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Please advise on this conversation we had over on c/Piracy. Transporters and replicators, basic operating principles?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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Yeah, they are. Waste matter is reclaimed as energy/supplies for food production
Ah I think I see the confusion. They are using antimatter for energy creation. Energy to matter for transport or replication is 'paid' for by the matter to energy destruction of the og material (whether it be the transported individual, waste matter collected from the crew, equivalent amounts of reactor fuel, or some combination of these) and the excess cost of thermodynamics is paid for by the matter-antimatter reactions in the reactor.
Is the efficiency miraculous? Yes, ofc. Is it breaking thermodynamics? No. It's easy to see how they are paying for the excess costs with reactor fuel and that is without any hand-wavium of subspace or dilithium crystals being involved.
I was saying that there's nothing, within our current physics, that is not efficient than a matter/antimatter reaction. You get 100% of the energy. Whether or not it's useful energy is another question, and I'm doing some hand-waving around the topics of containment, manipulation, etc. However, nothing we know of is a more efficient use of matter to generate electricity. Not fission; not fusion; not radioactive decay. If we could wrap a black hole in a Dyson sphere and capture Hawking radiation, it'd still be less efficient than M/AM annihilation.
I was saying that - barring a magic technology such as capturing usable energy from quantum fluctuation, saying ST has a form of energy production that is a matter-based energy production that is more efficient than M/AM annihilation would violate our known laws of physics, because introducing a hydrogen atom to an anti-hydrogen atom is 100% efficient and costs nearly nothing to effect.
ST is full of magic technologies, and carrying around a bunch of AM as part of a way to play Mozart in the ready room is really dangerous, so - maybe they use it a bit, but they rely on more stable, less dangerous energy sources like dilithium. Anyway, trying to mix hard science and Star Trek is a dangerous endeavor. ST is more hard-sciency than the Space Wizards in Star Wars, but there's still a vast amount of speculation required to make things work.