So, if anyone else has ever seen the Outer Limits episode "Think Like a Dinosaur," I was wondering if the Star Trek Transporters actually kill the being being transported, with the pattern forming in a new location having all those memories and physical characteristics, but the original being destroyed to "balance the equation." That equation being that a person cannot be allowed to exist in two places at the same time?
Also, why didn't the "evil" races with transporter-tech ever use it to duplicate (and back up) their most useful entities and storm the quadrant? Between Thom Riker, Scotty, and Moriarty, it was pretty well proven that you could do that.
Josiah Peterson
Scotty leaves himself in transporter limbo. Riker's involved some magic clouds. Moriarty was something that at first couldn't be done then they let him pretend in a kind of dream world simulation that he's a real boy, but I forget if they actually work out how to make him.
You probably could use it like that but a better question is probably why didn't they use it for medicine more?
Zachary Taylor
I used to think transporters were murder boxes, but I've learned to stop worrying and love them.
Time, space energy... everything is quantized therefore all movement could be described as destruction in one place and construction in another place. The illusion of infinitely divisible space is just a mistake of the human brain (see: Zeno's paradox), which uses infinity as a sort of mental estimation trick, but infinity doesn't actually exist (Edgar Allen Poe's Eureka has a good explanation of this, there are probably better ones for today's readers by now). We are always being destroyed / reconstructed in a certain sense but our memories construct an identity, a constant self over time on top of change. Herodotus didn't say "you cannot step in the same river twice" he actually said something more like (Kahn's translation): "As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them." It actually IS the same river because human minds is able to identify a river even as the waters flow. Similarly, if one is destroyed in one place and reconstructed in another place 2000 km away, as long as one retains the memories needed to maintain your identity, you have not been destroyed and recreated any more than you have been with a movement of any other velocity.
Well, there are actually a lot of reasons why transporters can't actually happen like in Star Trek, but assuming people can actually move matter faster than light, which is an assumption obviously necessary for Star Trek, that's what's going on.
It's really the "good" races that should use transporter tech, as they do to Doctor Pulaski. In the future, death will lose its sting as people will be backed up in a biological Git-like system. When people die, they will be resurrected by 3-D the last-saved scan of the person.
Bentley Allen
...
Dylan Stewart
Transporters and replicators are two technologies whose effects on society are frequently overlooked by ST writers. Here we have Culture-Level technology but humans still behave like current year humans. The other society changing tech is holodecks. If you can live your fantasies forever (practically unlimited energy in ST) in holodecks, why leave it? Why do anything else?
Liam Bell
No. The transporter moves the physical atoms through subspace.
They even had an episode of transported people interacting with subspace life forms.
The star trek transporters do as the name says, they transport.
You are 100% you.
Levi Barnes
There's no way a starship 200 years from now will be controlled by humans. There will be no use for humans; machines will be superior at everything. Everything but being part of stories that are pleasurable to the human brain. Which is why optimistic Sci Fi will never be possible again—only Science Fantasy or pessimistic Sci Fi. Meanwhile the machines will be having a better time than we are capable of, but it will be unfeelable by humans.
Andrew Wright
I'd never use a transporter I'd walk through a magical portal though
Brody Rodriguez
>I'd never use a transporter I'd walk through a magical portal though
one of the TNG episodes involved terrorists getting a hold of and using dimensional folding devices to bypass conventional teleporter-blocking shielding and escape into insanely deep caverns. episode involved taking doctor beverly crusher as a hostage. the reason for discontinuing the use of the obviously superior tele-portal technology? minor genetic degredation that would become permanent given the abusive number of teleports TNG plotlines require.
Julian Foster
>Do transporters KILL? THEY. DO. NOT.
It is established in TNG that the transporters do NOT "kill" people, your consciousness/("soul" if you prefer) persists throughout the transport process.
Henry Edwards
>tfw born in le wrong generation
Carter Cox
Is this the one where Picard and Crusher got their minds linked?
I used to be a massive star trek nerd but I don't remember that particular premise and I fear I may be slipping.
David Butler
>your consciousness/("soul" if you prefer) persists throughout the transport process.
okay chucklefuck, how can your consciousness persist if your neural network has been atomized?
Joseph Moore
Who was The Countess Regina Bartholomew?
Joseph Cook
The pattern buffers.
Nicholas Martinez
>Transporters work this way >-So, according do your explanation, they kill you? >No, they don't >-Why? >Because I say so
Jackson Brooks
Welcome to Trek magitech.
Connor Gomez
>tears you atom for atom I'm not even going to go into the Theseus' Ship or existential consequences of this, but it's pretty obvious that this would kill you, even if you do get put back together on the other side.
Xavier Gutierrez
>I'm not even going to go into the Theseus' Ship or existential consequences of this Humor me
I don't have anything going on tonight
Nicholas Fisher
Every cell in your body has died off and replaced in the span of seven years. That means that everything that makes you you is an immation of what you was sevenish years ago. Yet you still think of yourself as the same person. Following this logic it doesn't really matter if they do get killed off to be transported.
Easton Hill
>believing the seven years nonsense >mfw
neurons in the brain are never replaced.
Julian Clark
Machines will be the new us. Not our replacements, but our successors. The next form of conscious mind to take the mantle.