Everyone goes to the holodeck to fuck, and apparently they make the lower deckers clean out the biofilters?
Why?? Just dematerialize it on the spot and send it back to the sterilized organic particulate suspension tanks! (TNG Technical Manual p. 91, the tech manuals are cannon deal with it nerds 😎)
First off, I think we should dispense with the notion that the biofilters are exclusively jizz. If Janeway’s in the middle of one of her period dramas after her third cup of coffee that morning, and she needs to drop a massive deuce, does she pause the program, or hike up her skirts over a chamber pot in the corner like a proper Regency era governess?
And you want them to use the transporters to beam waste material around the ship? The system that created Tuvix?
In “Day of the Dove” Spock claims that intra-ship beaming is dangerous, “Pinpoint accuracy is required. If the transportee should materialise inside a solid object, a deck or wall,” and in “Twisted” B’Elanna has to specifically configure a transporter for site-to-site beaming.
(please ignore season one of Disco, where characters just tell the computer to beam them somewhere on the ship, and it does so instantly without issue)
Not to mention that page 108 of the “Technical Manual” cites that site-to-site beaming requires double the amount of power expenditure, because it is essentially two transporter functions combined into one.
When you get right down to it, having the lower decks change out the biofilters just makes good sense. And what else are they doing while bridge crew actually handle all the important jobs? I’m pretty sure ensign Jones will survive if he misses this week’s life drawing class or poetry recital.
Not everything needs to be automated. And disposing of the jizz canisters builds character.
I will never not link this whenever this cums up.
Just dematerialize it on the spot and send it back to the sterilized organic particulate suspension tanks!
Hang on, isn’t that the gloop they use for replicators? Troy might find her chocolate sundae always way too salty.
That was, legitimately, one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. The bit with Moriarty was amazing!
Ah, but that very Technical Manual (ch. 12.5) clearly states that solid waste is transported through linear induction utlity conduits - no mention of dematerialization, except in the case of those materials that cannot be recycled by mechanical or chemical means!
Whatever the technical reasons or not (and I treasure my original printing copy of the TNG Technical Manual too), my take in the Lower Decks tasking is that it falls in the toothbrush-to-clean-grout category of character-building tasks for junior officers.
Isn’t a starship computer technically advanced enough to automate most tasks? And we never see the cleaning bots but they’re implied to exist.
In a post scarcity luxury world you don’t really need jobs, but I think they understand that people should still do them because “it builds character.”
