"Balance the equation." Do transporters KILL?

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.

Star Trek transporters actually move each and every atom to the desired location. They don't replicate. They do die in a sense, but no more than going to sleep is dying in a sense.

What stops them from creating an infinite legion of clones?

TRANSPORTERS DON'T CREATE ANYTHING YOU MONG IT JUST MOVES ATOMS ABOUT IT'S LIKE SAYING "HURRR WHY CAN'T CARS CREATE AN INFINITIE CLONES LE LE" YOU FUCKING MORON

The Prestige is actually Nolan's extended meditation on the transporter conundrum

No they don't, they convert the atoms into the corresponding energy. To throw actual atoms between a ship and planet there'd be a physical stream of matter being blasted to the surface, that being the case how would they materialize in caves or buildings? What if a bird flew through the stream as it was being sent down, part of you would go missing.

...

The matter travels though subspace so it can travel through cave walls.

The anomaly in the planet's atmosphere created him, not the transporter.

Thats why they have buffers, if a part of transfer fucks up its then when it replicates stuff to fill the blanks.

Shit we had like 10 episodes abut transporter mishaps so its not perfect tech.

So if it replicates missing stuff then what appears might not be completely you, which kinda comes back to the OPs point. After repeated transports how much would still actually be the original 'you'?

Who even cares if each atom is different what is important is the arrangement

I think the answer to transporter problem is the linearity, which transporter preserves. You never 'die" or cease to exist, even if it sometimes replaces parts of you, your body does that all the time too, only on a slower pace.

>Moriarty
>using the transporter
You don't understand Star Trek because you watched it as a child. Your memory is faulty and you're getting details wrong. Please do not make any more threads attempting to discuss Star Trek until you watch it again as an adult.

The atoms which constitute your body today are not the same atoms which you were born with.

I think the real issue is that you find Star Trek boring, so you need to force in some darkness or edginess in order to grab your attention. Well, stop it. The Star Trek universe is simply an inherently optimistic universe where any hurdle can eventually be overcome through careful applications of science and technology. For that reason, the inhabitants of said universe found a way to invent, manufacture and utilize transporters which can transport people without killing them. The sooner you can accept that, the better. There's no need to keep shoving your murder fantasies in where they don't belong.

Yea, they always seem to have backups of people in the buffer for those occasions where everything fucks up, so I always figured every time you got beamed, it was actually disintegrating you (killing you) then resembling a backup of you wherever you were going.
In essense, transporters are basically suicide booths that make a clone of you.

Question is - does your consciousness teleport with you to the clone? If so, that means they literally have a digital copy of your soul in the buffer.
Kinda fucked up no matter how you think about it.

>soul
When science gets this far, people will freak. Or maybe they won't. If the tech worked wouldn't that validate the idea that the soul doesn't exist?
All you need is the correct combination of atoms to create life.

I've always thought its kinda neat to think about.
In essence, our 'consciousness', our thoughts and memories and everything are basically a bunch of tiny electrical sparks shooting around inside a ball of meat.
Are we those tiny sparks? The little firing neurons? Are we the meat?
Energy can't be destroyed, so where does it all go?
I love that shit.

that's just not true though, if the transporter loses too much of you, you materialize as a horrific skinless blob.

We are the universe observing itself.

...

Souls are canon in Star Trek and consciousness exists outside the body

>digital copy
>Scotty
Didn't he stay in the buffers for 80 years or something before Geordi got him out? In that time he didn't exist as anything other than energy so was he effectively dead for all that time?
From Scotty's point of view he stepped into the transporter and re-materialized instantly decades later but for everyone else he simply wasn't a part of the universe any more.