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
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?
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
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.
Because unlike our world, the Star Trek world actually respects people’s privacy. Ever noticed how people just vanish from the ship and the computer never alerts anyone until someone asks for their location? When Trek was written, the idea of constantly monitoring and reporting on individuals was abhorrent. It’s disgusting how willingly people just accept that now.
But like, they can still track you. And removing the badge that lets them track you is basically a crime. Also section 31 exists basically just to track and monitor people.
They can locate you. They don’t actively monitor you. That’s a big difference.
Section 31 were created as the bad guys! Genocidal maniacs who Sisko and crew fought against every step of the way.
And I don’t use the phrase “genocidal maniacs” lightly, but they were literally xenocidal and Sloane was, as a spy, less of an Ian Fleming James Bond type and more of a John le Carré type—an actual maniac in the piece of human wreckage who’s been turned violent and crazy by the stress of war.
(I really wish his end had come at Sisko’s hands, and involved contrasting Sisko’s actions in Pale Moonlight with Sloan and 31’s degeneration in to xenophobic crimes of extermination, and how both shared the same origin but ended up in very different places.
Be that as it may, he made some valid points talking to Bashir.
"The Federation needs men like you, Doctor. Men of conscience, men of principle, men who can sleep at night. You’re also the reason Section Thirty one exists. Someone has to protect men like you from a universe that doesn’t share your sense of right and wrong. "
That’s pretty much exactly how it seems to me. I guess I understand how American fans who were born after 9/11 and Facebook might have a different perspective, because privacy means something different now–but it’s cognitive empathy, which means I understand their feelings, not the sympathetic empathy of someone who shares it.
Ironically, I learned these cognitive empathy skills from Captain Picard, and still consider TNG possibly the best way to expose young people to the skill. :-)
