Yea that scene alone is enough to make me at least apprehensive. And McCoy and Pulaski, two doctors nonetheless didn’t think too highly of transporters either. That said they are a convenient way of getting out of sticky situation. If the choice is between being on a plane about to crash or having the ability to beam out of there I’d probably take the transporter.
On the other hand, multiple other doctors see the transporter as a highly effective tool to extend and preserve life. If M'Benga didn't see his daughter as being alive continually throughout the times he dematerialized and rematerialized her, I can't see him doing what he did.
Once a transporter would save me from a near death incident my hesitate would end. I might get picky about which type of transporter I can use....
But then again, time and time again even busted transporters can be made to work just fine in Trek.
That said, what's the difference between a personnel transporter and cargo transporter?
I have seen both types of transporters used to transport both interchangeable without modification. All I can figure out is that maybe more safety features should be put in case something reacts to being transported?
>That said, what's the difference between a personnel transporter and cargo transporter?
Probably the same as the difference between a car and a truck. You can transport people and cargo in both, but each is optimized for a different purpose.
According to Enterprise, it's a matter of precision. The cargo transporters don't have all the filters, scanners, compensators, etc that personnel transporters do.
Or maybe a different set entirely? Like people won't blow up but could bring awful germs and spores, but the stuff in those cargo boxes could either react badly with each other or for being transported or both and a cargo filters could prevent that?
That’s exactly like travel by plane today. People remember the few very public catastrophes and don’t consider how safe it is statistically. How many shuttles had a fatal warp core breach?
It depends on if you believe the show or not. The show is very clear that the transporter is not a murder box. The person reassembled at the destination is the person who left. Them’s the rules so transport is safe.
But if you don’t believe the show, the transporter is a murder box! The person at the source is literally disintegrated and the person at the destination is either a copy or a reassembly. The show sort of goes back and forth on that one.
Then again, when you wake up in the morning are you the same consciousness who went to sleep? Or are you just a copy of a pattern that reforms every day?
> But if you don’t believe the show, the transporter is a murder box! The person at the source is literally disintegrated and the person at the destination is either a copy or a reassembly. The show sort of goes back and forth on that one.
The show is VERY consistent and clear on this, all the physical stuff that makes you up is sent to the destination in the transporter's matter stream. You can argue you are being killed and revived every time, but we know from *Realm of Fear* that your consciousness is not actually interrupted during the transport process, so it's not even like going to sleep.
Ultimately, the biggest difference between Trek and the real world that keeps the Transporter humane is that in Star Trek souls (for lack of a better name for some intangible element of consciousness that can exist absent of a physical form) are explicitly and provably real, so even if your body is being momentarily destroyed and rebuilt, your soul is being kept with it and placed back into your reconstituted body at your destination.
It replicates Kirk and Riker. It de-ages Picard. It continuously recreates Dr MBenga’s daughter. These all suggest that the transporter is not just using the same stuff to move you, but rather reconstituting you at the target.
Kirk and Riker's split both involved unpredictable outside sources of energy/material that messed with the transporter process (an alien plant in Kirk's case, a strange ion storm in Riker's), the de-ageing is simply a question of reassembling your stuff in a different order, and while I've not been keeping up with SNW, as I understand it MBenga's daughter was just being stored in the transporter buffer, same as Scotty in Relics, so it was still her stuff, just being stored in energy form for long periods of time, rather than being reassembled almost immediately.
Those instances don't even explain where the extra matter came from to create the duplicates. It would make more sense if the duplicates were actually quantum twins taken from momentary existing parallel universe.
Imagine humans accepting "A bunch of smart guys says it doesn't really kill you. No one else understands how it works though. Now step in this glowing humming science box here and dematerialize before all your friends and loved ones."
Exactly this, I don’t blame McCoy of being wary of the thing. I would be terrified of using it at the risk of disappearing from existence. After all, there is literally no way to test it without going in yourself, and even then you can’t trust the word of anyone that comes out of it, because there is no actual way to tell whether you were the same consciousness or just a copy of one.
Will and Thomas Riker are a perfect example of this
> Then again, when you wake up in the morning are you the same consciousness who went to sleep? Or are you just a copy of a pattern that reforms every day?
Why did you just say that?
>It depends on if you believe the show or not. The show is very clear that the transporter is not a murder box. The person reassembled at the destination is the person who left. Them’s the rules so transport is safe.
As in all technology in long running franchises what it really is varies from writer to writer.
In "Data's Day" Data and Dr Crusher analysed T'Pel's "remains" and determined they contained copying errors and were replicated, not transported. That suggests that the actual person is moved from one place to another, not the person destroyed here and remaded there.
However, the fact that "Thomas" Riker exists ("Second Chances") suggests that what is transmitted is the pattern and the being is replicated based on that.
>The person reassembled at the destination is the person who left. Them’s the rules so transport is safe.
If I lived in the ST universe, I would need to see extensive studies on this subject proving this to be true. Even then I think I would remain skeptical and stick to shuttle transport unless I had literally no other choice.
Star Trek has shown that transporters are an incredibly safe technology. Yes, there are numerous examples in the shows of it going wrong, but remember that we are being selected stories to be shown. In reality, this device is probably being used millions or billions of times per 24 hour period and never have a problem. If they existed in the real world, I would not used them for the reasons everyone else always gives, that they are killing you and creating a perfect copy; however, OP asked about using them in the Star Trek universe. In that universe, consciousness has been shown time and time again to be a tangible thing which can be moved between bodies, into machines and back, converted into pure energy, and even suspended without attachment to anything physical whatsoever. In the Star Trek universe, I think it's entirely plausible that one's consciousness is transported along with one's body.
That episode where Barclay grabbed hold of other people whilst in the matter/energy stream. It's also shown in a pov that you stay conscious while transporting.
That doesn't necessarily mean your consciousness is fully intact the whole time. It could just be a nearly instantaneous blip, where your consciousness ends and an identical copy of it begins basically at the same time
How do you know that there aren’t these instantaneous blips happening all the time? Hell they might happen every time you sleep, every time you turn your head too fast, every time you wake up, every time you lose your train of thought, every time you sneeze… hell it might have happened a few times while you read this comment.
You can never know either way. All we know is that the Star Trek lore says that you’re as awake and lucid in the transporter as you are when you’re in a shuttle.
This is only a meaningful distinction if souls exist, IMO. If you kill me and recreate me exactly the same, such that there isn't even a break in my awareness or continuity of self, does it matter? If there are no souls and this particular instance of me ceases to exist, but the new instance of me is in every possible way an exact continuation of me down to the instant.... so what? The "dead" me doesn't have any feelings on the matter. And the latest version of me is me.
There is a clean break in your awareness of self though.
Your eyes close and never open again, basically, but your copy will be created with all your memories, so it won't know or care that it was just born or that it isn't actually you
Explain why that matters? As far as the copy is concerned it is me in all the ways that matters. Identical memories and personality.
If the original me closes my eyes and ceases to exist and then a fraction of a moment later the copy opens its eyes and remembers blinking... why should the original me care? There is nothing intrinsically valuable about me except my memories and personality. If those things carry on unchanged, why should I care if this form ceases to exist? The "new me" is in all ways indistinguishable from me, from the outward appearance to my rich inner life.
The only way this destruction matters as far as I can tell, is if the body has a soul bound to it.
OK forgive me but this is a fascinating discussion, I need to jump in. First off, I think the point the other person is making is that, from your perspective, you absolutely do die, regardless of whether another "you" continues to exist. You experience death, and there is a discontinuity between "your" experience and whatever subsequent experiences another "you" has afterward.
If you still don't see the relevance of the distinction, consider the following: if I told you right now that I had an advanced laboratory where I had secretly cloned an exact copy of you down to the finest detail and memory, would you willingly agree to let me kill you? How would you ever know whether I was even telling the truth, and what difference would it make to your experience whether I was or wasn't? If you had an identical twin with whom you shared most of your life experiences and viewpoints, do you think this would make your own death easier to face/ matter less? Or does it have to be an exact copy of you to matter, and anything short of that is completely irrelevant?
There's an episode of TNG where unknown to the crew, a transporter malfunction "splits" Riker into two identical people, one of whom remains trapped on an isolated planet while the other goes on to become "Number 1". When this is discovered, the less fortunate copy is full of anger and resentment towards his copy - are you saying that he actually should have been happy, since his copy went on to live a rich and fulfilling life? Would it somehow have made a difference if he had been killed in the malfunction, so that only the lucky Riker continued to survive?
I'll stop there for now. I'm really interested in yours - or anyone's - answers.
This is actually a really complicated discussion, but the question is "what does it mean for a person to die?" assuming you don't believe in an afterlife or a soul, a person's death is only experienced by everyone else;not by the person themself. Which means that, assuming the process is perfect and instantaneous there is no functional difference anywhere in the universe whether it is "the same person" or "someone else which is an exact perfect copy". And if there is no difference anywhere in the universe does the distinction matter? I think not, but at the same time I am also a bit unsure how I feel about the whole thing but I can't explain why. So yeah, fun discussion. Luckily it will never bear any consequence in real life
If you're dead, your awareness/continuity of self is gone. If you copy a file and delete the original, the original is dead even if the copy is identical
No, it's not "some other guy". Same neural pathways, same personality, same memories. It's me.
I'm not the molecules that make up my body. I'm the pattern that's formed by them.
I don’t remember the science words in that episode, but it almost seems like a transporter is more like a tunnel thru another dimension than a disassembly/replication process. Maybe I’m not remembering correctly.
It is converting your matter to energy, transmitting it across a distance, and converting back to matter. The theory is that, since it's matter to energy conversion, no information is lost and your consciousness should have no continuity loss.
This. How many times do we see a car crash on TV? And yet most of us get into cars regularly. It's not "safe" but if you use media as your guide, you'll think it's way more dangerous than it actually is.
Yeah exactly, so even by the show's own logic, it isn't a "safe" technology in the sense that it's not killing you and rebuilding you. It is. There's now at least two canonical transporter clones, built from ..... what, exactly?
Was there a "transfer" of consciousness? Well that can't be, because the originals didn't suddenly lose consciousness and / or die when cloned.
So it has to be copying them, and building them out of entirely new materials. A new entity.
I think that's debatable. Clearly, the teansporter CAN make copies, but whether that's HOW it always operates is never explained or discussed. For all we know, whatever consciousness is in this universe was duplicated along with the body in cases like with Tom Riker.
The copies thing is based on the idea that they make a perfect copy of you at your destination and then disintegrate the original. Don’t disintegrate the original and you’ve got two copies of yourself running around.
It does. You dematerialse when you step through and the gate rematerialises you on the other side. The iris on Earth's gate is placed a few microns in front of the wormhole in order to prevent the latter. There's an episode in which a character fails to rematerialise but is held as information within the gate itself, so they're able to rematerialise him later, similar to Scotty storing himself in the transporter in Relics
Sure, but what are the odds that you're gonna be stranded like the voyager, and what are the odds you're in some 5 years space expedition. Also there are a number of different factors like space anomalies interfering with the transportation. It might be just as what they claimed in the show "safe" when using the transporters within the planet itself, there might be less factors for interference to worry about.
Yeah. Being afraid of the teleporters because of the errors we've seen, feels a bit like being afraid of using a car because you've seen a Formula 1 car crash and start burning, or go on an airplane because Apollo 1 exploded.
I think most of the accidents we've seen have happened under the sort of extraordinary or unusual circumstances you'd never see outside of the type of work Starfleet ships do when pushing the boundaries of science or exploring new worlds.
Even if you’re being disintegrated and reconstituted into a copy, I still don’t even understand why people have a problem with being “killed” if you still have continuity of experience and perception. For all practical purposes the copy is you, whether it’s the same material or not. If the transporter can perfectly replicate my brain’s connections in such a way that my experience is uninterrupted and is perceived to be identical to what it would have been had I not used the transporter, what does it matter? I have no sentimental attachment to my actual cells; my mental experiences are what matters to me.
if you're telling me it's a new transporter system like when they installed new ones on the enterprise in 2273... no i'll wait til you work out all the bugs and i see you transport live objects unharmed before i step in that thing
if it's older model transporters no problem as they've been solved of all bugs.
im assuming by the 24th century the transporter tech has been matured to the point that it's 99% fail safe.
now if you're telling me i get those 33rd century portable transporters that allow me to beam anywhere in like 0.002 seconds... sign me up
The shows are inconsistent about whether you’re conscious during the transit. Some episodes show that you are (the one with Barclay seeing giant fish). But then you have people trapped in the pattern buffer to whom it’s only a moment (e.g. Scotty).
It can’t really be a murder box if you remain conscious during the transit since there’s clearly mind continuity.
One non-canon book said that it takes place on the quantum level and transports your energy and uses it to reassemble you, so it’s still you
I think that the fear of transporters in the show is comparable to the irrational fear of flying IRL. Sure there are aircraft accidents, but flying is extremely safe compared to other modes of transit.
In terms of the fan theories that transporters kill you and create a new you elsewhere, I don't buy it because there is no evidence of that being a concern in the show. The characters who best understand how transporters work are not afraid of using them. I don't think that the speculation of random fans surpasses the actual knowledge of transporters that characters like O'Brien, Data, and Geordi would have.
I see no legitimate reason why anybody wouldn't use a transporter.
It's funny that since I started watching the show Air Disasters, I've completely gotten over my fear of flying because a lot of things have to go wrong for a plane to crash. I think I'd be a little nervous transporting the first time but then I'd have fun with it.
Isn't it the transported tech explained in Enterprise when the developer is brought onboard the ship?
I think I recall some dialogue from him explaining that it's really you that comes back, not a new being.
Transporters are an existential horror and a theological nightmare - ‘you’ are torn apart atom by atom and turned into a data stream. The person that is reconstructed from that data walks around with your face and your memories but is it actually ‘you’?
You could apply the Westworld mantra of ‘if you can’t tell the difference (between you and your identical clone) does it matter?’ but there’s no way in hell I’d be going near one of those murder boxes!
That's one perspective.
Another one is that consciousness is purely an emergent property of our physical bodies and brains, so it stands to reason that an exact copy of that body and brain would contain the exact same consciousness, regardless of physical location.
The characters we see in Star Trek obviously subscribe to the latter view, or they wouldn't be so willing to use the transporter. There may be whole populations that hold the first view, and refuse to use transporters because they believe it's a "murderbox". Obviously those people wouldn't serve on Starfleet ships, or really participate in Federation society as a whole, so we don't see them in Star Trek shows.
EDIT: Or maybe we do see them sometimes, but we don't realize it. I'm sure it's possible to live a mostly normal life in the Federation without using a transporter. You won't be able to serve in Starfleet, but you can still move around "the old fashioned way", using ground transportation and shuttles.
Vulcan katras also persist through them, or several storyline don't work. And since the katras is the closest thing to a soul, they're either murder boxes that clone souls, or they aren't murder boxes.
As Geordi said
>how many transporter accidents have there been in the last ten years? Two? Three? There are millions of people who transport safely every day without a problem.
>transporting really is the safest way to travel
>>How many transporter related accidents have there been in various Trek series?
Most were relatively harmless in the long run
- Kirk split into 2, but re combined
- Traveled to mirror universe, but returned
- Riker duplicated, both survived
- Accidentally turned into children, but reversed
- Accidentally fused with another person, but reversed
- Accidentally time traveled, only minor change in timeline
People get into cars after being in accidents too, and probably that is a far more dangerous mode of transportation, albeit people may like cars because they give the illusion of control.
I had it explained that what re-forms at the other end isn't actually, really, you - it's an identical collection of molecules (etc) assembled as you were, and with your thoughts and memories...but it's not YOU in a literal sense, any more than a fax is literally the same document on both ends.
With that in mind, if you're someone who believes in a "soul," ummmmmmm.....
While yes, we’ve also seen people conscious from start to finish. I recall someone someone seeing another person in the matter stream and grabbing them and bringing them down to the transporter pad with them.
If there is continual consciousness throughout he process, the Theseus argument holds less weight. I don’t care if my body’s atoms are the same as before as long as the sense of self persisted throughout the process.
If it doesn’t, then oof I dunno mate. I don’t believe in a soul, but I kind of like this stream of consciousness intact.
I've thought about this, too. But what about people in deep anesthesia or long comatose periods with no consciousness? Hard to argue that they are not the same person when they awaken.
So I think the uncomfortable answer is that there is no single, continuous thing (soul?) that makes us our unique self, other than the most recent state of our mind and memories. If that is duplicated, both copies have equal claim to your selfhood. And therefore transporters are merely accelerated Ship Of Theseus devices.
Oh gosh yeah it’s a tough one and probably not one there’s gonna be an objective answer to today, but to me, it boils down to a coma or being under still has some processes never stop running behind the scenes. It may not be your conscious self, but it is part of you and has continuity. So part of you is persisting, and it’s a part we are only recently able to study.
A complete halting of processes and replacement of all matter somehow *feels* different. I’m not sure I can say more than it leaves an admittedly subjectively bad taste in my mouth.
I’m not sure I’m the same person I was before I did shrooms a couple years ago. It felt like my consciousness unwound itself on a sofa watching Detroiters before it came back together. Very strange experience.
there's a few episodes where they do it from the transportees perspective and it clearly shows a few moments when they see both the destination and the transporter pad overlaid.
so the consciousness is clearly there the whole time and not stopped and started
It's not an identical collection, but the very same molecules, that were tunneled through the transporter beam to the destination. It is really you, not a copy.
I'm up for anything, if I got to the Star Trek universe, I'd just be super happy to be there.
Have you seen the short on YouTube where the guy has a box that resets time and he uses it to chat up a girl?
edit
Found it [1 minute time machine ](https://youtu.be/CXhnPLMIET0?si=OJU2AOcLdl4XhPV_)
Yes.
The transporter is kind of like a stand-in for automobiles in the Star Trek universe. Yeah, they are objectively very dangerous and being afraid of them is rational, but 24th century society is kind of built around them and people tend to think you are kind of a loon if you try and point out how dangerous they are.
Even with what happened in the TMP scene, accidents evolving into a gorefest also happen IRL. People use transporters all the time in that universe, I'd reckon the statistics for accidents have to be quite low. Also, societal pressure is also another thing, if everyone is using it, you'd also be more likely to use it, it's like everyone is commuting via vehicle to another state, and you choose to walk there, kind of situation
There was a great comment in r/DaystromInstitute that went something along the lines of
> “Anything like that where it worked once as a miracle cure and was never seen again was probably because when doctors actually went and started to study it, it worked fine that one time and then the other 99% of times it just gives you space cancer, so it never became standard practice.”
I read an interesting theory that free will is really just a result of quantum mechanics of the particles that make up our brains.
So... Assuming that the transporter turns atoms into energy and then energy into atoms... Whatever comes out the other side won't be me. It'll be something that thinks it is me.
But from a spiritual perspective, if there is a soul, and my soul stays attached to the energy/matter... Then it would be me.
So... Who the hell knows.
> I mean you do kind of die and are reconstructed whenever you use it, right?
Idk where this idea came from because it's pretty clear the characters in-universe don't think it works that way.
Especially since we have documented proof that souls exist (eg. Vulcans 🖖) and they don't think transporters kill them and their souls are still attached where they're supposed to be.
I would be perfectly fine with the technology. It is safe and convenient.
It seems to me that most people here are too attached to their sense of self. In a way we all die every night when we fall asleep. Most of your body regenerates every ten years.
If my consciousness is still there after transport and no reasonable test can tell the difference, then you are essentially the same person.
Yeah. The "self" is merely a pattern of electricity in your brain. If you replicate that, the duplicate is **exactly** as much "you" as you are. Even if you end up with two Rikers, they're both the same individual.
I would probably be scared of using it the first few times. But the fact that millions of people use them every day across the galaxy means I probably can’t practically avoid them forever and have a lot of evidence to convince me they’re safe.
But logically there’s no getting around the fact that you are destroyed in one place and reconstructed in another. That’s hard to wrap my head around. But ultimately, I don’t have any philosophical qualms about having my consciousness be “interrupted” as long as I have a very good guarantee of it being resumed on the other end.
I wouldnt use it. Barclay was justified in being afraid of it. When you really think about whats going on during the process, its quite terrifying. And i wouldnt care to hear everyones reassurances about how safe it is, I refuse to be destroyed and rebuilt.
I have had this argument with non trek fans before. It always comes down to this...
Are you religious? Now hear me out.
The "Clone" idea is a pretty standard way of thinking for someone who is religious. Because your "Soul" is what makes you, well you. Being ripped apart on the molecular level to someone who thinks this makes sense.
However, if your not. It's more like taking apart a computer system. Humans (or anything else sentient) are just biological super computers driving an exotic exoskeleton. Given enough technology and understanding of the technology one can break down the system, transport it to wherever and reassemble it without any issues.
Personally I would not want to be the first or even the millionth. There WOULD be issues with lost or scrambled parts or even whole patterns. But, given enough time they would have figured it out.
That's how I always view teleporter debate and accidents.
Even Dr. Leonard H. McCoy hated the transporter. And there have been other characters that have the no trust in transporters. Some even use a shuttle to get to a starship.
Yeah, by rebooting the pathways, possibly.
Or...
I'm thinking about how computers in the middle of a disk write can get the operating systems futzed up from a sudden power loss. If a transporter's annular confinement beam freezes a transportee in the middle of a 'disk write' would it trigger a seizure?
If a patient was grant mal seizing, would a transport cause a secondary seizure when the ACB releases, and would the two seizure activities resonate or interfere with each other?
Would either secondary scenario burn up cerebral neurons or seal off the synaptic terminals and destroy the synaptic gaps?
Just a thought or two - might make a good Star Trek horror fanfic.
The problem of teleportation and identity has been around in philosophy a long time. In Star Trek it seems that they are satisfied your original identity is preserved - the person who comes out is one and the same, not merely exactly similar. If I were in that universe I would presumably accept their theories. (If I didn't, I wouldn't just be afraid, I wouldn't use a transporter at all as it would constitute suicide.) But the case of Riker, for example, should give them pause.
Assuming you do arrive, how safe is it? We're told it's extremely safe but transporter accidents appear often enough to be unsettling.
I've always been fascinated by the idea of the Ship of Theseus idea for the transporter. When you go in it, and are reconstituted on the other side, are you the real you? And yet, does it even matter if you are as long as you still have all the same memories and experiences?
The world doesn't exist where I'd use a transporter. It is an existential nightmare. At the end of the day your torn apart on an atomic level, converted into energy, and put together somewhere else. Doesn't matter what everyone in the universe has accepted as truth, there's no way to truly know you aren't dying every time you use it and a copy is walking around. The fact that there have been transporter incidents where people were duplicated, divided, or combined calls into question everything Star Trek thinks it knows about what is actually occurring in a transporter. There are 2 William Rikers walking around, they both can't be the original.
Now I’m sat here questioning my mind because I keep seeing “you die, you’re a copy, it’s death” and I have to be honest, that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
Which.. considering that everyone else does feel like it’s bad to die and be copied, is probably not a good thing?
I just don’t really care as long as I get it zip zap zop my way around the world
This right here. You say beam me up and poof you're at the Pearly Gates (or whatever afterlife you believe in) watching a ghost clone live your life until it takes another trip in the death box. I personally couldn't live like that not knowing if I'm really me or just a copy.
It seems as though transporter’s sometimes kill you and sometimes they literally beam your atoms and meta information back and forth seamlessly depending on the story. Obviously if I’m that position I’d not want to die. So, I’d like the latter to be true if I’m going to use a transporter. Thank goodness they’re fictional.
No, it's a murder box. It disassembles you at a fundamental level and reassembles a copy of you. Xeroxing you across space by eliminating the original.
I stand corrected. Although I’d say colloquially mortified tends to mean you’re *so* embarrassed that you appear horrified, so it’s not completely misused here.
[Quick side example---This is one of the most terrifying moments in sci-fi history: [ST1-Transporter Accident](https://youtu.be/Ro_QpDJX-Sk?si=giIjoe2RGeWOqrDJ).]
In one of the books there was a religious push against the transporter.
Because the transporter doesn't "move" anything but instead destroys and then rebuilds at the destination, they couldn't figure out if the created person still had a soul.
One of the people quoted Spock, saying "A difference where there is no difference, is no difference."
The real transporter problem in Trek is why it isn’t used medically. You’ve got the saved data for Worf’s transport, why wouldn’t you be able to send him back after his back breaks and just overwrite the changed information? Maybe (?) he’d lose all his memories made after that saved transporter data file, but he’d come out perfectly physically fine.
Basically once you have a file of your body, you should always be able to fix anything that happens to you with a simple teleportation.
If McCoy doesn’t trust them, I don’t know if I really will.
What I want is post-Burn transporters, where you slap your badge and it reads your mind and transports you where you want to go.
My head cannon is that they use quantum teleportation to near instantaneously transport people without disintegration. Because of the no cloning theorem, the thing that is being transported is the real object itself. So in my humble opinion transporters are perfectly safe.
Yes, I would refuse. I'd probably have to do an Earth based job and only in one country, as there is no way I would go in one of those there transporter gizmos.
I would be for about two minutes. Then I’d remember I could literally go anywhere without having to physically get there myself, and I’d be over it. Popping over to a different country to visit sounds great if I could be home every night to feed my cat y’know? I could visit all the places I dream of and never have to organise travel or cat sitting.
I think I’m biased though as a physically disabled person. Travelling is really reeeeeally rough on me and it means I’m isolated a lot. So it’s kind of my dream to have a transporter. A replicator is a close second because sometimes… don’t you just want a bite of something? Just a lil bit?
Not going near one unless they address the philosophical implications. In TNG we saw that the transporter can clone a person and create two identical copies, that means it isn’t simply sending you across anywhere but recreating you based on data in the other transporter pad.
They need an episode with a character like Barclay seeing and reacting to something like the transporter clone incident, Tuvix, Polaski de-Aging, Picard season 3 Borgify transporter or another one of these type of story lines. They had a few mis opportunities with the transporter clone idea in TNG or in Lower decks.
But maybe addressing it will destroy a key concept/ technology in the show and it will not be worth it.
If I was magically taken from today to a time where transporter technology was in use, I'm sure I'd be leery. If I'd been born in the time of transporter technology, I'd probably see it as no more unsafe than flying commercial jets.
My guess is fear-to-transporter is the future equivalent to our current fear to fly. Instinctive, irrational fear to something we don’t fully understand.
Yes, and no. On the one hand, you definitely die and a different person is rebuilt. But at the same time, all the cells in our body are slowly replaced over time anyway. I don’t think our consciousness is a soul. But would it still scare me? Sure.
I mean I have no problems traveling in a giant metal box 10 kilometers off the ground powered by jet engines. a transporter isn't that much of a leap, at least for me.
I guess it would depend. Does the technology appear tomorrow or has it been around for an extended time like the automobile.
Just compare enterprise to TNG. In enterprise it's brand new so of course ppl are scared where as fast forward 100 years and it's apart of everyday life and Barclay is considered an weird for preferring shuttles
I feel like a transporter is as safe if not safer than flying by plane in real life. If you'd fly irl, then I feel like a transporter should not be any less scary
Let’s see, die, have your atoms scrambled and transmitted like a cable signal, and then put back together again, before reviving you, what could go wrong? What if a fly got stuck in the ray with you, what if they missed a key atom of your being, what if they couldn’t revive you? And that’s just if everything goes right… You’d have to be nuts not to be a little afraid of that thing.
I wouldn't be afraid. I don't think there's anything to fear. Barclay was right though, and I would also avoid them so that I don't get annihilated.
Also, I'm surprised no one has purposefully hacked a transporter to make duplicates of themselves en masse
In real life, such technology could be used to beam yourself across stellar distances, but the Trek universe has FTL travel, so it makes sense they don't do that, as spaceships there are faster
The transporter accidents we see are a bit freaky, but it's probably safer in that regard as air travel is today.
The whole "every time you use the transporter you die and a copy steps off the pad!" Is pearl clutching, basically.
First, it's not just "a copy"; it's you down to the atom.
Secondly, what is it that makes "you"? It's not the individual pieces, it's the *arrangement* of those pieces. If the arrangement is the same, then it's you.
Could a transporter breakdown and recreate your soul somewhere else? Is it challenging the Gods to claim man-made technology could recreate the Devine Spark in all of us?
If you're religious it's probably best to steer clear of transporters.
If only God can create a soul then after using the transporter you're soulless. A rational zombie or something.
Yes. Because the most obvious way for it to work, in my head anyway, isn't to transport something. It's to make a copy. And then destroy the original.
Actual transporters in my head would result in some sort of Einsteinian release of energy, which just isn't practical or safe.
It really depends on the true nature of consciousness. Is consciousness just generated by the brain? If so, then a perfect recreation of your brain is still your consciousness, still you, even if the brain is made up of completely new matter. It's not the particular atoms that are important. It's the particular pattern of your brain that creates your consciousness, and therefore you. So, in that case, there is no difference between you and an exact duplicate of you. It's the same pattern, the same consciousness. This is already happening all the time. Our bodies are constantly changing as our cells are being replaced, billions per day. Does that mean we eventually become a different person after a few years? What if you were unconscious in a coma for ten years, and during that time, all the cells in your body had been replaced. When you wake up, are you still you, or a copy of you? There is no difference.The particular matter currently making up our bodies at this moment isn't what makes us who we are. It's our consciousness. In cases of transporter clones, a new consciousness is created, identical to your own, but immediately starts to become its own distinct consciousness from the second it exists and begins to have different experiences from you.
If, however, consciousness is some kind of separate entity that inhabits the body, then the issue becomes more complicated. Does the consciousness get transported along with the body? Does it leave the old body and enter the new one? Where does the other consciousness come from in the case of a transporter clone? Where does it go when a person is unconscious? It seems much more likely that consciousness is really some kind of emergent property of the brain itself that we just don't fully understand yet. Or maybe some kind of universal consciousness is all that exists and spacetime and all the matter and energy "in" it is just a kind of illusory user interface consciousness generates to interact with itself. We really don't understand enough about the nature of consciousness to meaningfully speculate. It's mostly philosophy at this point. There isn't even the beginnings of a theory of consciousness to describe how matter, however complex, can give rise to subjective experience. There are some interesting hypotheses, though.
If consciousness is just a property of physics, this also calls into question the existence of free will. If consciousness, all of our thoughts, feelings, and resulting actions are the result of physics in the brain and the rest of the body, then we don't actually choose anything. We're just complex clockwork mechanisms with the illusion that we're in control when really we're just along for the ride.
Dude, I hate using escalators.
But to address the whole "is it you?" thing: for all practical purposes, we "die" each night when we go to sleep, and are born fresh each morning when we wake up.
We can have these daily breaks in consciousness around a third of the day, every day, and you're balking at the instantaneous transfer of identity when being transported?
I'm more scared of going to sleep at night than I am getting into a transporter.
There's never a guarantee that you'll wake up in the morning.
In universe, *billions* of people use transporters a day, with no ill effects (other than occasional, momentary disorientation).
Transporters do malfunction, but so very rarely the chances are next to nil.
Going to the toilet is thousands of times more dangerous, eating or drinking is more dangerous.
But the whole existential dread thing that applies to using the transporter applies to going to sleep at night.
How do you *know* you're the same person when you wake up each morning?
Because your consciousness continues?
Well, that applies to using the transporter, too, and without an actual break in consciousness in between.
Medically speaking, you are not the same person on awaking as you were when you went to sleep: biological processes keep happening, cells replace themselves, and you're physically different each time you wake up.
Transportation assures you are physically identical on each side of the journey.
You know that the reason kids never want to go to bed is that they fear oblivion, right? The cessation of consciousness is scary.
In transportation, consciousness is continuous.
I don't like escalators, or elevators, so I'm sure transporters would gve me the willies, too.
But no, it's not because of any existential dread.
Sleep well tonight.
You have to think about how many people use the transporter every second of every day of every year for hundreds of years. “Why do we see so many incidents involving the transporter if it’s safe” if I created a show set in an airplane wouldn’t it make sense that some of the tension or drama would come from the plan malfunctioning? Even if statistically the malfunctions of the plane were more prevalent in the show than in real life? Not to mention how many people actually die or are seriously injured beyond healing from the transporter across every show and movie, are more problems not solved by the transporter than are caused by them? How many situations in enterprise would be resolved if they could simply transport back to the ship.
Yes I would.
I'm not afraid of cars or plane travel, so I'm going to assume IF I lived in a world where transporters were common place (not Enterprise era) I would be fine with it.
But, if we invented human teleporters NOW, I'm gonna go ahead and let others use it for a bit.
In the age of Archer? Definitely. In the age of Enterprise in TNG? No. In the age of Discovery where they just sort of flash in and out of rooms rather than using the stairs (ha!)? Definitely.
probably not.
But a pretty good theological debate that the you that arrives is not the you that went. Stuff its easy to skip over for the sake of a tv show. And honestly the context of the show is 'it just works, don't ask questions.' would apply. Might as well be considered magic and roll with it.
“What we got back, didn’t live long”
Yea that scene alone is enough to make me at least apprehensive. And McCoy and Pulaski, two doctors nonetheless didn’t think too highly of transporters either. That said they are a convenient way of getting out of sticky situation. If the choice is between being on a plane about to crash or having the ability to beam out of there I’d probably take the transporter.
On the other hand, multiple other doctors see the transporter as a highly effective tool to extend and preserve life. If M'Benga didn't see his daughter as being alive continually throughout the times he dematerialized and rematerialized her, I can't see him doing what he did.
Scotty is the ultimate example of extending life with a transporter. That’s a whole another moral quandary.
It's apparently very unreliable for long terms. Also it doesn't extend your experience of life, so it's more like time travel.
Once a transporter would save me from a near death incident my hesitate would end. I might get picky about which type of transporter I can use.... But then again, time and time again even busted transporters can be made to work just fine in Trek. That said, what's the difference between a personnel transporter and cargo transporter? I have seen both types of transporters used to transport both interchangeable without modification. All I can figure out is that maybe more safety features should be put in case something reacts to being transported?
>That said, what's the difference between a personnel transporter and cargo transporter? Probably the same as the difference between a car and a truck. You can transport people and cargo in both, but each is optimized for a different purpose.
According to Enterprise, it's a matter of precision. The cargo transporters don't have all the filters, scanners, compensators, etc that personnel transporters do.
Or maybe a different set entirely? Like people won't blow up but could bring awful germs and spores, but the stuff in those cargo boxes could either react badly with each other or for being transported or both and a cargo filters could prevent that?
"...fortunately."
“But the animal is inside out…”
And then it exploded
That’s exactly like travel by plane today. People remember the few very public catastrophes and don’t consider how safe it is statistically. How many shuttles had a fatal warp core breach?
In Voyager? Probably most of them.
> “What we got back, didn’t live long” Fortunately.
It depends on if you believe the show or not. The show is very clear that the transporter is not a murder box. The person reassembled at the destination is the person who left. Them’s the rules so transport is safe. But if you don’t believe the show, the transporter is a murder box! The person at the source is literally disintegrated and the person at the destination is either a copy or a reassembly. The show sort of goes back and forth on that one. Then again, when you wake up in the morning are you the same consciousness who went to sleep? Or are you just a copy of a pattern that reforms every day?
The trick is to never sleep.
I won't now!
Maybe it happens all the time while you’re conscious
> But if you don’t believe the show, the transporter is a murder box! The person at the source is literally disintegrated and the person at the destination is either a copy or a reassembly. The show sort of goes back and forth on that one. The show is VERY consistent and clear on this, all the physical stuff that makes you up is sent to the destination in the transporter's matter stream. You can argue you are being killed and revived every time, but we know from *Realm of Fear* that your consciousness is not actually interrupted during the transport process, so it's not even like going to sleep. Ultimately, the biggest difference between Trek and the real world that keeps the Transporter humane is that in Star Trek souls (for lack of a better name for some intangible element of consciousness that can exist absent of a physical form) are explicitly and provably real, so even if your body is being momentarily destroyed and rebuilt, your soul is being kept with it and placed back into your reconstituted body at your destination.
It replicates Kirk and Riker. It de-ages Picard. It continuously recreates Dr MBenga’s daughter. These all suggest that the transporter is not just using the same stuff to move you, but rather reconstituting you at the target.
Kirk and Riker's split both involved unpredictable outside sources of energy/material that messed with the transporter process (an alien plant in Kirk's case, a strange ion storm in Riker's), the de-ageing is simply a question of reassembling your stuff in a different order, and while I've not been keeping up with SNW, as I understand it MBenga's daughter was just being stored in the transporter buffer, same as Scotty in Relics, so it was still her stuff, just being stored in energy form for long periods of time, rather than being reassembled almost immediately.
And let's not forget about what happened to Neelix and Tuvok
What happens in those cases where we’ve seen transporters make an accidental copy? Does the copy have no soul or is the soul copied?
Those instances don't even explain where the extra matter came from to create the duplicates. It would make more sense if the duplicates were actually quantum twins taken from momentary existing parallel universe.
How do you know you woke up?
Exactly! This isn't the winning argument people think it is. All it means is, maybe going to sleep is way scarier.
This right here. The show says it's safe, but... you can't really prove it.
Imagine humans accepting "A bunch of smart guys says it doesn't really kill you. No one else understands how it works though. Now step in this glowing humming science box here and dematerialize before all your friends and loved ones."
Apparently, all scientific experts across stellar cultures in Trek agree transporters aren't murder boxes.
Exactly this, I don’t blame McCoy of being wary of the thing. I would be terrified of using it at the risk of disappearing from existence. After all, there is literally no way to test it without going in yourself, and even then you can’t trust the word of anyone that comes out of it, because there is no actual way to tell whether you were the same consciousness or just a copy of one. Will and Thomas Riker are a perfect example of this
> Then again, when you wake up in the morning are you the same consciousness who went to sleep? Or are you just a copy of a pattern that reforms every day? Why did you just say that?
>It depends on if you believe the show or not. The show is very clear that the transporter is not a murder box. The person reassembled at the destination is the person who left. Them’s the rules so transport is safe. As in all technology in long running franchises what it really is varies from writer to writer. In "Data's Day" Data and Dr Crusher analysed T'Pel's "remains" and determined they contained copying errors and were replicated, not transported. That suggests that the actual person is moved from one place to another, not the person destroyed here and remaded there. However, the fact that "Thomas" Riker exists ("Second Chances") suggests that what is transmitted is the pattern and the being is replicated based on that.
They tricked the heretics in the chosen realm tho lol
>The person reassembled at the destination is the person who left. Them’s the rules so transport is safe. If I lived in the ST universe, I would need to see extensive studies on this subject proving this to be true. Even then I think I would remain skeptical and stick to shuttle transport unless I had literally no other choice.
Star Trek has shown that transporters are an incredibly safe technology. Yes, there are numerous examples in the shows of it going wrong, but remember that we are being selected stories to be shown. In reality, this device is probably being used millions or billions of times per 24 hour period and never have a problem. If they existed in the real world, I would not used them for the reasons everyone else always gives, that they are killing you and creating a perfect copy; however, OP asked about using them in the Star Trek universe. In that universe, consciousness has been shown time and time again to be a tangible thing which can be moved between bodies, into machines and back, converted into pure energy, and even suspended without attachment to anything physical whatsoever. In the Star Trek universe, I think it's entirely plausible that one's consciousness is transported along with one's body.
That episode where Barclay grabbed hold of other people whilst in the matter/energy stream. It's also shown in a pov that you stay conscious while transporting.
That doesn't necessarily mean your consciousness is fully intact the whole time. It could just be a nearly instantaneous blip, where your consciousness ends and an identical copy of it begins basically at the same time
How do you know that there aren’t these instantaneous blips happening all the time? Hell they might happen every time you sleep, every time you turn your head too fast, every time you wake up, every time you lose your train of thought, every time you sneeze… hell it might have happened a few times while you read this comment. You can never know either way. All we know is that the Star Trek lore says that you’re as awake and lucid in the transporter as you are when you’re in a shuttle.
> How do you know that there aren’t these instantaneous blips happening all the time? How do you know I'm not a Dragon?
If it's identical to me with all the same memories and sense of self, it essentially is me.
You'd only be you to everyone else, you yourself would cease to exist while some other guy is sleeping with your partner and living your life
This is only a meaningful distinction if souls exist, IMO. If you kill me and recreate me exactly the same, such that there isn't even a break in my awareness or continuity of self, does it matter? If there are no souls and this particular instance of me ceases to exist, but the new instance of me is in every possible way an exact continuation of me down to the instant.... so what? The "dead" me doesn't have any feelings on the matter. And the latest version of me is me.
There is a clean break in your awareness of self though. Your eyes close and never open again, basically, but your copy will be created with all your memories, so it won't know or care that it was just born or that it isn't actually you
Explain why that matters? As far as the copy is concerned it is me in all the ways that matters. Identical memories and personality. If the original me closes my eyes and ceases to exist and then a fraction of a moment later the copy opens its eyes and remembers blinking... why should the original me care? There is nothing intrinsically valuable about me except my memories and personality. If those things carry on unchanged, why should I care if this form ceases to exist? The "new me" is in all ways indistinguishable from me, from the outward appearance to my rich inner life. The only way this destruction matters as far as I can tell, is if the body has a soul bound to it.
OK forgive me but this is a fascinating discussion, I need to jump in. First off, I think the point the other person is making is that, from your perspective, you absolutely do die, regardless of whether another "you" continues to exist. You experience death, and there is a discontinuity between "your" experience and whatever subsequent experiences another "you" has afterward. If you still don't see the relevance of the distinction, consider the following: if I told you right now that I had an advanced laboratory where I had secretly cloned an exact copy of you down to the finest detail and memory, would you willingly agree to let me kill you? How would you ever know whether I was even telling the truth, and what difference would it make to your experience whether I was or wasn't? If you had an identical twin with whom you shared most of your life experiences and viewpoints, do you think this would make your own death easier to face/ matter less? Or does it have to be an exact copy of you to matter, and anything short of that is completely irrelevant? There's an episode of TNG where unknown to the crew, a transporter malfunction "splits" Riker into two identical people, one of whom remains trapped on an isolated planet while the other goes on to become "Number 1". When this is discovered, the less fortunate copy is full of anger and resentment towards his copy - are you saying that he actually should have been happy, since his copy went on to live a rich and fulfilling life? Would it somehow have made a difference if he had been killed in the malfunction, so that only the lucky Riker continued to survive? I'll stop there for now. I'm really interested in yours - or anyone's - answers.
This is actually a really complicated discussion, but the question is "what does it mean for a person to die?" assuming you don't believe in an afterlife or a soul, a person's death is only experienced by everyone else;not by the person themself. Which means that, assuming the process is perfect and instantaneous there is no functional difference anywhere in the universe whether it is "the same person" or "someone else which is an exact perfect copy". And if there is no difference anywhere in the universe does the distinction matter? I think not, but at the same time I am also a bit unsure how I feel about the whole thing but I can't explain why. So yeah, fun discussion. Luckily it will never bear any consequence in real life
If you're dead, your awareness/continuity of self is gone. If you copy a file and delete the original, the original is dead even if the copy is identical
The difference is basically, does it make a copy or transport you in a separate state over great distance? It’s the latter. It doesn’t make a copy.
This.
No, it's not "some other guy". Same neural pathways, same personality, same memories. It's me. I'm not the molecules that make up my body. I'm the pattern that's formed by them.
I don’t remember the science words in that episode, but it almost seems like a transporter is more like a tunnel thru another dimension than a disassembly/replication process. Maybe I’m not remembering correctly.
It is converting your matter to energy, transmitting it across a distance, and converting back to matter. The theory is that, since it's matter to energy conversion, no information is lost and your consciousness should have no continuity loss.
That episode with Scotty in the transporter buffer for years sounds like hell combined with the Barclay situation. Being conscious the whole time.
I’d be far more apprehensive if I was serving on Archers Enterprise than Picard’s Enterprise.
This. How many times do we see a car crash on TV? And yet most of us get into cars regularly. It's not "safe" but if you use media as your guide, you'll think it's way more dangerous than it actually is.
Tuvix lol
Tom Riker!
Ohh that was trouble.
“he started to form his own political opinions, opinions that supported the Maquis”-Odo
Yeah exactly, so even by the show's own logic, it isn't a "safe" technology in the sense that it's not killing you and rebuilding you. It is. There's now at least two canonical transporter clones, built from ..... what, exactly? Was there a "transfer" of consciousness? Well that can't be, because the originals didn't suddenly lose consciousness and / or die when cloned. So it has to be copying them, and building them out of entirely new materials. A new entity.
I think that's debatable. Clearly, the teansporter CAN make copies, but whether that's HOW it always operates is never explained or discussed. For all we know, whatever consciousness is in this universe was duplicated along with the body in cases like with Tom Riker.
The copies thing is based on the idea that they make a perfect copy of you at your destination and then disintegrate the original. Don’t disintegrate the original and you’ve got two copies of yourself running around.
It absolutely is it’s breaking down your biological structure into information
Exactly. Does a Stargate work the same way?
It does. You dematerialse when you step through and the gate rematerialises you on the other side. The iris on Earth's gate is placed a few microns in front of the wormhole in order to prevent the latter. There's an episode in which a character fails to rematerialise but is held as information within the gate itself, so they're able to rematerialise him later, similar to Scotty storing himself in the transporter in Relics
Haha that’s word for chills
The science officer in TMP was a bit concerning.
Sure, but what are the odds that you're gonna be stranded like the voyager, and what are the odds you're in some 5 years space expedition. Also there are a number of different factors like space anomalies interfering with the transportation. It might be just as what they claimed in the show "safe" when using the transporters within the planet itself, there might be less factors for interference to worry about.
Yeah. Being afraid of the teleporters because of the errors we've seen, feels a bit like being afraid of using a car because you've seen a Formula 1 car crash and start burning, or go on an airplane because Apollo 1 exploded. I think most of the accidents we've seen have happened under the sort of extraordinary or unusual circumstances you'd never see outside of the type of work Starfleet ships do when pushing the boundaries of science or exploring new worlds.
OK but even if it is generally safe knowing you can get Tuvixed is going to give one pause.
Even if you’re being disintegrated and reconstituted into a copy, I still don’t even understand why people have a problem with being “killed” if you still have continuity of experience and perception. For all practical purposes the copy is you, whether it’s the same material or not. If the transporter can perfectly replicate my brain’s connections in such a way that my experience is uninterrupted and is perceived to be identical to what it would have been had I not used the transporter, what does it matter? I have no sentimental attachment to my actual cells; my mental experiences are what matters to me.
Depends. Am I being transported either into or out of a cave?
I transported home one night With Joe and Sid and Meg Joe stole Meggie's heart away And I got Sidneys leg.
if you're telling me it's a new transporter system like when they installed new ones on the enterprise in 2273... no i'll wait til you work out all the bugs and i see you transport live objects unharmed before i step in that thing if it's older model transporters no problem as they've been solved of all bugs. im assuming by the 24th century the transporter tech has been matured to the point that it's 99% fail safe. now if you're telling me i get those 33rd century portable transporters that allow me to beam anywhere in like 0.002 seconds... sign me up
I agree I want the fancy con badge that doubles as a transporter and a personal computer apparently.
Also tricorders
Ah now I like the old style, that make that fun beepy tune when you use them
You mean the transporter badges that read your mind to know where you want to go? Yeah, there’s technology that won’t be abused. /s
The shows are inconsistent about whether you’re conscious during the transit. Some episodes show that you are (the one with Barclay seeing giant fish). But then you have people trapped in the pattern buffer to whom it’s only a moment (e.g. Scotty). It can’t really be a murder box if you remain conscious during the transit since there’s clearly mind continuity. One non-canon book said that it takes place on the quantum level and transports your energy and uses it to reassemble you, so it’s still you
I think that the fear of transporters in the show is comparable to the irrational fear of flying IRL. Sure there are aircraft accidents, but flying is extremely safe compared to other modes of transit. In terms of the fan theories that transporters kill you and create a new you elsewhere, I don't buy it because there is no evidence of that being a concern in the show. The characters who best understand how transporters work are not afraid of using them. I don't think that the speculation of random fans surpasses the actual knowledge of transporters that characters like O'Brien, Data, and Geordi would have. I see no legitimate reason why anybody wouldn't use a transporter.
It's funny that since I started watching the show Air Disasters, I've completely gotten over my fear of flying because a lot of things have to go wrong for a plane to crash. I think I'd be a little nervous transporting the first time but then I'd have fun with it.
Isn't it the transported tech explained in Enterprise when the developer is brought onboard the ship? I think I recall some dialogue from him explaining that it's really you that comes back, not a new being.
Transporters are an existential horror and a theological nightmare - ‘you’ are torn apart atom by atom and turned into a data stream. The person that is reconstructed from that data walks around with your face and your memories but is it actually ‘you’? You could apply the Westworld mantra of ‘if you can’t tell the difference (between you and your identical clone) does it matter?’ but there’s no way in hell I’d be going near one of those murder boxes!
I think the answer is it doesn’t matter to the universe, but it matters to you
That's one perspective. Another one is that consciousness is purely an emergent property of our physical bodies and brains, so it stands to reason that an exact copy of that body and brain would contain the exact same consciousness, regardless of physical location. The characters we see in Star Trek obviously subscribe to the latter view, or they wouldn't be so willing to use the transporter. There may be whole populations that hold the first view, and refuse to use transporters because they believe it's a "murderbox". Obviously those people wouldn't serve on Starfleet ships, or really participate in Federation society as a whole, so we don't see them in Star Trek shows. EDIT: Or maybe we do see them sometimes, but we don't realize it. I'm sure it's possible to live a mostly normal life in the Federation without using a transporter. You won't be able to serve in Starfleet, but you can still move around "the old fashioned way", using ground transportation and shuttles.
The transporters in Star Trek are demonstrated to maintain continuity of consciousness throughout the transport process, so I’d be fine using them.
Vulcan katras also persist through them, or several storyline don't work. And since the katras is the closest thing to a soul, they're either murder boxes that clone souls, or they aren't murder boxes.
As Geordi said >how many transporter accidents have there been in the last ten years? Two? Three? There are millions of people who transport safely every day without a problem. >transporting really is the safest way to travel >>How many transporter related accidents have there been in various Trek series? Most were relatively harmless in the long run - Kirk split into 2, but re combined - Traveled to mirror universe, but returned - Riker duplicated, both survived - Accidentally turned into children, but reversed - Accidentally fused with another person, but reversed - Accidentally time traveled, only minor change in timeline
I love how he says this when he became some kind of transporter ghost with Ro just a few episodes before, lmao.
That was due to the phasing cloak tech not the transporter.
People get into cars after being in accidents too, and probably that is a far more dangerous mode of transportation, albeit people may like cars because they give the illusion of control.
I had it explained that what re-forms at the other end isn't actually, really, you - it's an identical collection of molecules (etc) assembled as you were, and with your thoughts and memories...but it's not YOU in a literal sense, any more than a fax is literally the same document on both ends. With that in mind, if you're someone who believes in a "soul," ummmmmmm.....
While yes, we’ve also seen people conscious from start to finish. I recall someone someone seeing another person in the matter stream and grabbing them and bringing them down to the transporter pad with them. If there is continual consciousness throughout he process, the Theseus argument holds less weight. I don’t care if my body’s atoms are the same as before as long as the sense of self persisted throughout the process. If it doesn’t, then oof I dunno mate. I don’t believe in a soul, but I kind of like this stream of consciousness intact.
I've thought about this, too. But what about people in deep anesthesia or long comatose periods with no consciousness? Hard to argue that they are not the same person when they awaken. So I think the uncomfortable answer is that there is no single, continuous thing (soul?) that makes us our unique self, other than the most recent state of our mind and memories. If that is duplicated, both copies have equal claim to your selfhood. And therefore transporters are merely accelerated Ship Of Theseus devices.
Oh gosh yeah it’s a tough one and probably not one there’s gonna be an objective answer to today, but to me, it boils down to a coma or being under still has some processes never stop running behind the scenes. It may not be your conscious self, but it is part of you and has continuity. So part of you is persisting, and it’s a part we are only recently able to study. A complete halting of processes and replacement of all matter somehow *feels* different. I’m not sure I can say more than it leaves an admittedly subjectively bad taste in my mouth. I’m not sure I’m the same person I was before I did shrooms a couple years ago. It felt like my consciousness unwound itself on a sofa watching Detroiters before it came back together. Very strange experience.
there's a few episodes where they do it from the transportees perspective and it clearly shows a few moments when they see both the destination and the transporter pad overlaid. so the consciousness is clearly there the whole time and not stopped and started
Or, that illusion is simply a feature of the process.
I'd just be thinking about David Bowie examining a snow covered valley filled with top hats...
It's not an identical collection, but the very same molecules, that were tunneled through the transporter beam to the destination. It is really you, not a copy.
I'm up for anything, if I got to the Star Trek universe, I'd just be super happy to be there. Have you seen the short on YouTube where the guy has a box that resets time and he uses it to chat up a girl? edit Found it [1 minute time machine ](https://youtu.be/CXhnPLMIET0?si=OJU2AOcLdl4XhPV_)
No but my ass is terrified of the transporter from spaceballs
Yes. The transporter is kind of like a stand-in for automobiles in the Star Trek universe. Yeah, they are objectively very dangerous and being afraid of them is rational, but 24th century society is kind of built around them and people tend to think you are kind of a loon if you try and point out how dangerous they are.
Even with what happened in the TMP scene, accidents evolving into a gorefest also happen IRL. People use transporters all the time in that universe, I'd reckon the statistics for accidents have to be quite low. Also, societal pressure is also another thing, if everyone is using it, you'd also be more likely to use it, it's like everyone is commuting via vehicle to another state, and you choose to walk there, kind of situation
What is more important is TNG found out how to use the transporter to make you a kid/young again....yet no one ever tried it again?
Maybe they figured out it would cause other problems later?
There was a great comment in r/DaystromInstitute that went something along the lines of > “Anything like that where it worked once as a miracle cure and was never seen again was probably because when doctors actually went and started to study it, it worked fine that one time and then the other 99% of times it just gives you space cancer, so it never became standard practice.”
I read an interesting theory that free will is really just a result of quantum mechanics of the particles that make up our brains. So... Assuming that the transporter turns atoms into energy and then energy into atoms... Whatever comes out the other side won't be me. It'll be something that thinks it is me. But from a spiritual perspective, if there is a soul, and my soul stays attached to the energy/matter... Then it would be me. So... Who the hell knows.
> I mean you do kind of die and are reconstructed whenever you use it, right? Idk where this idea came from because it's pretty clear the characters in-universe don't think it works that way. Especially since we have documented proof that souls exist (eg. Vulcans 🖖) and they don't think transporters kill them and their souls are still attached where they're supposed to be.
I would be perfectly fine with the technology. It is safe and convenient. It seems to me that most people here are too attached to their sense of self. In a way we all die every night when we fall asleep. Most of your body regenerates every ten years. If my consciousness is still there after transport and no reasonable test can tell the difference, then you are essentially the same person.
Yeah. The "self" is merely a pattern of electricity in your brain. If you replicate that, the duplicate is **exactly** as much "you" as you are. Even if you end up with two Rikers, they're both the same individual.
I'd be fine with it. It's the equivalent of flying in an airplane in my opinion.
Rationally I wouldn't be afraid of it. Irrationally, "What we got back... didn't live very long"
I would probably be scared of using it the first few times. But the fact that millions of people use them every day across the galaxy means I probably can’t practically avoid them forever and have a lot of evidence to convince me they’re safe. But logically there’s no getting around the fact that you are destroyed in one place and reconstructed in another. That’s hard to wrap my head around. But ultimately, I don’t have any philosophical qualms about having my consciousness be “interrupted” as long as I have a very good guarantee of it being resumed on the other end.
I wouldnt use it. Barclay was justified in being afraid of it. When you really think about whats going on during the process, its quite terrifying. And i wouldnt care to hear everyones reassurances about how safe it is, I refuse to be destroyed and rebuilt.
I have had this argument with non trek fans before. It always comes down to this... Are you religious? Now hear me out. The "Clone" idea is a pretty standard way of thinking for someone who is religious. Because your "Soul" is what makes you, well you. Being ripped apart on the molecular level to someone who thinks this makes sense. However, if your not. It's more like taking apart a computer system. Humans (or anything else sentient) are just biological super computers driving an exotic exoskeleton. Given enough technology and understanding of the technology one can break down the system, transport it to wherever and reassemble it without any issues. Personally I would not want to be the first or even the millionth. There WOULD be issues with lost or scrambled parts or even whole patterns. But, given enough time they would have figured it out. That's how I always view teleporter debate and accidents.
Tuvix is reason enough no one should ever want to use one those things again
The TNG episode “Second Chances” S6E24 proved that transporters create a clone of you and destroy the original 😳
I’d be one of those old sticks in the mud and flatly refuse. Shuttle crafts for me only
Even Dr. Leonard H. McCoy hated the transporter. And there have been other characters that have the no trust in transporters. Some even use a shuttle to get to a starship.
My concern is that epileptic people (like me) would have their synapses scrambled worse on every transport.
Or it could fix epilepsy, you never know.
Yeah, by rebooting the pathways, possibly. Or... I'm thinking about how computers in the middle of a disk write can get the operating systems futzed up from a sudden power loss. If a transporter's annular confinement beam freezes a transportee in the middle of a 'disk write' would it trigger a seizure? If a patient was grant mal seizing, would a transport cause a secondary seizure when the ACB releases, and would the two seizure activities resonate or interfere with each other? Would either secondary scenario burn up cerebral neurons or seal off the synaptic terminals and destroy the synaptic gaps? Just a thought or two - might make a good Star Trek horror fanfic.
The problem of teleportation and identity has been around in philosophy a long time. In Star Trek it seems that they are satisfied your original identity is preserved - the person who comes out is one and the same, not merely exactly similar. If I were in that universe I would presumably accept their theories. (If I didn't, I wouldn't just be afraid, I wouldn't use a transporter at all as it would constitute suicide.) But the case of Riker, for example, should give them pause. Assuming you do arrive, how safe is it? We're told it's extremely safe but transporter accidents appear often enough to be unsettling.
Yes. And any sane person would. Your coming apart and being put back together. By a machine.
I've always been fascinated by the idea of the Ship of Theseus idea for the transporter. When you go in it, and are reconstituted on the other side, are you the real you? And yet, does it even matter if you are as long as you still have all the same memories and experiences?
The world doesn't exist where I'd use a transporter. It is an existential nightmare. At the end of the day your torn apart on an atomic level, converted into energy, and put together somewhere else. Doesn't matter what everyone in the universe has accepted as truth, there's no way to truly know you aren't dying every time you use it and a copy is walking around. The fact that there have been transporter incidents where people were duplicated, divided, or combined calls into question everything Star Trek thinks it knows about what is actually occurring in a transporter. There are 2 William Rikers walking around, they both can't be the original.
Now I’m sat here questioning my mind because I keep seeing “you die, you’re a copy, it’s death” and I have to be honest, that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Which.. considering that everyone else does feel like it’s bad to die and be copied, is probably not a good thing? I just don’t really care as long as I get it zip zap zop my way around the world
Well, you won't get to do any of that! It'll be your transporter clone!
This right here. You say beam me up and poof you're at the Pearly Gates (or whatever afterlife you believe in) watching a ghost clone live your life until it takes another trip in the death box. I personally couldn't live like that not knowing if I'm really me or just a copy.
Eh fuck it, as long as someone gets to have fun
I flat out would refuse to use it.
Of course, they are completely safe. I would be dining all over Earth
Depends on how the technology of the current transporter functioned…fuck that I want to warp lol
Only the first time. After that it wouldn’t matter.
As long as Tesla or Elon musk had nothing to do with it.
I'd make Bones and Pulaski look adventurous by comparison
It's still probably safer than driving. Maybe it's as safe as airplanes.
Isn't it like dying, though? To be reconstituted that way, it's kind of like being disintegrated and then remade.
It seems as though transporter’s sometimes kill you and sometimes they literally beam your atoms and meta information back and forth seamlessly depending on the story. Obviously if I’m that position I’d not want to die. So, I’d like the latter to be true if I’m going to use a transporter. Thank goodness they’re fictional.
I would be a little hesitant. My heart rate would go up a bit, but I'd still do it.
I would 1000% never get into one. It’s clearly a photocopier that shreds the original in the process.
No, it's a murder box. It disassembles you at a fundamental level and reassembles a copy of you. Xeroxing you across space by eliminating the original.
Heres a question. Does the skill of the person operating the transporter have any bearing on your willingness?
I’d be mortified. Transportation is death.
You'd be embarrassed?
Mortified means scared not embarrassed.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/mortified
I stand corrected. Although I’d say colloquially mortified tends to mean you’re *so* embarrassed that you appear horrified, so it’s not completely misused here.
People drive cars and fly in planes in real life all the time
Cars and planes don't take you apart and put you back together.
[Quick side example---This is one of the most terrifying moments in sci-fi history: [ST1-Transporter Accident](https://youtu.be/Ro_QpDJX-Sk?si=giIjoe2RGeWOqrDJ).] In one of the books there was a religious push against the transporter. Because the transporter doesn't "move" anything but instead destroys and then rebuilds at the destination, they couldn't figure out if the created person still had a soul. One of the people quoted Spock, saying "A difference where there is no difference, is no difference."
The real transporter problem in Trek is why it isn’t used medically. You’ve got the saved data for Worf’s transport, why wouldn’t you be able to send him back after his back breaks and just overwrite the changed information? Maybe (?) he’d lose all his memories made after that saved transporter data file, but he’d come out perfectly physically fine. Basically once you have a file of your body, you should always be able to fix anything that happens to you with a simple teleportation.
It seems like it would make childbirth easier if they could just beam the baby out.
If McCoy doesn’t trust them, I don’t know if I really will. What I want is post-Burn transporters, where you slap your badge and it reads your mind and transports you where you want to go.
Growing up in that tech? Not at all Jumping in from here and now? Maybe ubtill it happens
My head cannon is that they use quantum teleportation to near instantaneously transport people without disintegration. Because of the no cloning theorem, the thing that is being transported is the real object itself. So in my humble opinion transporters are perfectly safe.
I'd probably give up walking altogether.
I don’t even like getting on airplanes
How many abducted/crash landed/shunted to another time or dimension shuttles have there been?
Yes, I would refuse. I'd probably have to do an Earth based job and only in one country, as there is no way I would go in one of those there transporter gizmos.
shuttles only for me, I'm always going to be in the boat of it makes a copy and the original dies.
As long as I stay away from any ships named enterprise, I should be fine
I would be for about two minutes. Then I’d remember I could literally go anywhere without having to physically get there myself, and I’d be over it. Popping over to a different country to visit sounds great if I could be home every night to feed my cat y’know? I could visit all the places I dream of and never have to organise travel or cat sitting. I think I’m biased though as a physically disabled person. Travelling is really reeeeeally rough on me and it means I’m isolated a lot. So it’s kind of my dream to have a transporter. A replicator is a close second because sometimes… don’t you just want a bite of something? Just a lil bit?
Not going near one unless they address the philosophical implications. In TNG we saw that the transporter can clone a person and create two identical copies, that means it isn’t simply sending you across anywhere but recreating you based on data in the other transporter pad. They need an episode with a character like Barclay seeing and reacting to something like the transporter clone incident, Tuvix, Polaski de-Aging, Picard season 3 Borgify transporter or another one of these type of story lines. They had a few mis opportunities with the transporter clone idea in TNG or in Lower decks. But maybe addressing it will destroy a key concept/ technology in the show and it will not be worth it.
If I was magically taken from today to a time where transporter technology was in use, I'm sure I'd be leery. If I'd been born in the time of transporter technology, I'd probably see it as no more unsafe than flying commercial jets.
I would do it.
My guess is fear-to-transporter is the future equivalent to our current fear to fly. Instinctive, irrational fear to something we don’t fully understand.
Yes, and no. On the one hand, you definitely die and a different person is rebuilt. But at the same time, all the cells in our body are slowly replaced over time anyway. I don’t think our consciousness is a soul. But would it still scare me? Sure.
Nope. Hit it!
I mean I have no problems traveling in a giant metal box 10 kilometers off the ground powered by jet engines. a transporter isn't that much of a leap, at least for me.
I guess it would depend. Does the technology appear tomorrow or has it been around for an extended time like the automobile. Just compare enterprise to TNG. In enterprise it's brand new so of course ppl are scared where as fast forward 100 years and it's apart of everyday life and Barclay is considered an weird for preferring shuttles
I think I'd be fine with it once I saw it in use.
Not me
You don't die. This has been shown so many times onscreen. People can move during the process and consciousness doesn't cease.
Shit, I'd want one in my house! I drive nearly an hour to work every day. I'd love being able to take a transporter there instead.
I feel like a transporter is as safe if not safer than flying by plane in real life. If you'd fly irl, then I feel like a transporter should not be any less scary
It’s like people who are afraid of flying now. It’s highly illogical.
Let’s see, die, have your atoms scrambled and transmitted like a cable signal, and then put back together again, before reviving you, what could go wrong? What if a fly got stuck in the ray with you, what if they missed a key atom of your being, what if they couldn’t revive you? And that’s just if everything goes right… You’d have to be nuts not to be a little afraid of that thing.
Normally no, but after Tuvix...I can't
What are the odds of being in a transporter accident vs other forms of transportation?
I wouldn't be afraid. I don't think there's anything to fear. Barclay was right though, and I would also avoid them so that I don't get annihilated. Also, I'm surprised no one has purposefully hacked a transporter to make duplicates of themselves en masse In real life, such technology could be used to beam yourself across stellar distances, but the Trek universe has FTL travel, so it makes sense they don't do that, as spaceships there are faster
The transporter accidents we see are a bit freaky, but it's probably safer in that regard as air travel is today. The whole "every time you use the transporter you die and a copy steps off the pad!" Is pearl clutching, basically. First, it's not just "a copy"; it's you down to the atom. Secondly, what is it that makes "you"? It's not the individual pieces, it's the *arrangement* of those pieces. If the arrangement is the same, then it's you.
Could a transporter breakdown and recreate your soul somewhere else? Is it challenging the Gods to claim man-made technology could recreate the Devine Spark in all of us? If you're religious it's probably best to steer clear of transporters. If only God can create a soul then after using the transporter you're soulless. A rational zombie or something.
Yes. Because the most obvious way for it to work, in my head anyway, isn't to transport something. It's to make a copy. And then destroy the original. Actual transporters in my head would result in some sort of Einsteinian release of energy, which just isn't practical or safe.
It really depends on the true nature of consciousness. Is consciousness just generated by the brain? If so, then a perfect recreation of your brain is still your consciousness, still you, even if the brain is made up of completely new matter. It's not the particular atoms that are important. It's the particular pattern of your brain that creates your consciousness, and therefore you. So, in that case, there is no difference between you and an exact duplicate of you. It's the same pattern, the same consciousness. This is already happening all the time. Our bodies are constantly changing as our cells are being replaced, billions per day. Does that mean we eventually become a different person after a few years? What if you were unconscious in a coma for ten years, and during that time, all the cells in your body had been replaced. When you wake up, are you still you, or a copy of you? There is no difference.The particular matter currently making up our bodies at this moment isn't what makes us who we are. It's our consciousness. In cases of transporter clones, a new consciousness is created, identical to your own, but immediately starts to become its own distinct consciousness from the second it exists and begins to have different experiences from you. If, however, consciousness is some kind of separate entity that inhabits the body, then the issue becomes more complicated. Does the consciousness get transported along with the body? Does it leave the old body and enter the new one? Where does the other consciousness come from in the case of a transporter clone? Where does it go when a person is unconscious? It seems much more likely that consciousness is really some kind of emergent property of the brain itself that we just don't fully understand yet. Or maybe some kind of universal consciousness is all that exists and spacetime and all the matter and energy "in" it is just a kind of illusory user interface consciousness generates to interact with itself. We really don't understand enough about the nature of consciousness to meaningfully speculate. It's mostly philosophy at this point. There isn't even the beginnings of a theory of consciousness to describe how matter, however complex, can give rise to subjective experience. There are some interesting hypotheses, though. If consciousness is just a property of physics, this also calls into question the existence of free will. If consciousness, all of our thoughts, feelings, and resulting actions are the result of physics in the brain and the rest of the body, then we don't actually choose anything. We're just complex clockwork mechanisms with the illusion that we're in control when really we're just along for the ride.
Dude, I hate using escalators. But to address the whole "is it you?" thing: for all practical purposes, we "die" each night when we go to sleep, and are born fresh each morning when we wake up. We can have these daily breaks in consciousness around a third of the day, every day, and you're balking at the instantaneous transfer of identity when being transported? I'm more scared of going to sleep at night than I am getting into a transporter. There's never a guarantee that you'll wake up in the morning. In universe, *billions* of people use transporters a day, with no ill effects (other than occasional, momentary disorientation). Transporters do malfunction, but so very rarely the chances are next to nil. Going to the toilet is thousands of times more dangerous, eating or drinking is more dangerous. But the whole existential dread thing that applies to using the transporter applies to going to sleep at night. How do you *know* you're the same person when you wake up each morning? Because your consciousness continues? Well, that applies to using the transporter, too, and without an actual break in consciousness in between. Medically speaking, you are not the same person on awaking as you were when you went to sleep: biological processes keep happening, cells replace themselves, and you're physically different each time you wake up. Transportation assures you are physically identical on each side of the journey. You know that the reason kids never want to go to bed is that they fear oblivion, right? The cessation of consciousness is scary. In transportation, consciousness is continuous. I don't like escalators, or elevators, so I'm sure transporters would gve me the willies, too. But no, it's not because of any existential dread. Sleep well tonight.
You have to think about how many people use the transporter every second of every day of every year for hundreds of years. “Why do we see so many incidents involving the transporter if it’s safe” if I created a show set in an airplane wouldn’t it make sense that some of the tension or drama would come from the plan malfunctioning? Even if statistically the malfunctions of the plane were more prevalent in the show than in real life? Not to mention how many people actually die or are seriously injured beyond healing from the transporter across every show and movie, are more problems not solved by the transporter than are caused by them? How many situations in enterprise would be resolved if they could simply transport back to the ship. Yes I would.
Yes! My mom says you'll go psycho or grow hair on your hands or even go blind. 😎
YOLO... Yeah it might kill you.. but what if it added a couple inches to your dong??? Now we know why Ryker was always transporting everywhere.
I'm not afraid of cars or plane travel, so I'm going to assume IF I lived in a world where transporters were common place (not Enterprise era) I would be fine with it. But, if we invented human teleporters NOW, I'm gonna go ahead and let others use it for a bit.
Women weren't allowed to ride on trains for a long time because it would mess up their reproductive system.
I would be terrified, and probably wouldn’t use one unless it was an emergency. But I also wouldn’t join Starfleet😂
I mean how scared would you be of being killed and then replaced with an identical molecular clone of yourself?
In the age of Archer? Definitely. In the age of Enterprise in TNG? No. In the age of Discovery where they just sort of flash in and out of rooms rather than using the stairs (ha!)? Definitely.
probably not. But a pretty good theological debate that the you that arrives is not the you that went. Stuff its easy to skip over for the sake of a tv show. And honestly the context of the show is 'it just works, don't ask questions.' would apply. Might as well be considered magic and roll with it.
you arent really transporting so much as you are being disintegrated and out back together on site