one of the weirdest things about star trek is why replicator/teleporter technology (they are the same) havent completely destroyed the concept of senescence within the societies that can afford to use the technology. in this episode of ds9, for example, chief o'brian comes down with sudden inexplicable Wernicke’s aphasia. and they cant fix him in sickbay, but for some reason they also do not airlock him and just print out a new copy from the transporter.
i mean, there are a couple explanations for this culture lag. i dont know what the canonical explanation is and i sort of dont care, but, first of all maybe the transporter technology hasn’t been around long enough for people to adjust to the idea of never dying, of always having a backup body, of being capable of being printed from genome at literally any time. the second possibility is that, something like a fax machine, the transporters are capable of buffering, sending, and receiving the entire data of a humanoid being’s genetic, physical, and electromagnetic (or whatever form our memories and consciousness take; waves hand vaguely) selfness, destroying it in one location and reconstructing it in another from raw materials (probably just straight up atoms?), but doesn’t have the capability of storing this information for long periods of time.
this is semi-addressed in the episode where garak barges in on bashir’s james bondian holodeck fantasy while kira, sisko, dax and o'brian just transported out of an exploding shuttle at the last second and somehow get “stuck” in the station’s computer, which is asked during an emergency sequence to find room to store their “imprints”, which rapidly begin to “degrade” in RAM. which, ok. i’ll buy that.
there is also the possibility that they aren’t printing from genome, but rather some other, less analytical/deconstructive process that simply replicates the entire datamass of the transporter subject without really “understanding” it, just sort of dealing with it as a gestalt. that would explain why people who use transporters regularly still age, rather than being freshly-printed from a genetic map as determined by the computer.
the replicator/transporter question is dealt with far better in a book called The Collapsium by Wil McCarthy, who goes into some excellent backstory about how the borders of cities begin to degrade as major metropolitan transporter gates are opened all over the world, and Denver becomes literally a step away from Seattle, and the cities begin to blend and muddle before preservative legislation is introduced. it also deals with the reality of printing multiple copies of a single human and then rejoining them later (creating two- or three-track memories for a given period of time; more is trickier for the brain to handle apparently, and yes–every teen tries at some point to have sex with themselves, generally with disappointing results). the sequels go into the question of what the next generation after the first immortals actually do with themselves in a world where their parents never grow old, never retire, and are always a lifetime ahead of their children.
the third possibility, of course, is that it’s just taboo to use transporter technology to avoid age. that legislation that controls the construction of transporters prevents anti-senescent measures being implemented, and mandates aging and eventual death, despite the federation having literally unlimited resources. the lack of national healthcare in the united states is demonstration enough that such attitudes could easily prevail and flourish in the far future.
