Confession time: City traffic scares me. It's bad enough that I didn't learn to drive until after the ten-feet-tall-and-bullet-proof stage of life, but I've also never lived in a city larger than the La Crosse of the 2000s or Eau Claire of the 1990s--whichever is bigger. So there was a certain amount of bravado involved in your faithful blogger plowing to and from the Twin Cities this weekend--and, in all liklihood, in Dennis riding shotgun besides. Fortunately, we had better directions (from the road construction perspective) for the return journey. Yet having to stay relentlessly on point through the metropolitan area was frustrating enough that I grumbled to Dennis, "They can't invent transporters soon enough for me."
He--being a truck-driver's kid--seemed to find that funny. But it started me thinking "What if?" That's where the long stretches of MN State Highway 52 and I-90 kicked in. Whoops. Looking back at the evolution of the "Star Trek" weltanshaung through the franchise's five incarnations, it seems dubious (at best) that the transporter could have possibly been invented before the replicator. Humor me by thinking about it for a second or twelve: A replicator merely converts (stored) energy to matter according to some template. A transporter, in contrast, scans matter, maps it to template, converts it to energy, transmits it (plus the scanned template), then reverses the entire process at the destination point.
The relative differences in complexity alone argue for the precedence of replicator over transporter, don't you think? Then, when questions of liability are introduced, the disparity in liklihood becomes so much steeper. The worst-case scenario of a replicator fail is a pile of goo. Possibly toxic, true, but building scanners and shields into the dispenser unit should minimize the fallout by however many nines are economically feasible. Transporters, on the other hand, don't get a second chance with precious cargo. Up to and including red-shirt extras who don't have last names. ;-)
But--lest my gentle reader consider this an exercise in angel-counting (quantum interpretation found here)--I will note that, at least in 2010, replicators seem to be leading transporters. Either one would be an epic (and not in the cant, trite sense of the adjective) game-changer. In each case, don't hold your breath...but don't blink either. Such are the times we inhabit. (Wheeeee!!!)
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* English major flashback: I can't cite the exact source, but I would be remiss if I didn't give credit to the unknown (meaning, unremembered by me) journalist who summarized one of Ronald Reagan's State of the Union Addresses (1986, 1987 or 1988--I forget which) thusly: "For the President, future indicative is past perfect."
