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Transporter Technology
tyranthraxisii
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In the Star Trek universe where peoples molecules are disassembled, stored in a computer system, then reassembled somewhere else from said stored data, why would anyone actually perma die? Could you not just "load last save" if something unfortunate happened?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=TREQGl54BU8&feature=endscreen
I thought WoW's forums had angry elitist snobs, but I never could have imagined the level STO forums has.
I thought WoW's forums had angry elitist snobs, but I never could have imagined the level STO forums has.
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"A matter stream could not be stored indefinitely in the buffer; after 420 seconds, the stored pattern would degrade and the object was lost. The only known occurrence of a person surviving in a buffer longer than the theoretical maximum was Captain Montgomery Scott on board the USS Jenolan."
seems like an awefully lame way to fix that loose end, and drop a hippy reference in the process, but apparently that is the official story.....
I thought WoW's forums had angry elitist snobs, but I never could have imagined the level STO forums has.
If the Soul is transferred to the new body, then that renders this ethical problem moot, but the Soul is an unscientific concept that can't be proved.
Bingo.
The teleporter is a fantastic experiment for the Mind/Body/Soul philosophical quandary. Depending on where you stand (mind, body, or soul), there are some issues with transporter technology as presented in Star Trek:
Mind: People who follow this line of reasoning would conclude that unless you can teleport a person's consciousness, the person arriving on the other end would not be the person that stood on the original platform. You'd have effectively destroyed the original to spawn a clone at a different location--a clone with no memories of their original. They'd essentially be a new person.
Body: If you think our identity resides in our physical bodies, then you likely wouldn't use a teleporter since the technology destroys the original body completely and assembles a copy with wholly different material at the other end. The person stepping off the destination pad isn't the same physical being that left for the origin point.
Soul: Those who believe in the existence of a soul wouldn't have an issue with teleporters, provided you could transfer the soul. This is sorta like the mind, but not quite.
There was a fantastic quiz we took for a personal identity course which covered this issue and helped you figure out to which of the three philosophies of identity you gravitated.
Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We must Dissent" (Accompanies the Secret Project "Bulk Matter Transmitter")
"The first living thing to go through the device was a small white rat. I still have him, in fact. As you can see, the damage was not so great as they say."
Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "See How They Run" (Accompanies discovery of the "Matter Transmission" tech)
There's a lot of discussion about it, from the soul, to it being a Murder Copy Machine. And even when the writers or the creator himself says differently, people will argue that they don't control what they created.
I Absolutely LOVE that you are quoting Alpha Centauri!
I thought WoW's forums had angry elitist snobs, but I never could have imagined the level STO forums has.
I also considered them dead the first time they were disintegrated with a transporter. Clearly it has nothing to do with the moving the actual person; they are just clones. Look at Thomas Riker. (TNG: Second Chances). If the transporter was just moving the one person then there would not have been two of him.
Yeeeeeeah. Remember when everyone was kiddies and then they used the save data to restore them to adults? (TNG: Rascals). That episode was slightly longer than 420 seconds.
I thought the transporter decompiled already exsisting matter and energy then compresses it and recompiles it in the same order, kinda like melting a block of ice, shooting the water through a pipe, then freezing it again in the same shape. though it does have a digital copy of them just in case something didnt come out right.
we've seen Sato go through the transporter still concious, so it means you are always you through it.
if it just destroyed the target and then made an exact copy, it'd render the deletion useless.
Don't forget that Barclay allowed us to see what being beamed looked like from a first person perspective.
If he was being killed first, how would he be able to see the transportation or the people trapped there?
They shouldn't need a stored pattern. In the Unnatural Selection episode of ST:TNG, they cured Dr. Pulaski of an infection and reversed its debilitating physical symptoms based on a healthy DNA sample from a strand of hair. Based on that, there should be no disease or injury that can't be cured if the transporter is used to reassemble the patient using a previous medical scan of a time when they were healthy.
Also, it's funny. Right a little before the servers went kaput, we were discussing transport technology and I wondered. Imagine the early stages of development.. somewhere, there is a planet filled with dograts and catbird carcasses.. For all we know, tribbles could be our early transport attempts on animals that we mushed together using antimatter, science and our insane need to be instantly somewhere else.
According to Memory Alpha, due to interference from a molecular reversion field, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Keiko O'Brien, Ensign Ro Laren, and Guinan had their ribo-viroxic-nucleic structures removed from their DNA during transport. They re-materialized as children, though all their memories and mental capacities remained those of adults. They were subsequently returned to their correct physical appearances when they were transported again and the structures were restored using bioscans from their medical records. Nothing was retrieved from the buffers.
Definitely on the list of speculative fiction pitfalls to avoid. Think about the full implications of your phlebotinum before you implement it.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
That makes sense.
That whole episode is a bit wack. The genetic engineering on the children apparently ignores the fact that such engineering is banned and outlawed in the Federation. This is stated in at least three different Star Trek series (ENT: "The Augments", DS9: "Doctor Bashir, I Presume", TNG: "A Matter of Time") albeit all of them were produced after this episode, so the script writers at the time may not have been aware of this stipulation.
It's tough to resolve issues like this. I blame Maurice Hurley. He might have given us the Borg, but he drove away Gates McFadden and several writers, including Tracy Torm
atoms are a curious thing, scientists still dont yet understand them as much as they would like to.
your living soul and memories could be contained in a group of atoms that would be completely invisible to the naked eye but tecnology such as the transporter would see these atoms and be able to transmit them along with the rest of the atoms that form your body to be reassembled in another place.
the only time these living soul and memories atoms would be seperated from your body would be at the point of your death.
in theory.
when you step onto a transporter pad your atoms are broken down and stored and then transmited in a stream to the new location.
when they get there they are reassembled into you, thay are not differant atoms they are your atoms transmited in a stream much like how electricity is trasmited down a wire.
if however there is a malfunction and some of the matter is lost much of it can be replicated by the transporter the replicated atoms would be 100% dulicates of the originals this would include your memory and soul atoms as is what happened to will riker.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Wow. That's a very enlightened and intelligent point of view about transport technology.
It was even more impressive when Sheldon Cooper posed it to Leonard on Big Bang Theory.
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
So the buffer is pointless because they could just anything to make a new copy, such as the aforementioned hair. That only reinforces my old belief that they were not the same people that had originally left. They were recreated from stored records and merged with the partial living templates that they had on hand.
Ah, Mass Effect. I just finished playing that series yesterday. How very much of its story is lifted from the 'Revelation Space' novels.
Actually based it on an Outer Limits episode. Original is "deleted" when teleportation happens, but it is not instantaneous. However, origin side didn't get signal that copy arrived safely due to interstellar communication problems so the original and copy existed at the same time until the destination side could send a signal that indicated the transportation was successful.
I suppose we could be just telepresence robots and our signal is just locked into these bodies so if another body is available that can process our signal is available, then the signal would just go to that body. Of course, it all goes back to where we exist, the mind, body, or soul and that is a question for philosophy and religion not science since it is not provable.
...Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you / Oh, I can hear it callin 'me / I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?...
- Anne Bredon
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
There is a lot of evidence suggesting that our memories and personality are not stored in some undiscovered space inside atoms or anything, but are stored in our brains, because if the brain is damaged, we can see that memories get lost, or that our personalities change.
You can still theorize that the brain is just a form of "communication interface" between our real soul and the world, and damage to the brain makes this communication harder and causes changes in our world that are not part of the original soul. But from a scientific point fo view - unless this hypothesis offers some prediction different from "our self is part of our physical bodies", it's just philosophy, not science.
That said - if our identity/personality is inherent in our bodies and not some external entity, then we have to remember that all our cells and atoms are changed during our life, and we don't experience it as "dying" and being "cloned" all the time, we still see it as a continous experience and existence. Matter-Disssembly and Reassemby could still mean a continous experience and existence (it certainly looks that way in Startrek), so, no, you're not killed and cloned, you're still you, because you remember yourself being yourself and that is all there is to make out the "You".
That is not a ethical quandary at all once you think about it. The human body is replaced cell by cell (including brain cells) all the time, every 7 years the person that walks around is not the same person biologically at all. In addition a persons neurons and brain functions change over their lifetime, meaning you are physically not the same person, biologically or mentally every decade or so.
A person is the sum of their memories not a 'soul', a person isn't a fixed concept, they evolve throughout their lives, a 'soul' is meaningless with regard to transporters.
The person isn't killed anymore than they are killed by their own biology.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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couple that with various discussions -- like the new movies, where young scotty is trying to beam onto a moving ship -- and one gets the impression that the beaming IS indeed particles sent from here to there, not a "higher quality" replicator.
My character Tsin'xing
A Star Trek Transporter is just a cloning device that can send the clones to wherever they want with a minor modification. How it works is that it dismantles the body into a bunch of particles and reassembles it at another location. As long as you have the a person's pattern stored, then you can keep on sending clones to various locations by having a storage of material available. After all, you just need a certain amount of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few other trace elements to form a human. So just hook up some storage tanks of these elements to the transporter, scan a person, and instant cloning machine. Therefore, Starfleet doesn't need to send anyone down to the planet. Kirk stays on the Enterprise while his clone heads the away team.
After all, this is already proven by Thomas Riker in the Second Chances episode. So Transporter clones actually occur in Star Trek. Therefore, the original body is destroyed and an identical copy is created for normal Transporter operation and it is just a simple matter to use it to clone an army with enough energy and material.
So if a person is the sum of their memories and not due to the soul, then there is absolutely no difference between the original and the copy. So Transporters have killed millions of people in the Star Trek universe since the original and copy have equal rights to exist.
No it doesn't clone. It can accidently duplicate a signal in two. If it was a cloning machine why wouldn't the Dominion just beam one Jem Hadar onto DS9 5000 times?
It copies a persons 'signal' (for want of a better term) and duplicates it in another location and destroys the previous one, if that signal is split in to by an ion storm, or whatever, they you have Thomas Riker.
There is no difference between them, my point was that they are not been 'killed' by the transporter any more than by their own biology.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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