Beam That, Scotty.

Captain and his team materialize on the surface of an M class planet. Tricorders are armed and the exploration begins. How reliably does Scotty's machine do its job? Accuracy to a millimeter may certainly not be acceptable. Atomic accuracy might just suffice. Surely the transporter buffers have limited memory storage capacity and also since captain is always in a hurry the time to accomplish a teleportation is also limited. Let us allow for the essentials like DNA in every cell and mitochondria to get the deserved atomic reproducibility. What about the RNAs floating around, proteins which already exist and the lipids? Does that glucose molecule too which is diffusing in the cytoplasm not deserve that extra attention for a guaranteed re-materialisation? For we would not like our Captain's exploration team to feel faint headed less they encounter an anomaly. In addition to the list of chemicals theres information about relative locations of all those chemicals; probably the largest burden on the buffer. Luckily for the Captain his ship encounters the Caretaker who gives them the technology to achieve all of the above ! But there is a catch. The transporter can reproduce copies of the subjects to the atom but it can only do so with a precision of 99.99%. Would the Captain have been happier with more decimal nines? How much precision is really enough? Captain's science officer also indulges in basic research in her spare time. Thats how a fruitfly finds itself sitting on the Doctor's starfleet uniform just over her shoulder while she hunts for possible life signs on that M-class planet. The Doctor sees the tiny creature as it grooms itself and is about to dust it off but doesn't and confines it in a biohazard bag instead. That is the moment a thought occurs to her.

Does the fruitfly too deserve that extra buffer space during the transit? Thought experiment begins. She decides not to take chances with genetic material and its immediate byproducts. She jumps straight to the neurobiology of the fly. The fruitfly brain has about two hundred thousand neurons. A tiny fraction of the neurons that the Captain's brain probably does. A fruitfly has a rich repertoire of things it can do. As a larva it can crawl and dig through soft substrates. It can see, can discriminate tastes and can learn. When it just emerges as an adult out of the pupal case (a feat itself) it extends its proboscis for the first time in its life; gulps in air so as to generate power to inflate its wings. An adult can do all that a larva can do and more. It can walk and fly. It can sing a song and find a mate. Can it really get by without overworking its neurons? Single neurons that release more than one neurotransmitter. Tiny varicosities form a complex network with others inside compact neuropils. Potential synaptic connections within nerve bundles themselves. Dendritic release sites and the accompanying extremely local feedback loops. Lack of clear distinction between axonal and dendritic ends of most neurons. And of course glia-neuron gap-junction-like connections every so often. This makes the Doctor wonder how the fly itself keeps an index of all these details and maintains them so but allows regulated plasticity to happen at certain "allowed" sites. Thats the fly's own problem. What about the transporter? How much leeway can a fly offer the transporter before it alters its physiology radically? Complexity of the nervous system of the fly surely would challenge a beam engineer. Most of the species the good Captain encounters that are teleportation-capable are humanoid species. The complexity of the insect species, no matter how advanced they may be, probably keeps them using this starfleet technology. The transporter is still just a copy machine. If it comes to reverse engineering the logic of the entire flybrain then that task might turn out to be even more daunting than generating an atom-by-atom copy of the fly. How will we ever have a complete algorithm for how a fly really works?