I wouldn’t say “coincidentally”. Sometimes characters are intentionally given the same birthday as their portrayer. Elizabeth Henstridge’s character Jemma Simmons on Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD comes to mind as another example.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
293 points (99.0% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
4635 readers
594 users here now
/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Just like how Jonathan Frakes shares a birthday with William T. Riker.
(Coincidentally, it’s the same birthday as Gene Roddenberry.)
Now that's how you 'coincidentally'
Ok, but when is Thomas's Riker's birthday?
Whatever star date he was generated on.
Which is… sometime in 2361, approximately 26 years after William Riker was born.
Whatever star date he was generated on.
no man, that would mean it's William Riker's birthday too. Thomas' birthday is the same as Wills , it doesn't matter how many times they died and got "revived" by teleportation.
Yes, the current theory on how transporters would work in the real world is duplication and digitization, but in Star Trek it is a literal matter transference. Transporter signals and confinement beams act like radio waves, they can only go so far and through so much before they fall off, and whatever matter got disassembled at point A is what gets sent out and reassembled at point B.
…At least until the transporter chief does something unorthodox like making a second confinement beam around the first to prevent matter leakage, only to have that second beam be unnecessary AND get mirrored back to point A where it used ambient particles to build an effectively complete duplicate of the person being transported without the knowledge of that person or the ship doing the transporting in the first place.
Thomas Riker was given the same memories of William Riker, but he didn’t exist before that incident.
Now this is some quality nerding.
Okay but whatever matter materialized as Thomas Riker wasn't sucked up from the planet by the transporter. The beam is just information. Everything transported gets assembled from new matter - or plasma or whatever - which means they could deliberately replicate as many Rikers as they wanted to. Or brilliant scientists, philosophers, redshirts, etc. To duck this reasoning they decided to make it a moral issue, like they did with cloning and genetic enhancement in Strange New Worlds.
The transporter is a great example of sci fi tech that isn't fleshed out and applied in ways that would be obvious if it were real. That happens a lot when something is invented for production reasons - in this case to avoid shooting too many shuttle takeoffs and landings.
I disagree that the transporter is creating matter. Didn’t Gene himself go to the trouble to say that transporters and replicators are not the same tech (even if they share a lot of the same principles of operation)?
If a transporter was creating people, it would have to also be an industrial replicator, tech that didn’t exist during Kirk or Archer’s day. It would also mean that replicators can create (complex) life, which is repeatedly said to be impossible. The episode Ship In a Bottle had to trick Moriarty into thinking it was possible to beam him and his partner off the holodeck and into the real world, because it wasn’t possible by any stretch of the imagination.
Thomas Riker is a miracle. The rogue transporter confinement beam and the accidentally duplicated pattern signal should have failed every step of the way but somehow didn’t. AND it miraculously acquired the necessary matter to resolve the signal into a living person. The matter belonging to William Riker proper made it back to the Potemkin. Who knows, maybe neither of them are pure. Maybe William is 1% planetary dust and Thomas is 1% William.
I’m sure Starfleet R&D ogled over Picard’s report to Starfleet Command for a long time. But I think the fact that the Moriarty program was still just a hologram in a lab at the turn of the 25th century suggests they couldn’t find a way to replicate that accident.
mirrored back to point A where it used ambient particles...
I always wondered about that. Where do all the extra atoms come from?? Most rooms don't have ~80 kg of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen lying around. (Yes, some of those are in the air, but nowhere near enough.)
Unless, by coincidence, Thomas was beamed into existence next to a walk-in freezer full of meat.
Inb4 Star Trek / Delicious in Dungeon crossover.
Air is more stuff than you would think. If you were able to isolate a cylinder of air around the Eiffel Tower the air would weigh more than the tower.
Okay, now I have to actually do the math.
Per this Wikipedia article, the average human is about 65% oxygen, 19% carbon, and I'm going to ignore the rest.
Per Wolfram Alpha, a typical cubic meter of air has 270 grams oxygen and 160 grams carbon. Comparing to the ratios above, oxygen is the limiting factor.
One Riker (80 kg) requires all the oxygen from (80 kg x 65%) ÷ 0.27 kg/m^3 = 192 m^3 of air. So if you beam Thomas Riker into a very large living room (8 x 8 x 3 = 192 m^3), it would have enough atoms to build his body, but then he'd asphyxiate because all the oxygen was used up. That said, a tennis court (~800 m^3) would be sufficient.
‘Riker’ is officially a unit of measurement now.
Yes, but that kind of subjective comparison doesn't work when you do a little math. The density of air at 1 atmosphere is about 1.2 kg/m3. According to Jonathan Frakes he weighed about 90kg when they shot TNG, so assembling Riker would require about 17 cubic meters of air - about how much is in a 16x16-ft room with a 10-ft ceiling - which is about the size of the transporter room. And that would use ALL the air in the room, i.e. making the room a vacuum, which doesn't happen.
And that's just for one guy, not a whole landing party. Of course the air could be supplied through vents - but it would have to rush in like a hurricane, which doesn't happen, and this doesn't cover how people beam into places that aren't equipped like that.
On the flip side, we know people's atoms don't turn into air when they beam away, because there's no violent outward whoosh from where they were standing. The effect would be as if they asploded.
Seems to me the transporter would have to operate on principles that just aren't known to us right now. Maybe the fabric of spacetime itself can somehow spawn and absorb matter, enabling a person's atoms to appear seemingly out of nothing when when they materialize - as well as local air disappearing to get out of their away. Vice versa when the person dematerializes. In fact instead of just information being beamed up, maybe the person's actual atoms are transported through a special spacetime medium, not just radio waves. The idea of sending your original atoms might clear up the philosophical/moral dilemma about whether the transporter kills you.
But then where did Tom Riker come from? I dunno, maybe the transporter glitch forked Will through the spacetimes of two separate multiverses, and both of them got reassembled in our universe? Or maybe it wasn't technically a transporter glitch but a weird wrinkle in spacetime, where it folded onto itself and he got sent through both folds.
I love speculating about this stuff!
It probably all came from the distortion field around the planet that caused the issues in the first place. It was strong enough to disrupt a transporter beam, so it might have been made up of physical matter swirling around in the upper atmosphere.
Having the beam reflected back to the surface took with it enough junk for the transporter signal to repurpose into a new Riker. :P
We’ll say that’s the reason Thomas acted a little cockeyed compared to William.
Inb4 Star Trek / Delicious in Dungeon crossover.
Isn’t that essentially what Neelix’s cooking was?
Finally we learn the terrible truth behind "leola root". 😸
Oh come on... next you'll tell me that 24 hours in a day and 24 beers in a case is just a coincidence!
My biggest claim to fame is that I share a birthday with Captain Kirk.
Mine is that I had a drink with Scotty, at least in my imagination.
Breen, you say? 🤔
Happy Shatday!
Yet the Kelvin timeline (Star Trek 2009) suggested he was born in the aftermath of Nero arriving in the past.
If he was canonically born in Iowa on Earth in TOS, does that mean the Kelvin timeline actually splits much earlier than Nero's arrival?
Premature birth induced by the high stress situation? Kelvin must have been planning to get back to Earth in pretty short order if so.
Premature birth induced by the high stress situation?
Works for me! Obviously the real explanation is the writers wanted an efficient way to tie the Nero story into Kirk's story within the movie's restricted runtime - I think they handled it well enough.
Nah, not enough fog monster for me.
Abrams should have added some random polar bears in too. Gotta work in more "mystery box."
I get that it's fashionable to hate JJ for the mishandling of star wars and it's fashionable to hate the 09 trek movie, but when the movie goes out of its way to go HEY WE ARE A WHOLE SEPERATE CONTINUITY CAUSALLY DISCONNECTED FROM THE TIMELINE SPOCK AND NERO CAME FROM... you look like a fucking jackass for whining.
Dude literally did everything he could to go 'this does not invalidate the trek you grew up with. '
Im calling out Abrams habit of dumping unsolvable "mysteries" in his work as cheap bait to maintain engagement instead of building cohesive stories that engage based on merit. He does this with every single property he works on, and once you see it you cant unsee it.
Its the same garbage Moffat did with Dr. Who/sherlock/etc. Besides a small scattering of standout episodes, his shows are inane, plotless garbage full of "mysteries" that have no pay off at all. Hbomberguy has a long but excellent video about this.
You should read the link i posted. I goes more indepth with the growing issue in entertainment media.
How do you feel about Lord of the Rings? Nobody has ever put more mystery boxes into a story than JRR Tolkien.
JJ Abrams didn't invent putting mysteries into stories, he just gave it the name "mystery box" in a TED talk. The insane internet hatred of JJ Abrams has resulted in people hating a part of world building that has always existed in stories. Just the Youtube videos you're watching won't point it out in the things you like and say things like "LOTR sucks because there's too many mystery boxes!" because they don't get any monetization that way. They just point it out in things you're preconditioned to dislike to create a narrative.
Tom Bombadil is a bigger mystery box than anything JJ Abrams has ever done.
So you haven't read the article or watched the video then?
Okay.
Yes, but not for that reason.