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.
Except that that explanation means Tom was made with the original Riker materials and Will was made from matter reserves on the ship using the original Riker as a template.
i always felt that it was wrong that they gave the riker that got out a promotion; but wouldn't do the same thing for the riker that didn't get out even though he was the one who paid the price for his heroism while the other riker simply got lucky and both did the same thing that earned that promotion.
Well shoot! I’d never thought about that and now I’m mad!
Give Tom Riker his promotion!
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.
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.
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.
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
Typical McCoy. Calls turbolifts elevators and transporters teleporters.
I still can't believe we are this many years out from ebaumsworld and still people are putting fucking watermarks on memes.
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.
And yet, on the list of bomb bombs Star Trek has given us, it's pretty far down there. I mean, wanna talk about WMDs? Look up Genesis or Generations. Those fuckers are un-nuking stars and collapsing nebulae because why not.
"But what if it kills you, but no one can tell?"
this is pascal's wager for nerds
I think McCoy was more afraid of accidents than existential factors.
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.
Me with brain chip implants, especially those with non-libre software
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.
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
"Devil's Elevator" hahahaha, have an upvote
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.
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.
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.
Personally, as long as it's provably safe, I'm fine with it.
As far as I'm concerned, if my consciousness is intact, and my body is a carbon copy, that's me. I place more weight on my consciousness being me than those specific atoms being me.
Besides, we all shed all of our atoms and replace them with new ones dozens of times throughout our lives. So we've already died in that way, I guess? But then again, it doesn't happen all at once, it's more of a ~~Ship~~ Body of Theseus type of thing.
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.
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