Was just thinking about this while taking a boring regular shower with water. A sonic shower just vibrates at high intensity to pulverize dirt and knock it from your body; but what about oils and lipids and all that other stuff that makes you stinky?
On a side note, I realized that the only time any dental care is brought up, it’s with the ferengi. The race with quite possibly the worst teeth in the galaxy are the only ones seen using cleaning utensils on them.
In-universe explanation: they’re advanced enough to be able to kill, dissolve, and sonically motivate bacteria and dirt - even in pores. This would leave you incredibly clean. Remember: they’ve got transporters. They reconstruct you from an energy beam in a split second, not noticeably disrupting your perception of consciousness. Sonic-shower precision like that would be considered child’s play.
Two things:
- Woah, I never really thought about it, but the not disrupting your perception of consciousness thing is huge. Not only do they have to replicate all of the electrons and neurochemicals in the right locations, but they also have to ensure that their motion continues in exactly the same way.
- If they’re able to do all of that, why the fuck does anyone ever leave a transporter dirty? They clearly already do some level of this with the bio-filters. Same with teeth, why don’t the transporters keep your teeth sparkly and your breath fresh?
Bonus points:
- Are water-based showers a luxury? Surely you could just slap a replicator in there and not have to worry about plumbing.
- Speaking of plumbing, I can’t recall seeing a toilet in Star Trek. Even if there are, they’d just have a matter decompiler in there, right?
- So, why not just use the transporters to clear your bowels then? Can’t shit your pants on an away mission if you got cleared out on the beam down.
- Like, why can’t you just roll out of bed, hop on the transporter pad, and show up to your classes at Starfleet Academy having had a Shower, a Shit and a Shave on the way!
The teleporter is already at the edge of their technological capabilities anyway, to the point they have to resort to some hacks to make it work.
ST Picard
Like keeping “common biology” like common DNA sections in the transporter’s firmware to not have to care about all individual aspects.
And this is even without accounting for malfunctions. Can you imagine eating the wrong vegetable and ending up tuvixed with poop?
New Debate just dropped: Was Janeway right to murder Poovix?
But it was a two for one special!
IDK about child’s play but definitely enough for the lower decks engineers to clean overnight.
Not to mention that they can vaccinate against practically every pathogen, so they could eliminate the types of bacteria that cause the majority of body odor.
Seems like statistically, each year a certain number of people would be vibrated to death by malfunctioning sonic showers.
Not to mention all the horny people who go deaf taking a “high frequency” sonic shower.
In ds9 it is mentioned they seal teeth in. Wich prevents any degradation.
But not bad breath?
They didn’t mention it…
You gotta belive not. All that residue there, prime for bacteria attack…
I assume the federation has a treatment that makes your mouth inhospitable to cavity-causing bacteria
hugh and stamets are both seen brushing their teeth in discovery. i imagine its just not shown very often
We are actually working on that now! There’s a sweetener called Xylitol that essentially starves bacteria to death because they can’t process it.
Edit: just found out it’s poisonous to dogs.
I could’ve sworn I read something a few years ago about some scientists genetically modifying or identifying this mutant variant of bacteria that was able to outcompete the natural stuff, but don’t produce the stuff that harms teeth. Was sometime in the 80s but the FDA completedly blackballed it.
I’ve not actually tried a modern sonic shower so I’ll take your word for the limitations of them as things stand and guess they’ve figured out how to make them work effectively in the next few hundred years.
I think the Ferengi we see have excellent teeth, by Ferengi standards. you can see they’ve working hard to look after them, rather than trying to look like hoomans.
