this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Star Trek science has always been for non scientists. if you could move a pattern and save a pattern, then everyone would backup to the last healthy copy of themselves.
I'd also lose all my memories since the backup. With those memories goes the way I make decisions. Not the most desirable way of maintaining youth and health. Kirk made that point in ST:V:
"Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves.
I don't want my pain taken away!
I need my pain!"
What if my pain made me a worse version of myself?
The you are a worse version of yourself.
Then we would restore from backup, right?
But you could still save a copy of yourself each morning and then if you die, recreate your last save point, no? Then you only lose a day.
Maybe a yearly save point too incase theres any long term thing you don't catch fast enough like cancer...
But they do. On several occasions a ship's doctor has managed to completely restore a mutated crewmate back to how they were before based on data stored in the medical computers. This is only possible if the medical computer contains a full biological backup, in the form of data.
Episodes like Threshold and that one where the Enterprise crew turn into children come to mind. The latter actually involves transporters.
They don't usually revert the crew using the backup data, though. They just program it to make changes to their bodies, like removing things. It wouldn't be any stranger than removing an alien pathogen.
The backup data, I think was only used for Pulaski when she got the ageing disease (where it might have been a reference pattern to correct errors, and they had to actually compare with a known good genome), and for Tuvix.
We do also know that a bad transport can't just be retried either. The Motion Picture had a transport go wrong, and Starbase One couldn't just restart the transport with backup data, or repair what they got back. Similarly, Scotty couldn't just load up Franklin's backup from the Jenolan's computers and transport him in either.
Failed transports generally seem to stem from not having quality data to reconstruct with. Not getting a good enough sensor lock, damage to the buffer corrupting the data, etc.
The entire point of a backup is to overwrite and replace bad data, though. If a backup was kept, it would logically follow that it would be possible to overwrite the damaged parts of the pattern, since we know that transports can succeed even if a portion if the pattern is lost.
Geordi specigically brings up it being impossible to materialise Franklin because his pattern had degraded too much, not that it was degraded at all, and would suggest that there's a threshold before repairs are no longer possible.
Not always they use the healthy backup. Check out dr. M'Benga's daughter.
A transporter trace might not have existed to begin with, and depending on how the disease acted, any old traces might have been lost.
For example, if she had an illness that only started presenting itself long after she caught it, like Tholian shingles. There may no longer be a healthy trace to pull from, or the disease caused damage that a backup cannot sufficiently repair.
We do know that some health conditions generally preclude transport. It's not very healthy for foetuses to be transported. Voyager did it, and the baby had to spend several days in ICU to make sure that being transported didn't mangle their neurochemistry, which would suggest that's also something a transporter cannot readily fix.
As previously stated, I'm leaving NuTrek out of this discussion entirely as NuTrek doesn't care about continuity in the slightest.
there is ethics about body modification and especially about enhancing your self artificially, it's seen as a dead end because people who are artificially "perfected" end up being stagnant and pointless. experiencing aging and illness is a part of ethical behavior, or is ultimately preferable to the alternative.
Star Trek can't decide whether it wants to be hand-wavey, "whatever moves the plot along" science or super-serious explained-in-detail science and ends up being the worst of both worlds.
FWIW, you've made this, in a thread about scifi transience:
Just sayin'.