transporters took a similar amount of time. You test something until you're reasonably sure it works, not for specific time periods such as five years or ten years or twenty years.
I would argue that the transporters of 2151, although approved for human use, were comparatively untested. Why else would Geordi mention, also in "The Masterpiece Society", only a "century" of evidence against possible side effects, whereas two centuries would've been a better argument? Why would Transporter Psychosis develop only in 2209? What about all the transporter problems after that commonly serve as plot devices?
The transporters may have passed Starfleet's basic tests in only a few years, but there is still a host of side effects, what with different people from different planets with different backgrounds stepping inside. The biofilter still cannot filter out a whole range of viruses, people can be split in two personalities, they can be turned into children, etc.
Boris
Posted by Colorful Cartman (Member # 256) on :
TPTB introduced transporters too early, in my opinion. It strains credibility a bit to see such a highly experimental technology already fully integrated into a small starship *AND* working without a hitch. Seems to me the physics behind teleportation are several orders of magnitude more complicated than those of, say, tractor beams. We've learned how to manipulate the fundamental force of gravity (evidenced by deckplating), so forcefields and the like can't be a very large step from there - they're related fields, after all!
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
But they don't work without a hitch, do they? Didn't a transport go wrong in "Strange New World" and almost kill someone?
Posted by Colorful Cartman (Member # 256) on :
He merely got, erh, twigged. Not life-threatening as I recall.
Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
"TPTB introduced transporters too early, in my opinion It strains credibility a bit to see such a highly experimental technology already fully integrated into a small starship *AND* working without a hitch."
With respect to evidence from earlier episodes, it would've been a better story choice not to include them until the turn of the century. With respect to the real world, it would've been best never to have transporters.
"Seems to me the physics behind teleportation are several orders of magnitude more complicated than those of, say, tractor beams."
We can't be sure of that. Artificial gravity has been around since 1994 or before (it was present on the Botany Bay as well as the 1994 spacecraft containing Claire Raymond and Co.), inertial dampers and subspace fields since 2063 or before. Transporters use subspace fields to transmit the matter stream and forcefields to contain the beamed individual during dematerialization (as seen in Roga Danar's breaking out of this field), and may well build on other existing exotic technologies, rather than being an extremely new invention by itself.
"We've learned how to manipulate the fundamental force of gravity (evidenced by deckplating), so forcefields and the like can't be a very large step from there - they're related fields, after all!"
Yet they took until just before "Enterprise" to develop, whereas artificial gravity had been around for at least 150 years before that. However, I agree that some exotic technologies might build on others.
Boris
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
quote: Yeah, like all those times walking failed me.
I envy you your superfeet, immune to slipping no matter the conditions.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
I've been hoping for the NX-01 to have a transporter accident that's more similar to the rather grisly demise of two Enterprise crewmembers in TMP. Now THAT'S a transporter accident! Embedding a few twigs in some guy's skin? That's not much by comparison...
As for the idea that the transporters are a bit of technology invented by the Vulcans, that's a fine theory... except for the fact that the Vulcans of ENT are NOT that generous with their advanced equipment. The way that warp drive and the lack of tractor beams and all sorts of other technology are presented, there's no way that the Vulcans would have given Earth transporter capability.
As for the speculation regarding the divergence of the timeline -- don't forget that Bill Gates replaced Henry Starling as the man behind the Information Age after Khan travelled back in time to kill Starling so that the Information Age would never happen. Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
Nice.
I too have a ridiculous pie-in-the-sky idea realted to this whole Vulcan transporter thing. We've witnessed several occasions where SF had been willing to handout replicator tech because it's percieved as a peaceful technology. Perhaps the Vulcans were kind enough to do this for a recently post-appocalyptic earth thinking they could eliminate resource shortfalls and thereby promote a civilization not reliant on the distribution of material wealth. Perhaps they gave us ones with the safety engaged so we wouldn't use it to make mini-nukes or phasers anything. Of course, a replicator is pretty much half of the technology used in transporting. All it would take is one grubby little sapien to reverse engineer one and hook it up to a scanner. Pretty soon we're making like Jeff Goldblum. I could see this being a further sticky point between humans and Vulcans and a reason for their reluctance to share other technologies...
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
The problem is that it's now been made rather clear that the transporter predated the replicator. (Which makes sense, I think. If you assume that a transporter can work in "dumb" mode, that is, just moving an object from point A to point B without really having any idea of the composition of the object. This would explain why, in TOS, you could sneak aboard a starship by hiding in a box, which one would think would be obvious to anyone watching the transporter as it worked.)
But I do agree with your theme, Balaam. If I've got one problem with Enterprise it's this: It has always seemed to me that, implicit in the "everything got better once the Vulcans came" story is the Vulcans pouring massive amounts of resources, energy, and time into rebuilding Earth. This I think could certainly lead to the resentment seen in the show. Vulcans forcing some changes while withholding others. "You're still trapped in the capitalism/communism matrix? *Vulcan mini-sigh* Primitives. Look, this is how you do it from now on."
But we haven't heard of the Vulcans doing anything like that, and while humans bootstraping themselves into a potential interstellar power in 90 years is compelling, I'm not sure it's completely reasonable, nor as interesting as it could be.
Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
If Vulcans had given us transporters, wouldn't there have been a better history of testing/usage unless they invented transporters themselves quite recently?
On the other hand, I agree that the Vulcans could've hardly had an influence over human affairs if they weren't important as at least a stabilizing factor from roughly 2100-2150, sort of like NATO troops in disputed areas today. Before 2100, I can see Timo's Earth of different states holding radically different levels of technology in the general chaos and fighting, perhaps all the way from the 1990s to 2100.
Boris
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
OTOH, the Vulcans might have chosen to back a single nation-state and help it subdue all opposition. (In light of the character demographics of all the Trek shows, guess which nation?) This could be the Vulcan Way, dating back to the time when they solved their own problems by sending their dissident trash offworld. It's also similar to what the Vulcans are doing at Coridan.
In such a setup, it would be to the advantage of the Vulcan-backed regime to keep as may secrets from the rest of the world as possible, until it achieved complete hegemony.
Also, Vulcans might have invented/acquired the transporter for bulk cargo transfer only. Or for some industrial process. They'd never even think of using it for traveling, any more than we would consider a kite or a cannon a valid technology for commuting. Except that we crazy humans just do consider these odd things every now and then. Like aerodynamically suspended flying machines that fall out of the sky as soon as they lose power or slow down.
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
I can see the Vulcans backing a single nation state, but they are a redundant term at the moment as far as the invention of transporters is concerned because we know that warp drive was invented without them.
The Vulcans might have had transporters earlier given their comparative tech level, and humans might have easily seen them in operation, but there is no need to go as far as to say that they gave the humans transporters, because they certainly didn't give us everything they have (including Warp 7-capable ships and tractor beams).
Also, "Enterprise" will likely show no evidence that transporters are anything but public, which makes it difficult to believe that they could've been kept secret from the Moab people unless they deliberately avoided contact with the rest of humanity prior to moving out, have moved out already, or have forgotten about early transporter experiments over the generations.
Boris
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Well perhaps, but surely up till now it's been just the opposite. Transporters are apparently exclusively military. I can't even think of a time when the only civilian aboard (Phlox) has been in a room when the word "transporter" was used. Though I'm sure he has been. I'm just saying.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
What Boris said about forgetting about the transporters is exactly what I assumed happened. After all, transporters at the time of ENT still seem to be relatively new. Even if the Moab settlers knew about them, they probably didn't have any. They probably wouldn't tell their children stories about transporters. So, after 200 years, no-one would be left who had ever seen or heard about one.
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sol System: The problem is that it's now been made rather clear that the transporter predated the replicator.
Yeah, when I walked away from that one, I suddenly remembered that there weren't any replicators in TOS. Me sub-clever.
I still like the idea that the Vulcans were intstrumental in the development of transporter tech, either with or without their knowledge or consent. It's a huge technology with all kinds of ramifications barely explored in the shows. (Why jettison the warp core at all?) I'm just not sure humans would be able to develop and deploy such a massive project so quickly, let alone trust it for human use.
I do like Simon's idea that they are a military tech. Of course, Phlox would have to know about them because of the twigged unfortunate, but that doesn't mean that John Q Public necessarily would.
Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
And yet we've seen a drunk develop warp drive in 2063. People, if you can't provide _evidence_ for your theories, then they're fan fiction and ought to go in the appropriate forum. Spelling and grammar are quite secondary to this aspect.
Where is the evidence that transporters couldn't have been developed by humans, given that they had warp drive 88 years earlier? Sure, the Kazon didn't have transporters although they did have warp drive, but we're talking 88 relatively peaceful years between the first warp ship and the first human transporter. Furthermore, where's the evidence that they've been developed quickly? It could've taken since the 1960s to develop transporters for all we know about them. And the first time someone from the Enterprise beams down on an Earth colony is when John Q Public will learn about them, if he hasn't done so by now. The problem with the Moab people is that they never even saw anyone beam down, let alone know the details of the technology.
Boris
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
According to $$$$$$$$$$poilers for $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$eason 2...
....the Klingons will have transporter technology. But whether they have just recently acquired is unknown.
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)