Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson@beehaw.org who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you're awesome aperson <3
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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Indeed. You could even do one better; instead of flashing the old copy to vapor once you'd confirmed that the groundside copy was working correctly, why not freeze it instead? Then if the away mission goes wrong and the groundside copy is killed, thaw the old copy back out again.
Isn’t that what the pattern buffer is sometimes used for?
I don't recall it ever having been used to bring people back after they've been killed; usually it's only relevant in weird circumstances like when Scotty showed up in TNG
Not routinely. And there's a strict limit on how long a pattern can be held (at least until Strange New Worlds changed that bit of continuity), and a limit on how much "space" is available in the buffers.
With my freezing proposal you just need a bunch of racks in a room somewhere, and people can be easily kept on ice for centuries with very minimal support (TNG S01E26 "The Neutral Zone"). Most starships have plenty of volume to pack frozen corpses.
Heck, keep some spares on ice even when not on an away mission. If you get killed you only lose a few weeks of memories. Or source spare parts from them. That battle Worf lost with a barrel wouldn't have been such a big deal if there was a spare spine just sitting in inventory, or Picard's run-in with those Nausicaans back in the Academy. And in a pinch you could solve staffing issues by thawing a few out to fill some extra shifts.
I begin to suspect perhaps the writers of Star Trek might not be fully exploring all the possibilities their technology provides them.
If they can assemble clones from pure energy as part of the teleporter process, like how a replicator makes food, then they can make 200 000 clones of Jango Fett with many more on the way to destroy ~~starfleet~~ the borg.
Clone orgies
There's a book series based on using cloning and memory storage to accomplish very similar things called Undying Mercenaries. The main difference is instead of copying someone and keeping the copy on ice they have cybernetic implants that send engrams of their mind to remote storage, and if they die a clone can be rapidly grown and those stored memories saved to it. It gets pretty schlocky as time goes on, but it's a fun premise to play around with.