In TNG, Picard says that the Federation has evolved past a need for money. Indeed, we never see any.
In DS9 though, Quark talks a lot about bar tabs and costs. Surely O’Brien and Bashir don’t get free drinks, so how do they pay? I’d assume that any Ferengi worth his lobes won’t accept anything that can be replicated, so do Federation officers get a stipend of tradeable “value” when interacting with cultures that still expect payment?
I think there’s also a reference to Quark paying rent to Sisko for running the bar. Presumably that’s denominated in latinum. I wonder where it goes? Maybe the secret “Garak black ops” fund.
Hmm I wonder even more how this works for Grandpa Sisko. How does his restaurant get allocated the food he needs to make his famous jambalaya? He makes it very clear the food he uses is NOT replicated.
Look at all the gardening videos on YouTube. People love producing food. Even a rather small patch produces more of something than you can eat. (If you want to eat other things too)
The only thing non industrial local gardening won’t you give is consistency. When certain produce is ripe there suddenly is a lot, and then not. They might solve this with people grade transporters.
Whats the difference between a transporter and a replicator? Once you’ve gotten the pattern of a tomato why can’t you just keep copying it? Presumably a human is too complicated to do that regularly but why not a tomato?
@Lem453 There are cargo transporters and people transporters. The people transporters are more faithful. The replicators are more like cargo transporters. See “Heisenberg Compensator” https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Heisenberg_compensator
I mean, on a molecular level there is no difference. I feel like they even did the whole ship of Theseus thing several times. And the obvious one is the 2nd Riker. Enterprise (the series, not the ship) saw the addition of transporters to starships and they talked about it a lot in that episode. Bones in the original refused to use them because he understood the science of it and knew people were essentially being killed and reassembled every time they were transported.
I always got the impressions that people who said non-replicated food tasted better were either deluding themselves or that extra flavor they attribute to the food is like, non food things in it. Leftover dirt, mold starting to grow… Kind of like how completely filtered water is tasteless when the minerals and other fine particulates are removed. Transporters, as a side effect of how they work, remove illnesses from the body (Except when it needs to not for plot reasons. And don’t get me started on the billions of bacteria that exist in our body all the time that are necessary for life that wouldn’t count as “you”). So presumably, they would remove all those tiny things in food if transported, and obviously wouldn’t create them in the first place if replicated.
A transporter is a device which takes matter, shifts it into subspace, and can do some manipulation of that matter in the process, but can’t reconstruct it arbitrary. Once the transported object has been rematerialized, all the transporter has left is a record of what that matter was at a far lesser precision than what would be needed to replicate it.
A replicator is a transporter designed to shift inert matter into subspace and modify it extensively from that state. A typical replicator is less precise than a transporter and is simultaneously limited by the complexity of its recipes. It cannot produce functional living things, for example.
Transporters and replicators are frequently referred to as matter-energy conversion devices. This is technically true but somewhat deceptive. It’s also a common misconception that a transporter is an advanced replicator, instead of the other way round, but we know this isn’t true: a safe-for-humans Transporter was invented and used in the 22nd century, while the contemporary replicator equivalents were primitive protein resequencers.
I have a large write up on this from the Daystrom Institute on that other site. I don’t think there are rules against linking there, so here you are: federation citizen’s migration guide I know this is only tangentially related, but it does have the idea of locals deciding how to allocate resources. And a summary of another daystrom discussion that I remember: Sisko’s restaurant might have significant cultural value, so the city council allows him to operate his restaurant as long as he has patrons to his restaurant. Hence why he’s concerned about turnover, even though money doesn’t exist.
I can’t find the saved link to the second discussion about why sisko cares about turnover, sorry