Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Don't mind me, just a Star Trek physics rant.

In The Original Series of Star Trek, they needed a way of getting people from the ship to the surface of a planet without using another set (such as the ship landing, or a shuttlecraft scene in every episode). So they decided on transporters. It was cheap, and required little when it came to production. They could change sets without a third set. Not only that, it added to the available storyline, as there have been several episodes that have revolved around the use of transporters.
Now, 47 years later, those same transporters, the cost-saving plot-device, are a feasible hypothesis. Only one drawback; it would require the power of something like 14 atomic bombs simultaneously detonating to reduce a human in such a way. And there's a slight issue with rematerialization.

Here's my addition to the reasons it wouldn't work: displacement.
Seriously, if you move one thing out of a room by making it cease to exist in said room, the displacement will pop the ears of anyone in there. Get six people, as they do on the show, and watering eyes and headaches will abound.
Now here's the big issue; displacing the air at the receiving end of things. If that didn't happen, people would be transported into solid matter, or else the air would exist in the same space as them, and they'd fall apart at rematerialization.
It would require not just moving "space" where the transported object(s) end up, but moving it from there back to the place where the transported object(s) came from, which would require two transporter pads.

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