Sonic showers would clean dirt from you, but you'd still stink.
Sonic showers would clean dirt from you, but you'd still stink.
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:
Bonus points:
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.
And this is even without accounting for malfunctions. Can you imagine eating the wrong vegetable and ending up tuvixed with poop?
So if I was in a rush, I could just transport myself across the room, but leave all the dirt and oil behind?
I feel like that's the equivalent of a person from 100 years ago hearing about the internet, and saying "so if I wanted to get somebody a message in a hurry, I could pen a letter, have someone take a picture of it, take the picture to a developer, and then send that over the internet to somebody?"
I mean, you could, and it would be better than what you have to do now, but the actual way they'd do it in the future is probably a lot better.
With some of the transporter specific jargon heard throughout the shows, I suspect it's possible, but would take some modifications to the targeting scanners to separate the crud from the person. Like how they separated Tuvok and Neelix from each other in Tuvix.
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.