Well, you can replicate dead plant and animal matter easily - food replicators do it at least 3 times a day per crewmember!Originally posted by Red:
I was under the impression that plant metter had been replicated successfully but that kind of animal (including sentients) was difficult to replicate.
Red
Replicating a living organism, OTOH, is completely different. This is where it comes down to memory storage capacity and transporter / replicator resolution.
Life processes (according to ST canon) are quantum level events. Storing a pattern for, say, a steak requires only molecular-level resolution - it doesn't matter if there's the occasional error, because a steak is dead anyway.
The reason a living organism can't be replicated is due to the fact that quantum events are random - they are not predetermined. Molecules are molecules - it doesn't matter what the components of a molecule are doing at any particular time, as long as the molecules are there.
You have your liquid suspension of proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, etc - the replicator grabs "x" amount of proteins, "y" amount of lipids, etc, and throws them together to create a steak.
A person, however (or a cow, for that matter), is alive. A living organism's subatomic particles are fluctuating madly according to quantum indeterminancy (yes, I know a steak's are as well, but the pattern is apparently different for a living organism as opposed to non-living matter), and that is what causes life-processes to take place. Without a pattern for those life-processes that the transporter can read, there is no way to reproduce them exactly. Even early transporters, before the development of (according to O'Brien) multi-plexed pattern buffers, didn't get it exactly right every time - occasionally there were tiny, quantum-level errors, which resulted in transporter psychosis.
Trying to store them in a computer is impossible - there's simply too much information. As I demonstrated above, you would require millions of times the memory to store a living organism's pattern. As it is, the limit of ST technology is you can store a pattern for a few minutes in the transporter's pattern buffer.
Also, it is important to remember, when you are beamed, your particles are broken down into energy quanta, transmitted and then reassembled. The transporter doesn't create you out of particles on the transport site - otherwise you wouldn't be beaming back in; a transporter would simply be a device that kills you and makes a replica of you somewhere else.
Yes, occasionally we see Trek canon breaking those rules: Kirk gets a double, as does Riker; Scotty manages to store his pattern for 70 years. In each case, however, there are exceptional circumstances - and as we saw with Relics, it's not a reliable thing, nor is it particularly safe!
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"May I find you with peace, and leave you with hope."