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Is beaming down in Star Trek a death sentence?


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2017 Sep 24, 4:16am   1,069 views  2 comments

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Can beaming out save someone’s life? Some would argue that having one’s “molecules scrambled," as Dr. McCoy would put it, is actually the surest way to die. Sure, after you’ve been taken apart by the transporter, you’re put back together somewhere else, good as new.

But is it still you on the other side, or is it a copy?

If the latter, does that mean the transporter is a suicide box?

To be clear, our purpose isn’t to get into the nitty-gritty of the science of the transporter. After all, if we could figure out exactly how a transporter works, we could build one. Instead we’ll touch on it only when the science becomes relevant, but—as was the case in our discussion of time travel in Trek—we’ll focus mostly on the transporter’s effects. And those effects have some interesting consequences. After reviewing the evidence, in fact, there might even be some hope that transport isn’t a death sentence and that “beam me up, Scotty” were not Kirk’s famous last words. (Kirk never said those exact words on the show, of course, but you get the idea).

Full Article: 3 pages, 10-15 minutes to read maybe. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/is-beaming-down-in-star-trek-a-death-sentence/

#ScienceFiction #SciTech #StarTrek #Transporter

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1   Dan8267   2017 Sep 24, 11:54pm  

anonymous says
But is it still you on the other side, or is it a copy?


It's both. A copy of you is no different than you. Since your atoms are being replaced all the time, you are a piecemeal copy of yourself from minute to minute.

All that matters is that an instance of you exists. What material is used to create it is irrelevant.
2   Dan8267   2017 Sep 24, 11:56pm  

There’s another, more famous version of the paintbrush example: a thought experiment known as the Ship of Theseus. Theseus wants to keep his ship in tip-top shape, so whenever a board rots, he replaces it with a new one and keeps doing so until none of the original planks remain. Is it still the same ship?


The only meaningful answer to is it the same ship is really an answer to how much of the same ship is it. The answer is that you simply measure how different the ship is. The less different it is, more it is the same ship even if the material is different.

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