Damn, I was going to ship of Theseus you about the cells in your body replacing themselves constantly, but apparently our brain neurons last a lifetime.
Now I don’t think I would ever use a teleporter, either. Shit.
Just believe we’re inside a simulation and transporters won’t matter.
Its kinda crazy actually if you think about it, our ability to anticipate actions is our ability to land in outcomes expected to be made by the reality generating around us if you imagine the reality outside our bodily sensory input as a big monte carlo field of potentials in the form of intertwined variables…like a big llm.
Aren’t LLMs basically pattern matching systems.
Humans are also pattern matching, and then predicting machines, but with way more inputs and senses than the LLMs.
They don’t match anything but do trigger the “nearest” response to a stimulus, so kinda like pattern matching but that implies doing it on purpose. But yeah the rest I agree with.
Will they anti matter then?
That is why nervous system damage usually means life long problems. Brains and all their wiring are so arcane and complicated, even our bodies don’t know how to grow more than one of them, and we often don’t get it right the first time either unfortunately.
Well clearly you didn’t get it right.
muscle cells too. the muscle cells you have now are the same cells you had as a kid (not entirely sure how far back it goes). they dont even divide when you gain muscle, the cells just get bigger and absorb nuclei from neighboring cells to support the extra mass. the cool thing is the nuclei stick around even if you let the muscles atrophy, so theyre forever changed by having once been big. thats probably part of why its easier to get back to muscle size youve been at before.
But what about the atoms/molecules that make up those neurons? Do they last a lifetime?
So far that we know of, neural cell DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines, never have their atoms replaced.
Which is to say that we are a ship of theseus, and a transporter does not kill us. The only reason these atoms are not normally replaced is because there is no natural mechanism to replace them.
Radiocarbon Dating of the Human Eye Lens Crystallines Reveal Proteins without Carbon Turnover throughout Life Lynnerup N, Kjeldsen H, Heegaard S, Jacobsen C, Heinemeier J (2008) Radiocarbon Dating of the Human Eye Lens Crystallines Reveal Proteins without Carbon Turnover throughout Life. PLOS ONE 3(1): e1529. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001529
Not sure I would tie my identity to my neuron DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines. Definitely agree with you that we are living ships of Theseus. I’m pretty sure there’s no natural mechanism to replace those parts because it’s really hard, and we work “well enough” without being able to.
Yun Tianming: am I joke to you?
Yeah but we don’t know if consciousness lives in the meat or in the chemistry.
I would be the guy who says, “Open-source teleporters only.”
I ain’t risking having myself modified surreptitiously. 😑
uses teleporter
is inexplicably desperate to try the New Improved Coca Cola
In that case if you’re a union leader, you just get deleted
But if they were open source they’d have the worst name possibly, and possibly an equally awful UI.
I guess we can be glad that “the GIMP” is taken so nobody will reuse that for a future FOSSeporter
- Bob’s Alternate Teleport Engine - A reimplementation of the standard protocol.
- Ben’s Unified Teleporter Template Placed Largely Under Ground - You do need to dig a big hole, but the result is very neat, with just the teleport pad and controls showing.
- Complex Linear Indoor Teleporter - Works like a corridor, letting you just walk from one building to another.
For number 2 there’s a derivative which can also vibrate, which is said to make the process much more pleasant. Oh and it’s entirely built out of rust, nobody really knows why though.
The faster you walk into number three, the sooner you reach the destination.
But you need to have the endurance to make it to the end.
The first one wouldn’t have a ui, it’d be a Unix-style command, probably called tsck, or killu or something.
The important part is to start with the acronym and then try and figure out what it can stand for.
Yes. The H.R.U.M.F. principle!
FOSSeporter makes it sound like everyone is dancing lol
No worries, its not you that was modified its your clone. Youre dead!
I always liked the idea of teleporters that are just wormhole pairs.
If you want to travel from New York to Paris you have to first go to your local wormhole station, walk through that and be taken to the central station for all US wormholes, walk over to the international portal and be taken to the global interface station, which would be located wherever the electricity is cheapest so probably somewhere in Iceland, then you walk over to the French national station, and be taken to some facility in France, and then from there walk over to the Paris wormhole.
All wormholes are 20 m across by standard allowing cargo containers to transport through, with the Americans have made system unnecessarily complicated by standardizing their wormholes to 2.5 giraffe widths.
You would like Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth saga.
That works for teleportation that needs a receiver, like for a phone call. In ST you only need a transmitter, so it’s more like a wormhole whose far end you can put wherever you want.
Excuse me sir or ma’am (or none of the above) do you want to co-write a movie? lol this is an amazing premise if it hasn’t been done (and my apologies if you’re referencing a movie i’m not aware of)
A distinction between a teleporter and a transporter…
To teleport implies the original matter is instantly moved from one place to another so there would be no destruction and reconstituted copy. A wormhole would seem to be the only realistic way that could be achieved.
A transporter, well that means copy then kill. No one knows if the kill part is painful because noone survives it. I find it funny Riker’s copy is actually the “original” and his lack of death is considered a transporter accident. Yet he is the one treated like the copy…
And all that said, barclay’s experience in the transporter beam is more suggestive of a wormhole style device.
I don’t know why I bothered to write all this out…
Someone needs to. At least you put thought into it.
Iirc Thomas is not Will’s copy. Basically the transporter has a malfunction where Thomas and Will are both constituted on a transporter pad. So both are the “original” and also both are neither. In a sense, the William Thomas Riker who stepped onto that pad that day ceased to be, forked into two different lives.
I used to use this episode to talk about identity when I taught ethics back in the day. Both men carried on their lives under the belief that they were the same man who stepped onto a transporter pad on Nervala IV. Their experiences defined who they were, demonstrating that it’s more than biological material that makes any one of us us.
Now the deeper question is: since you can’t add matter to the universe, what’s missing to give life to two Rikers?
The energy that was used in the original teleportation. I didn’t think it was that deep, it used more energy to reconstitute more matter.
Sounds like trek had the technology to copy people. You would think if they are sending people out into the unknown to explore galaxies light years away they would just send a copy. Or at least keep a copy.
I wonder what earth piccard would be up to…
Just copy Data everywhere.
You know what, now that your mention it, wasn’t the explanation that the signal was reflected back to the surface due to the ionising radiation of something, so the beam was kinda split or doubled. So my premise was wrong.
Yeah. They tried to split the beam to account for the radiation, half of it made it through, the other half mirrored back. I’m guessing the computer can extrapolate the remaining matter based off of data saved in the pattern buffer?
Either way, Thomas Riker was way under-utilized in Star Trek. I also love how “okay, sure” everyone is about this situation.
I assume they sent a lot more data than it takes to make a single person. Eventually enough data for a whole Ryker was received at each location, while a lot more data got scattered.
The are other methods from Star Trek that could potentially be size as well.
Like “hey you actually travel through this other dimension where your physical form is undisturbed and no time passes in this dimension”
Which sounds ok, but “by the way it’s kinda a hell-dimension and your consciousness gets tortured for a distance-relative time there but won’t retain the memories after…”
Stop giving your time to corporations! W this, T that. They have played us for absolute fools, there is no need for economy class.
Seize the means of eldritchticity production comrade, don’t believe any nonsense about colors. The trains are always on time under the F co-op too.
Oh dear lord. Yeah I could definitely see a variant where the hell dimension is just “work all the hours that it would have taken to traverse in normal space so that EvilCorp can generate profit for the pan-dimensional empire”
To transport just means to move, so if anything the term “transporter” implies physically moving people rather than copying. The term “teleport” is the more ambiguous one…
In this case transporter is more ambiguous not because of the literal meaning, but the association with a particular technology.
I’m glad you did.
his lack of death is considered a transporter accident
Must do wonders for his self worth! 😄
They both got converted into energy, Thomas is just as much a copy as Will. Also, apparently your experience is constant across the process, as seen by Barclay grabbing someone out of the matter stream. Presumably someone would notice if it hurt…
Isn’t Tom just another copy? He came out of the pattern buffer the same as Will iirc.
Yet he is the one treated like the copy…
no matter what, they were like 1000th generation of copies. “the original” died when riker stepped into the transporter for the first time. so discussing whether this one is 1001st, or 1002nd generation seems not that exciting…
A transporter is just Jason Statham in a suit. SCNR
Well, no, “transporter” means the first one, because that’s how they’re explained to work where they’re called transporters.
Now I understand why such and such movie about magicians calls the trick “the transported man”.
Everyone always focuses on the Ship of Theseus or the existential parts of this, but the societal impacts would be crazy.
Millions of people teleporting to the most beautiful places on earth and wrecking them, highways and boring parts of cities abandoned, mass death of people teleporting into a crush crowd at Mecca, landmarks toppled under the weight of teleporting tourists and bosses teleporting into your house for a “work from home” meeting, weapons and bombs being teleported into war zones…
Things would eventually find a new normal and teleporting food and resources around would remove the need for ships and trucks, you could explore the world much more easily and there would be lots of science to do in hard to reach places, marine biologists would have a field day exploring the deep ocean, doctors could teleport cancer cells out of patients, space agencies teleport probes, bases and astronauts to the moon and around the solar system…
Like it would be such a huge upheaval with so many implications. It’s interesting that people really fixate on the “would I die though? What does dying even mean if I’m still around?” part, even though I think that’s maybe the least interesting thing. I guess it taps into a very primal survival instinct?
Can I just teleport the poop out of my colon and the piss out of my balls, so I don’t have to get up to go to the bathroom?
Where are you storing your piss again?
Piss is stored in the balls
When you’re a little older you’ll learn about what actually comes from the balls.
Yeah it’s piss
Or you could eat whatever you want and then teleport it out of you. No more fatties – unless they like that shit.
But that would enable bioterrorism, where you teleport your waste into the body of someone you want to kill. We would all have to wear tinfoil suits.
There are a couple old sci fi stories that feature “time tourism”, where they have to stop sending people to popular events like the crucifixion of Jesus because they’re getting overcrowded. Robert Silverberg’s novel Up the Line and Garry Kilworth’s Let’s Go to Golgotha! In one of them the time travelers vastly outnumber the locals, and swing the vote to release one of the thieves instead of Jesus, because that’s what the travelers think they’re supposed to do.
Depends on how the technology works. It’s more likely that you would need someone’s how to receive or both ends, even if it were technically possible to just teleport randomly from point a to point b I feel like that feature would be disabled on commercial models precisely to stop the above from happening.
There’s a book where people have figured out teleportation so they have to hide women to prevent kidnappings.
My grandma won’t drive on the interstate. These are the same.
Quite reasonable. “Driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get waylaid.”
Is it waylaid or weighed, as in driving over a scale at a inspection station?
Edit: lyrics all say “weighed”, but the way it’s sung over two beats I definitely hear waylaid. Truckers hauling overweight loads, or heavier than reported on the bill of lading (contraband), don’t want to have to go over the scales because they’ll get caught.
We always sung it as waylaid. As in stopped by the PoPo. The song also speaks of transporting “smokes and folks”, so yeah, behave in a way that keeps one from ever talking to the authorities.
Yes thank you I agree that is what waylaid means. The lyrics however, are “weighed” as in pulling into a weigh station you usually see along the highway closed for some reason.
My mom wouldn’t drive on the freeway because she lacked confidence. It was too fast for her. She was fine riding with dad driving, though.
there is true teleportation, dimensional teleporting(in TNG there was one race that had it, but it damages them permanently) but federation never had that kind of technology. which doesnt “disitengrate you”
Warhammer 40k: Can I interest you in a trip through literal hell?
Also: what kind of immortality would you like?
Hmm… ironic immortality! I have eternal life, but grow increasingly more weary and numb to it’s joys until I wish for the sweet succor of death that will never come.
Sounds realistic as hell that
I don’t think that would be real. People become bitter and weary because they get old and their bodies start hurting and their minds failing more and more.
If you stay sharp and fit, you won’t get bitter.
This is so blissfully optimistic that I’m not even gonna try to bring you back down to Earth with my weary bitterness.
They become bitter because they don’t know how to handle their own minds. Hence being immortal gives one far more time to learn, but does not make learning inevitable
I’d use a teleporter with no hesitation. What’s important is my memories and sense of self, not the actual meat it’s in. I could find out I’m a copy of myself right now and not be bothered.
Yeah but once you step in the teleporter you stop being. The copy is only useful for other people to keep interacting with your clone, but the actual you is dead.
So what? There would be persistent awareness. The new me would remember everything up to the old me’s death and keep living. I’m fine with that.
If you don’t mind there’s no problem, of course, but quite a few people want to keep living. If you told a terminally ill person “so you’ll die, but don’t worry cause we can clone you and tell everybody you got better” I think “oh well then no problem” wouldn’t be a universal answer.
As far as you know. You wouldn’t know what they modified.
Would you be cool going into the execution chamber and getting shot to transport yourself? Would the memory of the death make a difference, or the ability to visit your previous remains? What happens if there is an accident and the new you wakes up, but the execution chamber fails and the old you is still alive?
Id be more fine with not remembering but to each their own
What happens to “you” several years from now when every cell in your body has been replaced by mitosis?
It’s a “I think therefore I am” kind of thing. I know I’m the same person I was five years ago, just with some new memories, and some memories have faded. But I am still the same person.
I don’t know whether you are the same person you were five years ago.
The show “Earth 2” in the 90s had an interesting concept in the backstory where not every human had a soul, and they made a device that could detect whether people had souls. I sometimes wonder if that’s the case, not everyone is actually a sentient being and just a biological machine.
Of course there’s no way to know, so we have to assume that if someone is a human, they are sentient. Same logic as the TNG episode “Measure of a Man”, but it applies to humans just as it does to robots.
There’s no “actual” you. Your body creates a sense of an “I”. If you copy that body including the brain, the copy will have the same. You wouldn’t say that the copy’s sense of smell is somehow different, so why make a distinction for the sense of self?
Because I don’t really care about what the copy can do and think, because I’ll be dead. My self disappears, even if someone else has a copy of it.
What makes you think that “your self” exists as anything else but an emergent property of your brain existing?
You’re just describing a feeling that we all share, but there’s no indication that it’s more than that. Check out my writings about this topic (link to a scientific book coming to the same conclusion at the end)
A man cannot step into the same river twice
I think this idea and confidence hold extremely true until you think about Elon Musk.
I have no idea what you mean lol
His machine would not work very well.
Actually, now that I think about it, it’s far worse than that. If a company has a teleporter that can build a copy of you, they can also build an almost-copy of you. Say, a copy that is less rebellious. More obedient.
Yeah, the idea’s cool in fiction, but in reality I would never touch a machine like this. I will walk my ass over in analogue.
I’m a biologist. Perfectly recording something is very very far removed from understanding something enough to make targeted modifications.
Specific changes, maybe. But broad ones? “Uehhh, make the amygdala smaller. Squash it. … Well, find a mapping of a guy with a smaller one, then. Do like a copy paste.”
All I’m saying is they would try, and trying is enough for me to nope the fuck out of all of it.
Who guarantees the copy is exact? I don’t think we can do checksums on living bodies.
Well I imagined we were talking about an imaginary sci-fi technology. Obviously it would be more complicated and possibly at risk for some kind of manipulation in real life. If I were presented a teleporter where the only fault is a philosophical question about being a copy, then I don’t mind being a copy and my original self dying.
That feels like a very different statement than saying you don’t mind stepping into the teleporter knowing you will die while a copy continues from where you left off on the other side.
yeah I did realize that after thinking about it. Still I’m not sure. I guess it depends on what that experience is like.
Everybody says it’s fine
We can, but we won’t.
Try new Coke.
The universe is a hologram, and our physical brain is just an antenna tuned to the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness exists separately to your body, so if the transporter builds an exact copy of your body (and brain) you will just tune back in to your same consciousness when you’re done transporting.
What drugs aren’t you on? And can I come along?
Dmt probably, and youll have to ask the entities in the waiting room for that
No drugs- just look into holographic universe
Yeah, it’s what’s known as a conspiracy theory with zero evidence
What if the transporter makes an exact copy without destroying the original?
Then the copy gets a new consciousness but has all your memories.
Decoherence swiftly followed by complete cognitive collapse.
The universe is a poop and our physical brain is just a toilet plumped into the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness sits inside of your body like diarrhea in a butt, so if the transporter flushes your consciousness down the doodoo shit pipe, you’ll just fill it up again like toilet water.
Thanks Hugh
Interesting concept. There could be a sci fi story about the brains of two intelligent creatures on vastly distant planets whose brains happen to have the exact same tuning and are attached to the same consciousness, with full awareness of both lives. How they cope with this would be fascinating. On Earth they would probably be considered mentally ill. Or maybe the story is that this is fairly common and is what’s really going on behind a lot of people’s mental problems.
y’know, it is interesting how fear of teleporters is handled but never stigma against teleportees. this hypothetical star trek grandparent is very understanding, but in the early days of the technology i can imagine many people wouldn’t be
Remember Enterprise (the show), and how the Teleporter was only for cargo due to its newness as a technology?.. but one episode they used it on people for an emergency and ended up with debris stuck in their bodies upon rematerialization?
Conspiracy theorists would have a field day
Sleeping is just teleporting 8 hours into the future and life is just continuous reconstitution anyways.
Exactly. The “me” of yesterday is already dead. He can’t think, feel, act, reason, or anything else. I have memories of being him, but if I’d suffered head trauma, even those could be gone. The illusion of continuous, conscious experience is just that—an illusion.
The young-Earth people say that their god created the world about 6,000 years ago, and planted fossils to test our faith. I say that my god created the universe 6 seconds ago, including these memories that we seem to have. There’s literally no way to prove otherwise.
And yet you have a vested interest in your continued survival. If you stepped into a transporter and it failed to disassemble you on departure, you would very much protest if a maintenance technician attempted manual disassembly
Not being in prolonged excruciating pain is very much part of the appeal of the transporter.
Lol, love the “manual disassembly” terminology.
That’s not a philosophical objection, though, it’s just instinct. If the transporter made a copy of me, the copy would also very much object to this proposed method of error correction.
This is simultaneously the most depressing and most realistic take on the subject I’ve ever read. I’ve always considered time travel to the past to be impossible because the past already happened and is gone, there is nothing to go “back” to. Time is an arrow that only points to the future and is forever in motion, never leaving a trail behind.
With that said, I can still enjoy time-travel fiction for what it is, a fantasy, and suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it.
“Life is a message scribbled in the dark.”
I mean, the brain mostly consists of the same matter, aside from cycling synovial fluid, once you reach middle age. Recreate me a body but keep my original brain and I won’t mind it, aside from all the horror.
The cells in your brain are not replaced like other cells in your body, but the atoms are. In fact, all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
I’m not sure exactly what’s true, but what you’re saying seems like a factoid that gets repeated a lot but isn’t really 100% true.
Structural stuff like the calcium in your bones… it would be interesting if it was really replaced on a schedule like that. It wouldn’t shock me if it was getting replaced, but it would certainly be cool to learn how that would work.
Is the lens in your eye getting replaced like that? I’m trying to think of body parts that seem to not get constant automatic maintenance. How about the enamel on your teeth? Really replaced every 7 years?
Or if we’re really just talking about atoms in your body, then famously the problem with heavy metal poisoning is that your body can’t get rid of it. So, is it being replaced or is your body getting rid of it? Or… is it just there from before?
And if you want to get really pedantic, and I always do, what fun… Things like artificial hips or breast implants are definitely in people’s bodies longer than 7 years but are not getting their atoms replaced.
My understanding of this factoid is that it has more to do with atoms tendency to swap particles when they bump into each other. So it’s sort of through attrition all of the atomic particles in your body are swapped out over the course of about seven years. So like as oxygen and carbon dioxide, for instance, move in and out of your brain and other tissues they leave electrons and shit behind and take some with them. But it also wouldn’t be the first time I had misunderstood something.
8 hours is for noobs. I can easily do 9-10
i am not touching that devil’s elevator as long as i live.
So does everybody else.
With the current constant scanning an analyzing and advertising pushed on us, I’d stay far as fuck away from any teleporting service…
If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.
Would you trust Google Instant Transport Services to not tune your personality to be more favorable toward products from their ad partners, or just slightly tune your political opinions to be more inline with their own.
Just a slight adjustment, an active protester against new datacenters would become less aggressive, a random person starts buying more Pepsi instead of Coke, a change small enough that no one notices a big change in behavior.
Also, would you trust that your memories would stay private?
I am mashing my thumb raw by obliterating X.
Honestly, I’d never thought of it, but if they can reconstitute you, memories and all, they can probably just straight read your fucking mind.
Jesus Christ, imagine a government that can know every single thought you’d ever had, and assassinate accordingly
There’s also the possibility that consciousness (including memories) is part of some kind of metaphysical net that “latches” onto a particular collection of cells/matter like an attuned radio. So once your matter stream is reconstituted, your memories just “latch” no need to reconstruct the memories. If our consciousness exists in the space between electrical pulses in our brain then such a thing is a kind of energy, yeah? Perhaps, like some forms of matter, consciousness is something that can transcend space and time? Within Star Trek this might explain how species like Betazoids and Vulcans can use telepathy—they’re able to tune into the consciousness net.
And, no, I don’t do drugs.
Hey. That’s close to my favourite theory :) although with different consequences. I like to believe that consciousness is just another property of matter that we can’t measure (yet?). Stones, dust, grass, all atoms / particles have it. But it takes a certain complex arrangement - like our CNS - with the capability to store and retrieve information (and thus learn) to actually form a conscious mind.
However this would mean your mind gets fully destroyed on disassembly and likely the copy won’t function / might be a vegetable on arrival because the unmeasured properties of atoms used to construct the copy were completely different (think of things like spin).
I know the theory your referring to, it grades the entire universes consciousness on a sliding scale from a neutron all the way up to a person.
But I don’t think that consciousness and memories are tied together at all. Consciousness is not well defined which makes it a fickle subject, but memories are a biological process that we can observe much more easily.
My understanding, based on a book I read once about neuroplasticity, is that memories are pathways that are literally burned into your brain by repeated sensory chemicals being sent to that particular part of the brain. As long as the transporter puts every single brain wrinkle back where it was and instructs the brain on which chemicals it sent down the pathways, you could probably put memories back into the head.
I wasn’t referring any theory. While I am not delusional to think I am the only one, I came up with this entirely by myself.
Also, your “but” isn’t a but. I was alluding to the same thing: memories is stored information, i.e. a structure like our brain growing.
Why I think the transporter might be catastrophic is because it could only reproduce the “software” accurately, the EEPROM-like memories. But the hardware might be all wrong.
I wasn’t referring any theory.
Oh! Well the name that the other dude who thought about it gave it was Panpsychism, you might be interested to read about it.
Your “but” isn’t a but
But it is :P I’m saying that I think the hardware would be the easy part. Put all the same types of stuff in the same configuration, give it some instructions and you’ve got a fleshy automaton that should reasonably be able to recall the same things the other thing could. The “software” as you called it, would be more difficult I think.
We know what makes a memory, but we don’t know why someone makes a particular decision or what influences their personality to act how they do. Hell, putting two human beings right next to each other and stimulating them in the exact same way doesn’t even produce the same results between the two, so we couldn’t accurately instruct the new automaton on how to act like the old one
Panpsychism sounds a bit embellished, but I’ll have a look. I think we have an analogy misunderstanding. I really meant memories etc as the software because it is “programmed” with our experiences. The hardware being the atoms that we can not accurately arrange in a copy because we have no concept of the conscience related property (e.g. conscience spin, for lack of a better word). It could be like trying to run little endian software on a big endian architecture: instant crash.
There a series called Riverworld that I think you would enjoy.
The books, not that TV movie that’s virtually entirely unrelated
Nah, Google would just lift your interests and then inject time-delayed ads into your brain…
Nope that would be too obvious.
If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.
That’s definitely not a given.
That’s like saying that if you can perfectly scan and reproduce a book down to the smudges and crumbs, that you understand the contents of that book.
To us right now in 2026, mapping an entire brain, simulating it perfectly, then editing it slightly without breaking it seems a lot more doable than breaking down a human quark by quark and rebuilding them somewhere else. But, that isn’t necessarily the case.
GITS, clever
Didn’t even think about that (:
Star Trek teleporter: fax machine / shredder combination (remember that time the shredder bit malfunctioned and we got double Riker…?)
Wormhole: just a weird long gateway (with a chance of spaghettification). No problems there unless it somehow takes you through some sort of hell dimension or something.
Stargate: somehow both, because let’s be frank, the Ancients were kind of dicks. (Also, didn’t actually need the whole buffer thing, that one Orlin built in Carter’s basement with a box of scraps was completely analog, no computer bits, and it worked just fine until it didn’t.)
It’s not like that Riker episode was taken lightly. But, you would think that an event like that would have led to a lot more soul searching. For example, occasionally there were religious people in Star Trek – what does this say about transporters and souls?
From what I remember, they spent a lot more time on the mechanics of a dude getting duplicated: the bureaucracy of it (his rank, etc.) and how it affected his relationships with Troi etc.
But, no talk of how every time someone is transported the original body is killed? No talk about how this might be a means of creating an army of clones?
Same deal with people being stored for a long time in the pattern buffer. Does this mean you can create backups of people so that if they die they can simply be beamed from that data?
Does this mean you can create backups of people so that if they die they can simply be beamed from that data?
that is exactly what they did when they lost picard in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_Among_Us
That had a bit of extra magic sprinkled in though. It wasn’t purely transporter tech.
they always had a bit of extra something, if some writer decided they need it for the story, that is the problem with made-up stuff. transporters and macroeconomy of their utopian society were prime examples of this, they were always interpreted as the writer decided to and it was better not to think about it much.
Schlock Mercenary (webcomic) had a couple of good takes on this concept. The “wormgates” in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side. As a side effect, the Gatekeepers could make copies of you in transit, which is how they kept their galactic dominance intact, by interrogating and shredding gate-clones. Arguably, they murdered trillions of sapients with their gates.
In-universe, it’s impossible to generate big wormholes, but the F’Sherl’Ganni “faked” it and everyone just kind of assumed there was some weird physics they’d figured out that nobody else knew.
The Teraport, in SM (or “tear-apart” as it was sometimes called derisively) at least had some continuity, by porting you through billions of microscopic wormholes. Whether that kills you or not, well, that’s between you and Carl.
The “wormgates” in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side.
That’s exactly how stargates work in the Stargate series (except for the bit where they could work like normal wormholes, but they’ve got a scanner/shredder/maker mechanism stuck in front of the wormhole for no apparent reason).
I don’t think they ever duplicated anyone (with a stargate), but Teal’c('s data) once got stuck in the buffer. Technically nothing would prevent the gate from duplicating travelers, as long as it had enough energy and it could be prevented from flushing the buffer.
remember that time the shredder bit malfunctioned and we got double Riker…
I member!
Was interesting to see people try to explain to him why he was left behind…
The Stargate ring transporters didn’t distirybthe copy, they just fired the object out in a straight line inside hyperspace. Though the Asgard system properly did kill the original.
They did digitise the victim, sorry, “traveler”, send the data and mass through the wormhole, store the data in a buffer on the receiving gate (there might have also been a buffer for outgoing data in the sending gate, I’m not sure) and reconstitute a copy on its “event horizon” (which wasn’t really an event horizon and actually turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with the wormhole, being instead the interface for the fax machine).
Teal’c (or rather data that could be reconstituted into a copy of Teal’c) once got stuck in the buffer, and Carter had to hack the gate so that it would create an “event horizon” without the actual wormhole, thus tricking the fax machine into reconstituting “Teal’c”, about two days later than it should have of it hadn’t malfunctioned.
