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Fuck it, kill me. My mind is the part I care about anyway. If you get that where it's going, I'm not bothered. You could even make some improvements on my meat housing before you replicate the next one, I don't mind. Go wild
I don't think transporters in star trek kill people, I just think they move them through subspace and the transporter malfunctions are subspace oddities
I still can't believe we are this many years out from ebaumsworld and still people are putting fucking watermarks on memes.
I get watermarking with your username, or if the platform automatically adds a small one (ifunny), but holy cow this is covering like 1/4 of the text
"Devil's Elevator" hahahaha, have an upvote
Doesn't it Galileo's transporter you?
...takes the you matter and dissolves it into a stream of particles which are reassembled in a different location, so when transport is 50% done, you're in two places at once (whilst the "plan" for you is in the pattern buffer, don't know where the matter is exactly)... i mean, it forms you into a beam of molecules right? Beams you up.
At one point there's a Barkley episode and he seems conscious for most of the process, just in a kind of super position.
After the half way point, there's more "you" in the destination than in the original location...so who are you? Where are you?
Then again, we know that accidents and reflections can be produced... So maybe I'm wrong and new matter/particles are being introduced otherwise how would Tom Riker exist...
...I mean, after all, Tuvix wasn't twice as dense as your average crew member.
Anyways, Dr. Polaski supposedly has McCoy's attitude towards transporters. However I think even she gave in here and there, as did McCoy.
Some wild-card ideas to think about here are this:
What we're afraid of is losing continuity of conscious experience, so a transporter brings to mind the concept of just making a copy who has your memories and thus does not share your qualia or experience of life. But we don't even know what retains that continuity to begin with. We have no idea why you seem to be the same person you were last year when most of your atoms have changed. We don't know why you're the same person when you're put under anesthesia... and in fact, you might not be. It may very well be that every time you are put under general anesthesia, a new consciousness emerges inside your brain, with the feeling like they've always lived in that brain with those memories.
Now step that back again. What about sleep? Can you prove you're the same consciousness that existed yesterday or before your last nap when consciousness was turned off and back on again?
Basically, we don't know what happens when consciousness turns off for any reason and why it comes back seeming to pick right up where it left off, but there are also a lot of people who say maybe it doesn't turn back on. And in fact, it can even be scaled up again... can you prove you're the same continuous entity that was aware of the universe a moment ago? What even IS a continual experience? Can it exist without memory?
If the brain just creates a story for our consciousness to make sense of the universe and can create and invent stories and filter things from your senses, how sure are we that there even IS a continual conscious experience? Your brain could be tricking you at every moment, there might not even BE such thing as consciousness ending, maybe when you "die" you immediately occupy the next most-probable configuration. And maybe this also can be tied to the new research that says if you could scan every particle that makes up a human body and recreate it, it would necessarily destroy the old copy, because the more you know about one property of a particle, the less you know about the other. The more you know where they are, the less you know about where they're going.
A lot of maybes here for a technology that may never exist in any capacity, but it's a great insight into how inexplicable the universe and our experience of it really is.
Good use of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principal of quantum mechanics near the end of your comment (the more we can know about speed, the less we can know about position)... And of course it's always fun to see the word qualia being used.
Personally I think we're a meat glitch. That is to say, the survival of our biology is aided by having predictive models of threats, pattern seeking and problem solving capacities (what to do about such threats), and some sense of mappable logic/reason (which solutions are best), all of which requires coordination (a story to help make choices)... But we're essentially a meat glitch.
This internal illusion of possessing consciousness may have evolved in order to aid long term survival, and perhaps to reproduce and do the other things life forms do... I think Data and Dr. Crusher discuss the definition of life at some point, detailing the requisite processes.... Having an identity isn't listed as one.
I believe it's been theorised that some species seem to act more as hives, there have even been some examples of humans being able to act in hive like ways. The technologist Kevin Kelly wrote about some of this in the 90s giving an example where a crowd could hold up a red or green sided paddle to play a game of ping pong on a big screen... One side of the room vs the other... Green paddles being a way to beckon the on-screen paddle to that location. The game was playable and seemingly coordinated just by having the feedback loop of the screen and the crowd, that was enough to create an overwhelming sense of shared willful and purposeful behaviour.
Most of us place our identity within ourselves as individuals, some learn to place it within their families. Richard Dawkins seems to believe it's actually at the level of the genes (makes that case in his book the selfish gene)... But the fact that we can to some degree place identity in different ways and locations suggests something of its unreality... Of course whose in control of that, and whether shifting it can be willful and comfortable, let alone controlled by a transporter chief is another question.
The best take on transporters was in a 'Buzz Lightyear' cartoon.
Buzz tells his team that a scientist has developed a transporter. The farm boy says that it sounds like a great invention; with a transporter the ship can stay up in orbit and the crew can teleport to the surface.
Everyone just looks at him like he's an idiot.
Not only that, but they‘re also literal bombs. Remember E=mc^2? With a technology capable of converting 100% of matter into usable energy, you‘d have a pretty scary bomb bomb.
I liked the method described in "Old Man's War." It wasn't teleporting exactly, but the premise could be used here too. The consciousness of the person was being transferred to another body and during the process, The singular consciousness was aware of being in two places for a short while.
"Altered carbon" had a similar logic
Dark Matter (the other one: the Canadian sci-fi show) had something called Transfer Transit kinda like that.
They scan you and rapidly grow a clone at your destination with all your memories. Clone has like a 3-5 day lifespan, but is otherwise "you". It goes and does whatever you planned to do at the far end.
The main you stays behind and does whatever until the clone returns to a Transfer Transit pod on the far end. It's memories are then uploaded to you and the clone disintegrates. You now " remember" everything the clone did on your behalf as if you did it personally.
I'd rather just use a remote controlled robot.
What is a clone but a flesh robot?
The thing about transporters is that if we had them right now, people would use them for everything. Transport me to the toilet. Transport the TV remote into my hand. Transport a fork into my hand. People would never get out of bed.
Transport the waste out of my bladder right into the matter recycler.
Transport the nutrient and vitamin mix into my stomach.
Transport the fat from my body.
Transport the nutrient and vitamin mix into my stomach.
I'm kinda with you, but pizza. Gyros. Tacos. Street food. I really don't see people giving up deliciousness for convenience. For necessity? Yes. Not for convenience.
Can we transport the excess calories worth out of my stomach? Eat too much? Transporter assisted bulimia.
I would like to be a food critic and just transport the food out of my stomach so I can spend all day eating. 8 gajillion calories a day