I'm with McCoy here

The fact that two Rikers existed is all the proof I need to be full Luddite. Save your death machines for the next person, thanks!

And they treat the one on the planet like he's a copy when he'd logically be the original with the one on the Enterprise being the duplicate.
- They are both copies. They explain that the guy operating the transporter was losing him, so he used a second beam to try to compensate. On beam made it through, the other bounced off the st uff in the atmosphere that was causing the problem and rematerialized him on the planet. I'm pretty sure this explanation was in the episode in order to establish that both Rikers are equally real.

This is why I want monsters Inc style linked door-wormholes. It's less... Reconstituted flesh.

Less room for duplicates, more room for halfsies I guess

I'll take the small chance of being cut in half over the guaranteed murder box, thanks.
Good news, I'm pretty sure holes in reality are more likely than the reconstitution beam.
Or Portal's... well, portals.
I hear the testers for those get cake.
- With mint frosting
That's the Iconian gateway system, and it's pretty boss.

Existential Comics' "The Machine" feels highly relevant here

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

That comic really came out with a banger on day 1
- Damn right, goes hard!
I am neither an emergent property nor atoms, I simply am.....
I personally never took much seriousness in the whole "What if your bed is a death machine!?!" idea
There's too much continuity for that to make sense, I mean, I remember most of my dreams, so I can basically account for everything... And many of my dreams are effected by outside stimuli...
- Yeah, the comic's story and message are beautiful, but the "sleep kills you" argument is poorly thought out, and based on a shallow understanding of what continuity actually means. It's not about consciousness, it's about continuity. The processes in the brain that make up your mind don't stop as soon as you fall asleep.
  There's an argument to be made about how you're never the same person that you were even just a moment ago, because you're constantly changing. That's also shallow and lazy, and ignores the continuity we're talking about.
  There's an argument to be made that from your perspective, continuity isn't broken. That's also shallow and lazy, because it treats the perception of continuity as if it's the same thing as real continuity. As far as your clone is concerned, continuity wasn't broken. But I was never worried about whether my clone will die when I go in the teleporter, you know?
- There are parts of your sleep that you're basically unconscious and nearly impossible to wake.
  The dreams could be a whole life being uploaded to your brain, hence the weirdness, until it's initialized and you wake up.

Everyone remembers his irascibility in the film but ignores that, for the three original years, he transported without complaint in nearly every episode. And it was a reliable, proven technology that apparently only got worse and more twitchy a couple of decades later.

About the time O'Brien was born.
- The plot thickens
Plenty of folks become more irascible as they age. It's one thing to do something under orders when you're young, and quite another thing to do them when you're retired.
Also, he would have seen more and more incidents as time went on
- "In other words: They DRAFTED me!"
Maybe it was kind of like getting B. A. Baracus into a helicopter- they had to drug him first.
I'm going through another cycle of binging EVERYTHING. Yes he did transport regularly, but he also certainly complained about it multiple times. Orders are orders in the end. Sometimes the hardest part of keeping a job is bottling up and repressing all those little existential horrors.
Yeah, but once you think it you can't get it out of your head.

I think I've explained this too many times to do it again, but: teleportation doesn't have to be "destroy and reconstitute" any more than going through a door necessitates killing you and reconstituting you on the other side of the door. The key is establishing continuity of your mind across the intervening space, which is mostly an engineering problem.

Star Trek transporters are "destroy and reconstitute" though. They are explicitly described as such. The whole Thomas Riker situation even requires it to be the case.
- Star Trek just throws all its rules out from one episode to the next. The Star Trek franchise is the McDonalds of sci-fi; you don't choose it because it's good, you choose it because it's available.
I think we are still in the realm of a physics problem for teleportation lol
Fusion is an engineering problem. the sun does it. We've done it. We just suck at it.
Teleporting is not possible as far as we know ....unless I missed something huge in science news
- It's not all that different to a fax machine, the way it's described in st.
  You just need to be able to accurately scan and place atoms to achieve the 'teleportation' being discussed here.
  Thinking about it even that is probably not possible, as you'd need to know both the position and momentum and state of every sub atomic particle in the body.
- I felt like they hinted in some episodes that there was some rule of nature they were exploiting to get it to work. Like imagine trying to tell someone in the 11th century that humans made machines that can fly, they imagine some mechanical thing flapping wings. They imagine it because they don't know what air does when it passes over a fast moving surface. It isn't like the transporter really stores your pattern down to every particle, there was something that they found that made it a lot easier problem to solve.
- Does quantum entanglement count? Probably depends on your definition of "teleportation", I'd assume.
The real problem with all of this is that people can't get away from the idea of a soul. Something intangible unmeasurable that is really "us" riding around in a meat-robot. It's hard for people (me included) to realize that the meat packaging is all that we are. If you destroy My body and recreate it, nothing will have been lost. The continuity within the meat computer in my head is all that I am. There is no "me" outside of that... And that's a really hard concept to accept and internalize.
- If you destroy My body and recreate it, nothing will have been lost. The continuity within the meat computer in my head is all that I am.
  If you perfectly recreate your body without destroying the original, the original doesn't start seeing and hearing through the clone. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, there's no difference between the you that steps into the transporter and the you that steps out of it, but you do actually die when you're "transported." You don't get to see what's on the other side of the transporter, another being that shares your exact memories does.
- I dunno even if there is no you in a metaphysical sense the deconstruction method still ends your personal subjective experience of being you which sucks. Sure the next you might be just as much you as the first one but you don't get to be around to enjoy that.
But the mind does not have continuity. You mind ends and a new copy starts and thinks it has continuity.
Putting aside the whole problems with maintaining continuity in a civilization that laughs at all the problems of FTL and relativity why is continuity important?
- Because I want to see where I'm going, and if my consciousness ends, I don't get to see it

Typical McCoy. Calls turbolifts elevators and transporters teleporters.

"Old man yells at matter stream."

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

Me with brain chip implants, especially those with non-libre software

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.

"But what if it kills you, but no one can tell?"

this is pascal's wager for nerds

Pascal's wager argues that if there are 2 different and non provable outcomes to a belief, you should believe the one that has better consequences for you.
In this case there are no divine consequences of being destroyed and reassembled in another location.
This is probably more of a ship of Theseus question.
- -A man can't step into the same teleporter twice.
  Proverbs for the 24th century
- The point of Pascal's wager is how non provable beliefs can't be logically reasoned one way or the other. Like how there is no objective original and duplicate ship of theseus.
  People arguing over the danger of the transporter is a lot like trying to reason any unsolvable paradox, and especially like arguing over having faith. Better than roko's basilisk, though, that's pascal's wager for scuzzy tools.
- Assuming the first time is voluntary there's potentially divine consequences to suicide.

All that could have been avoided by having a drop pod launched to the surface containing a mechanical avatar. The crew member just sits down in a chair to remotely control the avatar using an FTL link for instant control. Of course the avatar has a hologram projector so it looks exactly like the crew member. But that would be too safe and not dramatic enough.

That would make for an interesting story concept. It'd be cool to see the avatar, after exposure to various people occupying their body, begin to form it's own consciousness with shared traits.
- This is almost the plot of a doctor who episode
- I don't know why, but I feel like I've seen/read something similar to what you proposed... maybe because of 'The Island' to a degree?
  I agree though, it would be a fascinating story for sure.
- Isn't this Dollhouse?
Something went really wrong with computers after humans for warp. That's why you can break any evil one by acting crazy or telling it to calculate pi. Also why Data doesn't just wifi.
That's kinda how a piece of technology in Dark Matter works! Not the new show, the one that came out in 2015.

I think McCoy was more afraid of accidents than existential factors.

Tbh the same logic can be applied to sleeping. If our consciousness is akin to computer ram and sleep is the brain cleaning up that ram, how can you know that when you wake up you're still the same person that went to sleep last night?

This is a cool thought because it's not about being copied but more about the Ship of Theseus.
Why do we sleep?
"The body needs sleep."
No, the body needs rest. Our physical self just needs down time and relaxation and then it's good to go again. Our BRAIN needs sleep. Specifically, REM sleep to process all the new data that was taken in. Converting short-term memories into long-term memories. Sorting and organizing data. A kind of hard drive defragmentation.
Our sleep is normally presented like a sine wave. We regain base level consciousness cyclically several times a night, which is why we dream. Which is why our dreams are usually tied to recent memories. The more good sleep we get, the more our brains can deal with recent experiences.
When we wake up, it's like rebooting a device after an OS update. It's us, but with altered software. We are as much the person we were yesterday as the Ship of Theseus is still the Ship of Theseus after having pieces fixed and replaced. The whole is who we are, not the bits that changed.
how can you know that when you wake up you're still the same person that went to sleep last night?
Because you are composed of 99.99999% the exact same molecules. When you transport, you are literally ripped apart and recreated with new molecules at the destination site. That's how the transporter works. Your bed does not work that way.
- My boi doesn't sweat, breaths, spends ATP or has active metabolic processes while sleeping DAMM
- What would happen if I were able to put your brain in a blender and then rearrange everything exactly as it was? Would you be the same?
Because brain activity doesn't stop when I'm sleeping, it's more like the brain is just idling.
If we wanna go with computer terms, sleeping isn't shutdown. Sleeping is sitting on the desktop with no active windows. All the background processes don't stop when you're just sitting there and admiring your sick wallpaper.
Well we are obviously aware of our consciousness and I don't think mine 'died' last night.
This is why I don't like the word "consciousness" in these discussions. It has too many different but similar meanings. Our minds are, as far as we can tell, a property of the interactions between neurons in our brains. Sleep doesn't stop those interactions, even if we are "unconscious" during sleep.

McCoy is a doctor, not an engineer

"Devil's Elevator" hahahaha, have an upvote

I'd like to know or see a Star Trek series about the development of Star Trek technology.

Like the history of flight or the first ancient sea captains, .... when it comes to the history of the humble teleporter, how many freakin people did they have to reconstitute, recombine, turn into a puddle of goo, teleport into a wall, remove their brains, reconfigure their organs, teleport into a bulk head or reanimate into empty space before they perfected the technology.

*"...I teleported home one night, With Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie's heart away, And I got Sidney's leg." *
Teleportation Blues, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Maybe that's why there are so few Indians and Pakistanis in the Trek universe.
Someone had to be the first Porthos.

I never understood the problem people seem to complain about here.
A perfect copy, is perfect. There's no detectable, no measurable, no identifiable difference.
So what are you talking about? Unless you don't think perfect is actually perfect.

Because it's still a copy, so you still die. Imagine if there was a delay between the copy being produced and the original being destroyed, long enough for them to see each other if transported within the same room.
To Be
- Jesus Christ, existential crisis for the morning.
- You are a different person than you were yesterday.
  You have all sorts of new and different experiences from that person.
  You're even a different person reading the last word in this sentence, than you were when reading the first.
  But you're no less you, are you?
But is the copy me from my conscious point of view? I don’t care that it looks the same externally. Will I still be inside the ship?
- Yes. The copy is you as far as it can tell.
  And the original you doesn't exist anymore to be able to tell anything.
  So "you" continue, from your point of view.
- It mainly depends if you believe in a soul that is never copied that makes it "you", or a purely mechanical view of consciousness that says if all parts are copied there is no difference.
From an outsider's point of view sure, but does your consciousness dies when dematerialized, only to have a copy of your consciousness going on in the rematerialized body as if nothing happened?
- That is only an actual issue when you are some sort of spiritualist. From a materialist point of view, the entirety of you is "just" a very complex interplay of elementary particles.
A copy isn't you, it's someone else, a clone. It means you die when you step into the teleporter and someone else takes over your life.
- But a perfect copy is more like the you who stepped onto the pad, then then you are like the you who went to sleep last night.
  All sorts of changes happened, while you were sleeping.
  All sorts of changes happened while you were typing your last comment.
  The you of now is a very different person then the you of 5min ago.
ITT people who think they’re only themselves only if they’re completely continuous. Any number of them could have been replaced with a clone while sleeping and not know the difference. I am me, and that’s all the matters to me.
- Of course I wouldn't know. But the former me who got dragged off is dead. That's the whole point, the clone has no way of knowing and simply continues on life while the original dies.
  And because we only exist in the present, we rely on our memories of the past to tell who we are. Our memories tell me I'm me, so I think I'm me.
  Maybe it doesn't matter to you, but the reason I don't want to die is because I want to be aware. If I am never conscious again, but a copy of me is, good for them I guess, I wish them the best, but it's not what I want. I'm not conscious of waking up in the morning, even if they're me. I'm dead.
Because you won’t be the copy, the copy will be the copy.
- From the copies point of view, it is you.
Imagine the machine makes one such perfect copy of you without successfully dismantling you. That person stands in front of you. Do you see through their eyes? No. If you die, do they die too? Of course not. It doesn't matter how perfect the copy they are, they are not the same person as you. If the biological processes in your body end, you die. The you that steps into these teleportation machines never gets to see what happens on the other side of them.
- And that happens naturally all the time.
  The person you were yesterday, or even a minute ago, never gets to see who you are now.
It's like VHS!
- Then it's not perfect.

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.

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.

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.

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.
- I really liked that for how it allowed for interesting story telling. The clones can die without actually sacrificing the characters but there's still fairly high stakes because the originals won't know what happened while their opponents do.
  Really sucks that the show got cancelled, especially on that huge cliffhanger.
"Altered carbon" had a similar logic

I am not. You are already a process, a continuous state of going in and out of existence.

And yet despite this being philosophically sound my student loan people do not agree.

Dunno if this is just the millennial in me but I'd use one even if I was directly told it clones and kills me. Better than TSA.

Also I don't fear going to sleep or general anesthesia.

Not to mention, if we have the technology to construct human bodies and minds on the other side of that teleporter, what is to stop them from modifying the machines to change your brain (or body). I have lost any trust I once had in any government or company to believe them if, hypothetically, they tell me they have the know-how to change my opinion of Coca Cola upon reconstruction.

You might like Glasshouse by Charles Stross.
Cory Doctorow vibes.

I'd prefer the interdimensional travel they use in Earth: Final Conflict.

Personally, I'm hoping for a future where actually traveling anywhere is entirely optional.

My kid and I have discussed this at length. It's true, Bones and a few others live in a universe where they're the only soulful humanoids, surrounded by digital facsimiles. It must be depressing.

Bones beamed up and down multiple times. He's a simulacrum as well.
- Dang it!
I'm firmly on the anti-transporter side, but I'm also super into the concept of artificial personhood. The people that step out of those transporters have just as much of a soul as the people who stepped in, even if they are separate people

Like I believe in death in the first place, let's beam on down.

Ever wonder if that transporter tech was used to rebuild you better, stronger, smarter, faster?

Can't remember the exact story, but Larry Niven used that idea. Basically, you teleported from one side of the room to the other, but left all the poisons your cells had built up behind. The hero does this accidentally, then notices himself growing healthier over time.
- In another universe, Relg phased Silk through stone and found the cure for the common cold as the illness couldnt pass through with them...for some reason
Better, stronger, smarter, faster?
More than ever Hour after hour
- Work is never over.
Well we know the pattern buffer can hold a person indefinitely (SNW doc’s daughter) and they have bio filters that remove any bug changing the genome pattern you beamed down with…that’s all defensive, I’m sure the tech could be turned up to 11 but then you’re flying near Khan’s territory

Ask commander Sonak if the transporter is a completely safe method of travel.

Or, um... what's left of him...
- Didn't live long... Fortunately.

IDC, I'm using the teleporter.

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

They shred your body down to its atoms, and re-assemble it somewhere else. If we have any sort of soul, or inner ghost, it almost certainly dies when your body is shredded.

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

What if you wake up in hell, or on the next plane of existence, knowing that a soulless likeness of you is carrying on with your friends and family as if nothing happened, and nobody will mourn for your death?
- Nah, this is Star Trek. They'll come get me
- Soulless likeness? If it has a perfect copy of my brain, then it has my soul and for all intents and purposes is me

I'm on the fence: pro-transporter, anti-disintegration. If transporter technology existed without the suicide booth aspect and I could just send a copy of myself halfway around the globe in an instant I'd do it. Biggest problem I see is funding all the new clones of me running around. If there was somehow a way for us all to sync our memories occasionally without melting our consciousness that would be cool too.

I feel like this requires a Gurgeh reference.

Grandma?

Yep, we women also create trek memes.
- But McCoy is saying it.