I have to wonder why the pattern must be lost in the process of materialization. I’m not saying they should keep them forever, but if they can just not delete the patterns when sending people on a dangerous away mission, they’d leave open the option of restoring them to a back up state if they get killed (or worse).
Of course, while that would raise a lot of questions to be explored in a single episode, it would lower stakes and fundamentally changes the stories they can tell, so I’m not surprised they writers don’t do it.
The pattern is clearly meant to be more than just data too, because they have used previous transporter logs when they need a healthy snapshot to compare to a crewmate who is ill. It seems to be some kind of superstitious energy reserve that is that person, and no you can’t just siphon some juice out of the reactor and use previous scan data for reasons that are generally presented as technical ones, but could really only logically be ethical ones.
I can imagine the Klingons having a kind of special forces unit where they do copies like this and if the copy makes it back, the two versions fight to the death to see who the “real” one is.
I have to wonder why the pattern must be lost in the process of materialization. I’m not saying they should keep them forever, but if they can just not delete the patterns when sending people on a dangerous away mission, they’d leave open the option of restoring them to a back up state if they get killed (or worse).
Of course, while that would raise a lot of questions to be explored in a single episode, it would lower stakes and fundamentally changes the stories they can tell, so I’m not surprised they writers don’t do it.
The pattern is clearly meant to be more than just data too, because they have used previous transporter logs when they need a healthy snapshot to compare to a crewmate who is ill. It seems to be some kind of superstitious energy reserve that is that person, and no you can’t just siphon some juice out of the reactor and use previous scan data for reasons that are generally presented as technical ones, but could really only logically be ethical ones.
I can imagine the Klingons having a kind of special forces unit where they do copies like this and if the copy makes it back, the two versions fight to the death to see who the “real” one is.