As long as I'm posting this, I'm going to give a bit of history of the series.
It was late in late in 2000, maybe the first weeks of 2001, when I got a message--one of the few worthwhile things that ever reached me through an instant messaging system. (I've since shut them all down, since most of what I get is Spam, and I have several telephones.) There was a fellow known to me, and many others, as Graveyard Greg. He had been involved here, publishing interviews with such luminaries as Robin Laws, Greg Stolze, and somehow listed among them, me. For reasons I have never known, he was no longer working here, but someone had contacted him and given him a budget to create a new gaming web site. He thought that I would be a good writer for such a site, and wanted to know if I would be interested in doing a weekly column at maybe 1500 words a week, for which he would pay me from this budget. I said yes; I offered him the title, Game Ideas Unlimited, and he loved it. I wrote three columns and e-mailed them to him to show where I was going to take it, and we were all agreed that this was going to happen--and then the person who hired him pulled the plug, announcing that they weren't going to do the web site after all.
This is not that unusual. I was promised payment for an article once, <i>Re-educating the Power Gamer</i>, but the site that bought and published it never paid for it, and eventually went under. There are a few sites that make money at this, but it's not an easy thing to do, and even the big ones have been on the edge of bankruptcy more than once.
So I had these three articles, a few sketched ideas, and the concept of a series, and nowhere to take it.
Then Gaming Outpost announced that it was going to attempt something different, a new subscriber-based model in which there would be special content for those who paid a small monthly fee. They were going to hire five industry professionals to write columns, one for each day of the week. I fired off a note, saying I had this series looking for a home, and would they want it. There was some discussion--they had envisioned thousand word columns, and I had framed it at fifteen hundred, but they liked what they saw and gave me my number.
The three articles they saw by way of introduction were the Introduction I mentioned two weeks back, An Amusing Dungeon which I presented last week, and this one: Game Ideas Unlimited: Transmats. It is a discussion of many of the things I think are inherently suggested by the existence and understanding of matter transmission technology.
Some of my forum players are dealing with matter transmission technology in their worlds. This might get them thinking in new directions. In any case, I look forward to your thoughts on it here.
--M. J. Young
Some interesting thoughts there. I am going to quibble with one (and only one) aspect of it, though -- the nuclear power generation / containment angle. First, I don't see that it is actually required that the dismantling of the prototype would have to continue below the molecular level. When we replicate water molecules, having water as a by-product at the source would even be a benefit, but also there is no further information to be gained by examining 10 protons and electrons and a few (4?) neutrons.
Secondly, even if we do split up molecules, we're probably not looking at very much energy, in fact, many molecular breakdowns are even endothermic, that is, it takes more energy to split them up than you can gain back from using the component atoms (see electrolysis of water to create free Hydrogen and Oxygen for example). Now, if we truly need to go subatomic, and break up that nucleus, well then, yes your points do apply, I'm just not convinced we need to.
You are correct that most sci-fi overlooks many of the ramifications. Star Trek does acknowledge the use of transporter technology in the replicators/food synthesizers and the holodeck, but that really is just the tip of the iceberg.
I recently finished a pair of novellas by James Hogan, reprinted together under the title "Martian Knightlife". I love his older stuff, but his more recent work (like this) has been more uneven and some of his ideas have gotten pretty wacky (I think he may be on his way to joining the tin-foil-hat-brigade...), still some interesting ideas in these. In the first story, which sets up the second, someone has invented a transmat process that actually works better with people than with inanimate objects because you don't need to scan/store/transmit the data for every molecule, just the DNA and a memory map. As well, some of the ramifications of the identity/relationship of the original and end copy are explored.
Interesting thoughts.
Certainly if we used a process that identified substances at the molecular level and then reproduced those molecules as such at the other end, we wouldn't have to destroy nucleii. That might matter in some cases, though. For a machine that used electronic data storage, the charged/discharged state of each molecule might matter to the data storage. Perhaps more significantly, if we are not releasing the subatomic energy of the molecules at the one end, we're going to need to bring in a tremendous amount of energy at the other end to create the matter necessary, or else we're going to have to have systems that are packed with every element and maybe a few necessary compounds, so that these atoms and molecules can be projected to the correct positions.
Creating matter is a rather expensive process, in terms of energy, after all.
--M. J. Young
I don't know if I'd trust my memory, personality, and train of thought to the molecular level. I like that part of the technology; it makes the botch scenarios more interesting.
My quibble is that I highly doubt that pattern modification would be anywhere near as easy as the article makes it sound. To me, this is the difference between recording a digital image with a camera and convincingly modifying that image with a computer. If I recall correctly (I wasn't paying much attention at the time), there was significant lag between those two technologies. Even now, and contrary to popular wisdom, not everything can be done with Photoshop - and as an aside, it takes considerably less expertise to spot a fake than it did to make that fake.
While the effects of a digital image being a little "off" are fairly benign, I would want to carefully consider the ramifications of instilling my organic corporeal form with an analogous quality.
This isn't to say that in some hi-sci-fi universe they can't or don't do this at the drop of the hat - because of course in some universe they do - but I think there's plenty of room for a scenario with teleporters and flawless replicators which has not yet felt the full impact of the changes you describe, and which might not begin to feel them for several decades to come.
I hear what you're saying. Part of my response would be that a world with such technology has already reached the level of the technology explosion--that information is doubling so quickly it is more and more difficult to know everything even in a very narrow field. Thus once such a culture has the ability to do X, it will immediately proceed to do Y, as long as Y is similar enough to X.
Your analogy to photoshopping photos is pretty good; but then, I'm not saying that all of these applications are effected the instant the technology is developed, only that they would be developed reasonably quickly thereafter. Yes, it takes a lot of effort to make the changes, but we've also got systems that will facilitate that. The typical photoshopper is trying to paste images together by eye. The matter transmission replicator alteration system progresses in stages, but it has to progress.
Let's use Captain Picard's cup of tea. He orders "Earl Grey, Hot". Obviously the computer has already been programmed to know that he wants a specific quantity at a specific temperature, and he wants it in a cup. The question, though, is how much control he has over those settings, and how he gets that control. One answer is that at some point he placed the exact cup of tea, the right quantity, the right temperature, in the replicator, had it dematerialize (or at least read the pattern), and set that to match the command. If he wanted the same tea hotter or cooler, he could not get it unless he inserted another such cup of tea, and gave it a new identifier. If he wanted more or less, this too would require saving a different pattern. However, what we assume is the case is that the system can modify the size of the cup, the quantity of tea, and the temperature--and that comes by modifying the pattern. The modifications in that case are minor, but the system clearly is doing some calculation, determining how much energy is needed to get the target temperature for that quantity of liquid, and how big a container is needed to prevent it from spilling.
Now we turn to the broken femur. This is not about a person--not even a doctor--designing the corrected pattern for the femur. It is about the computer scanning the bone as it is in the leg, then comparing it to the model it has of the general parameters of femurs. It can calculate the correct length and diameter of the broken bone from the pieces, and the correct integration of the pieces from the stored pattern. In essence, we're asking the computer to reintegrate the pieces of a puzzle. That should be a simple task.
How much more difficult would it be for the computer to, at the same time, read the amount of calcium in that bone, determine whether the break is due to osteoporosis, a weakened bone from which the calcium has been leached over time, and by comparing this to the standards for calcification in bones restore the bone to a fully strengthened state?
All of that is relatively simple. The next step is also relatively simple: how difficult would it be to instruct the computer to reinforce the bone with a bit of steel? Whether you want the computer to add thin strips of steel within the bone or put a metal sheath around parts of the outside, the computer can calculate exactly where this would go and how to move or reconfigure surrounding tissue to create the space.
You advance through steps, certainly, but they're not terribly difficult steps, and they don't take that long. Probably FDA approval is the piece that causes the most delays.
--M. J. Young