In TNG, Picard says that the Federation has evolved past a need for money. Indeed, we never see any.
In DS9 though, Quark talks a lot about bar tabs and costs. Surely O’Brien and Bashir don’t get free drinks, so how do they pay? I’d assume that any Ferengi worth his lobes won’t accept anything that can be replicated, so do Federation officers get a stipend of tradeable “value” when interacting with cultures that still expect payment?
I think there’s also a reference to Quark paying rent to Sisko for running the bar. Presumably that’s denominated in latinum. I wonder where it goes? Maybe the secret “Garak black ops” fund.
Hmm I wonder even more how this works for Grandpa Sisko. How does his restaurant get allocated the food he needs to make his famous jambalaya? He makes it very clear the food he uses is NOT replicated.
@valek879
Look at all the gardening videos on YouTube. People love producing food. Even a rather small patch produces more of something than you can eat. (If you want to eat other things too)
The only thing non industrial local gardening won’t you give is consistency. When certain produce is ripe there suddenly is a lot, and then not. They might solve this with people grade transporters.
@DharmaCurious
Whats the difference between a transporter and a replicator? Once you’ve gotten the pattern of a tomato why can’t you just keep copying it? Presumably a human is too complicated to do that regularly but why not a tomato?
@Lem453 There are cargo transporters and people transporters. The people transporters are more faithful. The replicators are more like cargo transporters. See “Heisenberg Compensator” https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Heisenberg_compensator
I mean, on a molecular level there is no difference. I feel like they even did the whole ship of Theseus thing several times. And the obvious one is the 2nd Riker. Enterprise (the series, not the ship) saw the addition of transporters to starships and they talked about it a lot in that episode. Bones in the original refused to use them because he understood the science of it and knew people were essentially being killed and reassembled every time they were transported.
I always got the impressions that people who said non-replicated food tasted better were either deluding themselves or that extra flavor they attribute to the food is like, non food things in it. Leftover dirt, mold starting to grow… Kind of like how completely filtered water is tasteless when the minerals and other fine particulates are removed. Transporters, as a side effect of how they work, remove illnesses from the body (Except when it needs to not for plot reasons. And don’t get me started on the billions of bacteria that exist in our body all the time that are necessary for life that wouldn’t count as “you”). So presumably, they would remove all those tiny things in food if transported, and obviously wouldn’t create them in the first place if replicated.
Doctor McCoy used the transporter very frequently with minimal complaining; the only complaint I can recall is from TMP and followed a horrific and unexpected transporter accident.
As for transporters in Enterprise, two things are especially noteworthy: one, they explicitly refuted the idea that the transporter creates a “some sort of weird copy” of the person or object transported, and two, those human-safe transporters were contemporary with very primitive replicator equivalents called protein resequencers. Clearly transporters aren’t building humans atom-by-atom from data alone if they can’t figure out how to do more than resequence protein molecules in any other context.
Transporters don’t do anything to affect the matter they are transporting unless explicitly intended to: by the 24th century they are programmed to filter out recognizeable pathogens, and can be used to deactivate weapons or occasionally monkey with the genes of a person in mid-transport, but things routinely pass through the transporter without issue which are either totally unknown or explicitly non-replicatable. None of this makes sense if the sequence is scan -> destroy -> rebuild, but makes total sense if the transporter is shifting the transportee into subspace (with some tweaks to allow them to exist there) and then back out of subspace at the destination.
Thomas Riker (and now William Boimler) is the one big exception. Both occured under a very specific and extremely rare weather condition, and the first time this happened the Chief Engineer on the flagship of the Enterprise was shocked that such a thing was even possible. I’m much more inclined to believe that the “transporter duplicates” are actually the result of the phenomenon that duplicated Voyager in Deadlock, not the transporter actually constructing two people from the pattern and matter of only one.
That’s something I hadn’t considered about replicated food. As a gardener, I can attest that the dirt it’s grown in can have a pretty big impact on taste. It could be that.
Could also be, like, you order your replicated tomato, and they’re giving you Tomato variety number 7, as is standard for replicators, and you just don’t care for that variety. Kinda like how banana candy doesn’t taste like bananas, because it actually tastes like a variety of banana you can’t get anymore, so no one thinks it tastes real anymore.