6/6/2023 0 Comments Latinum star trekFrom the same episode, we see that the "gold pressed" nature of gold-pressed latinum is that the silvery liquid is somehow suspended inside the gold bricks. I don't know how well those two could combine, but evidently the Ferengi (or somebody) developed the right secret sauce to make it work. Assuming it's a metal, then the fact that it's a liquid would suggest it's some sort of mercury amalgam, possibly with a noble metal like platinum. We've seen pure latinum in "Who Mourns For Morn" and it looked like silver paint fresh from the jar. Just as Timo points out above, many food-stuffs are difficult to replicate properly, so it's not at all a stretch to assume that certain other materials are difficult to generate this way also. The idea is never to outright prevent copying - it is merely to make copying more expensive than the acquisition of the real deal.Īlternately, it's possible that it can't be replicated. The bigger units such as slips and bricks could of course retain the taste coding, but would also have more complicated things in them, just like bills are more complexly coded than coins today. Perhaps programming an authentic taste into the strips takes a lot of replicator resources (many people complain that replicator food doesn't taste as good as "real" food), and only an idiot would thus replicate a strip of latinum when it costs 153 strips to get the taste right. Quark has been known to check the value of the small latinum strips by biting. Of course, not all coding need be database-reliant. But in Trek, checking against a database would be trivially easy. Today, we don't check even bills worth a thousand dollars against a code database as a matter of routine, because that's way too difficult to do we trust that the other anti-copying measures work. A hundred bills (or latinum bricks) with identical codes are only worth one bill (or brick), plus a few years in jail. And replicating a code doesn't add to your possessions, because codes are unique and supposedly will be checked against a database. The Ferengi probably insert codes into their as such worthless latinum, too. The agreement would be thrown into confusion if everybody replicated these pieces of paper, so we insert codes into the as such worthless material to prevent this. Today, worthless pieces of paper have value because we agree that they do. But money is money: it has value because people agree that it does. Actually, nobody even went as far as saying "latinum can't be replicated".įor all we know, it can, just like hundred-dollar bills can be printed.
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