Transporters are Death Machines?

Captain

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Final Approach
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Year 2050. Star Trek style transporters have been around for a decade now and human transports are common. You have your first trip / transport scheduled today.

It's just like you see on Star Trek. You stand on the pad, the operator throws some switches and atom by atom you are disassembled here and reassembled there...an exact copy, atom for atom. When you arrive there you know who you are, know what business your on and remember going to the transport facility.

All your friends who have done it before appear to be fine. Not one single ill effect.


Now, today is your big day. You show up and stand on the pad. The operator throws some switches and your body is scanned. But nothing happens and you ask the operator why. He says everyone asks that and explains its for safety.

"You see, we wait here until the copy is made there so if there's anything that goes wrong we can stop it. Once the copy is confirmed there only then do we disassemble you. Oh look, it's done." and he pushes a button that scatters every atom of your body.

Does this shift of a few minutes make it murder? Or was it always murder? Did we watch Captain Kirk and his away team get killed over and and over year after year?

Where is the self and can it be relocated?
 
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Insert a myriad of Bones quotes...
 
Whoa, they can make copies? What is to stop them from making 5 of me and putting me to hard labor all day long. Wait just a minute......
 
The paradox deepens when you ask, "What if they chose not to dissemble the copy being transported?"

Which one would your consciousness follow? Both?

I read a book called "The Physics of Star Trek". Good read.

I recall it rated teleportation as very close to fundamentally impossible, due to restraints at the quantum level and the limits imposed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Then again, best to remember Clarke's First Law:

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
 
FastEddieB said:
The paradox deepens when you ask, "What if they chose not to dissemble the copy being transported?"

Which one would your consciousness follow? Both?

I read a book called "The Physics of Star Trek". Good read.

I recall it rated teleportation as very close to fundamentally impossible, due to restraints at the quantum level and the limits imposed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Then again, best to remember Clarke's First Law:

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Click to expand...

You miss the episode where Riker was duplicated?
(Well, the duplicate was actually found in the episode)
 
Your topic seems to drive at this question: "Where is the soul of man?".
 
EdFred said:
You miss the episode where Riker was duplicated?
(Well, the duplicate was actually found in the episode)
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as well as the episode where Scotty was kept alive in the buffer...
 
Bob Noel said:
as well as the episode where Scotty was kept alive in the buffer...
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Yes, but in that episode the "consciousness" didn't have to 'choose' which copy to follow, which was the part of FE's post I was addressing.
 
What could possibly go wrong?

fly.jpg
 
It's the energy and information that makes the quantum particles in your location materialize into you that gets sent, exciting the dormant quantum particles in that space, and like a quantum entanglement, the transfer is instant from one location to another. Nobody 'dies' in the process because what makes you alive transfers. There is no overlap possible.
 
FastEddieB said:
That makes an unwarranted assumption: that there is a soul.

To keep this out of the realm of religion, perhaps the word "self" is more neutral than "soul".
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An excellent idea. I used the word 'self' and 'relocated' instead of 'recreated' for that very reason. In fact, changing recreated to relocated is why I got the edit stamp on my OP.
 
Captain said:
An excellent idea. I used the word 'self' and 'relocated' instead of 'recreated' for that very reason.
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No, recreated is correct, transporters work at the quantum level with only information and energy, not matter. Matter deconstructs at one end and reconstructs at the other, instantly.
 
I always loved how the transporter operator would be manipulating switches to control the process. Yeah, I guess they didn't trust a computer to do it.
 
SkyDog58 said:
I always loved how the transporter operator would be manipulating switches to control the process. Yeah, I guess they didn't trust a computer to do it.
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I always assumed it was like ride operators at amusement parks. They push buttons and stuff to confirm people are clear and to shut it down in an emergency...but the actual operation is all automatic.
 
If they beam up a crate of vegetables, do those vegetables now have to be marked as 'GMO'?
 
Henning said:
No, recreated is correct, transporters work at the quantum level with only information and energy, not matter. Matter deconstructs at one end and reconstructs at the other, instantly.
Click to expand...

Law of conservation of matter, man. I'm going to have to write you a ticket.
 
Captain said:
I always assumed it was like ride operators at amusement parks. They push buttons and stuff to confirm people are clear and to shut it down in an emergency...but the actual operation is all automatic.
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I seem to recall that Scotty or whomever was operating it would be operating a slide type rheostat similar to a volume control or dimmer switch during the actual process. I would agree with you if he just pushed a couple of buttons to start the process it put it appeared he was controlling the process. No biggie though.

So if each time this was done a copy was being made and the original destroyed, how many iterations would it take before the copy of the copy of the copy... would show major degradation or would it?
 
Henning said:
No, recreated is correct, transporters work at the quantum level with only information and energy, not matter. Matter deconstructs at one end and reconstructs at the other, instantly.
Click to expand...

On a quantum level, there is no such thing as matter. The atom's subatomic electrons are just held in place by ionic bonding, presumed to be in orbit around a nucleus of neutron and protons. Each atom is adjacent to its neighbor but there is always a gap between them - empty space.

Brother in Law and I were discussing this very thing (space between atoms) this weekend during a game of Dominoes.

So there is really just energy. Information is superficial and egocentric.
 
SkyDog58 said:
I seem to recall that Scotty or whomever was operating it would be operating a slide type rheostat similar to a volume control or dimmer switch during the actual process. I would agree with you if he just pushed a couple of buttons to start the process it put it appeared he was controlling the process. No biggie though.

So if each time this was done a copy was being made and the original destroyed, how many iterations would it take before the copy of the copy of the copy... would show major degradation or would it?
Click to expand...

There was an episode where Geordi Laforge said that transporter technology has been proven safe over xxx number of years. So, no degradation.
 
mkosmo said:
Law of conservation of matter, man. I'm going to have to write you a ticket.
Click to expand...

No laws were broken since it's only information moving like a quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglements are the key to transporter technology, nt to mention our basic understanding of a whole spectrum of physics we barely perceive.
 
SkyDog58 said:
I seem to recall that Scotty or whomever was operating it would be operating a slide type rheostat similar to a volume control or dimmer switch during the actual process. I would agree with you if he just pushed a couple of buttons to start the process it put it appeared he was controlling the process. No biggie though.

So if each time this was done a copy was being made and the original destroyed, how many iterations would it take before the copy of the copy of the copy... would show major degradation or would it?
Click to expand...

It would have to be 100%, right?

Even if it replicated atoms at a 99.9999% rate there would, over time, be degradation making the technology worthless for live occupants.

Anyway, for purpose of this thought experiment I suppose we should assume 100% accuracy. Take that off the table...
 
I never understood why sometimes they could do point-to-point transports but most times they would use the transporter room. If they needed to be on the transporter'd pads for some transports, why not for all? Realistically if such tech existed (yeah I know), I would think you could only transport from one transporter to another.
 
SkyDog58 said:
I never understood why sometimes they could do point-to-point transports but most times they would use the transporter room. If they needed to be on the transporter'd pads for some transports, why not for all? Realistically if such tech existed (yeah I know), I would think you could only transport from one transporter to another.
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Costs more energy???
 
Oh but to answer the question "Where is the self and can it be relocated?".

I would assume in one's brain matter so as long as no brain cells were scrambled, the self would remain. Of course if there is time lapse between when the copy scan was done and when the original was destroyed, any memories or thoughts formed by the original during that time frame would be lost. And what if immediately after the original was scanned and after the copy was being assembled on the other end, the original changed his mind and stepped off the pad? Would the copy be destroyed or would the original be forced to be destroyed? Interesting ethical dilemmas which we will probably never be faced with.
 
SkyDog58 said:
Oh but to answer the question "Where is the self and can it be relocated?".

I would assume in one's brain matter so as long as no brain cells were scrambled, the self would remain. Of course if there is time lapse between when the copy scan was done and when the original was destroyed, any memories or thoughts formed by the original during that time frame would be lost. And what if immediately after the original was scanned and after the copy was being assembled on the other end, the original changed his mind and stepped off the pad? Would the copy be destroyed or would the original be forced to be destroyed? Interesting ethical dilemmas which we will probably never be faced with.
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Where is the brain? Does it stop at the skull or does it include the spine? What about the rest of the nervous system?

I recall something about an experiment showing that other cells had a memory too and could act in the interest of self-preservation.

I'd say that the "self" is everywhere and nowhere. It doesn't exist in 3-D space but animates a body for the purposes of experiencing the 3-D universe. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it....for now.
 
What's new with the update:

-Enhanced features including firearm and metallic object transport and enroute gender reassignment capabilities
-Fixed minor issue with limb transposition
-Fixed minor app stability issue
 
Sac Arrow said:
What's new with the update:

-Enhanced features including firearm and metallic object transport and enroute gender reassignment capabilities
-Fixed minor issue with limb transposition
-Fixed minor app stability issue
Click to expand...

and I suppose the next version will include political party change as well as racial homogenization.:D
 
I used to work with 2 geeks that spent hours discussing Star Trek vs Star Wars. One day they were talking transporters and how they worked. After trying long enough to actually get some work done, I asked a question similar to the ones above, "If a transporter disassembles your atoms and then reassembles other atoms somewhere else, it must have the ability to know how to put them all together, right?... OK, so why not keep a backup so if something happens down on the planet, you just toss 200lb of whatever into the transporter and reassemble it back into your original self?"

That shut them up for a while, until they said, "It doesn't work that way" and then went on to argue about if a photon torpedo could destroy a Death Star.
 
SkyDog58 said:
I seem to recall that Scotty or whomever was operating it would be operating a slide type rheostat similar to a volume control or dimmer switch during the actual process. I would agree with you if he just pushed a couple of buttons to start the process it put it appeared he was controlling the process. No biggie though.

So if each time this was done a copy was being made and the original destroyed, how many iterations would it take before the copy of the copy of the copy... would show major degradation or would it?
Click to expand...
a mimeograph as opposed to a facsimile. You only ever got a few 100 mimeos before the copies were unreadable.

Damn. I miss that smell of a fresh mimeo.
 
I had always understood it to be matter converted to energy and reassembled in another location, not copying.

Stepping outside of Star Trek universe though has anyone read Pandora's Star and the others in the same series by Peter F Hamilton? Great read for Sci-Fi lovers but looooong...

Anyway in this universe people upload backups of their conscious mind to(basically) the internet and if they die(called "body loss") they clone a new body for them and upload the backup. This also has the effect of making everyone essentially immortal... and allowing for you to have custom bodies of whatever size/shape/race/gender made for you.

I find that an interesting conundrum relating to this... if we copied my mind to another body and the current one died, is the consciousness typing this now gone? One would assume so, but this current instance of me would not know. The new instance of me, wouldn't know either as he'd have all the memories of the previous me.
 
Star Gates seem to be more feasible than transporters for moving humans. Not as convenient as transporters since you have to have a gate on both ends but you're only manipulating space/time not copying, destroying the original and reconstituting matter based on info sent. Seems too easy for the info to get corrupted in the process and what about "consciousness"? How does one copy the info stored in neurons?
 
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