It’s something that has bothered me since I realised
Or if they don’t have onboard sensors designed to do that then why not do that
Because someone who is unconscious or unable to move isn’t going to be able to call for help
The computers in star trek have no real intelligence, everything needs user input. I mean, their weapons don’t even auto aim.
On the good side people could just be teleported into medbay if their metrics are out of bounds. Though probably teleporting a lot of people exercising or having sex. It would be a hilarious plot point
On the bad side, O’Brien could just teleport in a new copy of you from the pattern buffer of your last teleport when you die
Yes, he could teleport a copy of myself but I would still be dead then, my soul sipping tea with the interdimensional koala while watching my copy do all the stuff I no longer can.
That’s not how the pattern buffer works. It’s extremely unstable. And patterns can neither be copied, nor scanned without destroying a person
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Relics_(episode)
That’s just what they want you to think.
Scotty is a genius and he was doing something that had never been done before. Continuously transporting himself to preserve the buffer. Not the same as just keeping a pattern in storage.
Besides, patterns can’t be duplicated by a computer. It’s not like a CD you can copy and burn. It’s more like a vinyl record governed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle
GDPR
I think the canon reason given for this and other “why didn’t the ship’s computer just stop them?” situations that it’s a privacy violation to just go around scanning people without their permission.
Although they do seem to do a lot of “scanning for life-signs” so who knows?
scanning for life-signs
Yeah, and I’ve never figured out the security feature that makes scanning for life-signs more effective when you sign a little song to the computer. But sometimes I guess it’s just more urgent to know, little life signs, where are you?
A lot of my head canon around this and the notable lack of automation prevalent in Starfleet: it’s a futuristic, post-scarcity jobs program. Yes, it’s about exploration and rendering assistance and all that. But it gives people something to do, a way to serve the whole. Picard said as much to Geordi when Scotty was aboard. I’ve of the many things Starfleet does is give people a sense of usefulness.
