Damn, I was going to ship of Theseus you about the cells in your body replacing themselves constantly, but apparently our brain neurons last a lifetime.

Now I don't think I would ever use a teleporter, either. Shit.

A distinction between a teleporter and a transporter...

To teleport implies the original matter is instantly moved from one place to another so there would be no destruction and reconstituted copy. A wormhole would seem to be the only realistic way that could be achieved.

A transporter, well that means copy then kill. No one knows if the kill part is painful because noone survives it. I find it funny Riker's copy is actually the "original" and his lack of death is considered a transporter accident. Yet he is the one treated like the copy...

And all that said, barclay's experience in the transporter beam is more suggestive of a wormhole style device.

I don't know why I bothered to write all this out...

I would be the guy who says, "Open-source teleporters only."

I ain't risking having myself modified surreptitiously. 😑

My grandma won't drive on the interstate. These are the same.

I always liked the idea of teleporters that are just wormhole pairs.

If you want to travel from New York to Paris you have to first go to your local wormhole station, walk through that and be taken to the central station for all US wormholes, walk over to the international portal and be taken to the global interface station, which would be located wherever the electricity is cheapest so probably somewhere in Iceland, then you walk over to the French national station, and be taken to some facility in France, and then from there walk over to the Paris wormhole.

All wormholes are 20 m across by standard allowing cargo containers to transport through, with the Americans have made system unnecessarily complicated by standardizing their wormholes to 2.5 giraffe widths.

Everyone always focuses on the Ship of Theseus or the existential parts of this, but the societal impacts would be crazy.

Millions of people teleporting to the most beautiful places on earth and wrecking them, highways and boring parts of cities abandoned, mass death of people teleporting into a crush crowd at Mecca, landmarks toppled under the weight of teleporting tourists and bosses teleporting into your house for a "work from home" meeting, weapons and bombs being teleported into war zones...

Things would eventually find a new normal and teleporting food and resources around would remove the need for ships and trucks, you could explore the world much more easily and there would be lots of science to do in hard to reach places, marine biologists would have a field day exploring the deep ocean, doctors could teleport cancer cells out of patients, space agencies teleport probes, bases and astronauts to the moon and around the solar system...

Like it would be such a huge upheaval with so many implications. It's interesting that people really fixate on the "would I die though? What does dying even mean if I'm still around?" part, even though I think that's maybe the least interesting thing. I guess it taps into a very primal survival instinct?

Sleeping is just teleporting 8 hours into the future and life is just continuous reconstitution anyways.

Warhammer 40k: Can I interest you in a trip through literal hell?

With the current constant scanning an analyzing and advertising pushed on us, I'd stay far as fuck away from any teleporting service....

If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.

Would you trust Google Instant Transport Services to not tune your personality to be more favorable toward products from their ad partners, or just slightly tune your political opinions to be more inline with their own.

Just a slight adjustment, an active protester against new datacenters would become less aggressive, a random person starts buying more Pepsi instead of Coke, a change small enough that no one notices a big change in behavior.

Also, would you trust that your memories would stay private?

I am mashing my thumb raw by obliterating X.

I’d use a teleporter with no hesitation. What’s important is my memories and sense of self, not the actual meat it’s in. I could find out I’m a copy of myself right now and not be bothered.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us Captain Picard gets taken over by an alien energy being. It hijacks his body and he teleports himself into a cloud of dispersed particles in a nebula. They spend more than an hour trying to recover him, and are about to give up, when Troi senses his consciousness, and they are able to reconstitute him through the transporter. This, and other mentions of "mental energy" in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.

Anything more involved than that gets into philosophical debates about whether or not you die every time you go to sleep, and is about as useful a conversation as whether or not you can "know" if you are or aren't a brain in a jar.

The bit I find worrying is that you'd have to trust you will be 1:1 reconstructed at the other side.

What happens if there's an error on the reconstruction side and it either fails to reconstruct you back properly, or at all?

Or what if some malicious party injects something into, or removes part of your reconstruction?

There'd be no way for you to know from the other side, so you could just be killed or maimed in an instant, and there'd be nothing you could do to stop it

"What if instead of landing craft, we just used some kind of teleporter thingy? It'd be a lot cheaper over all."

"Great idea, Gene. I'm sure this won't have any future story repercussions that get way out of hand!"

Star Trek teleporter: fax machine / shredder combination (remember that time the shredder bit malfunctioned and we got double Riker..?)

Wormhole: just a weird long gateway (with a chance of spaghettification). No problems there unless it somehow takes you through some sort of hell dimension or something.

Stargate: somehow both, because let's be frank, the Ancients were kind of dicks. (Also, didn't actually need the whole buffer thing, that one Orlin built in Carter's basement with a box of scraps was completely analog, no computer bits, and it worked just fine until it didn't.)

The Machine

The ship of thesis is “the ship of thesis” because it is the ship that thesis is using. He could hop off a trireme and on to a “boston whaler” and it would be the ship of thesis.

Edit: you must live with me spelling sin. I will not alter time and reality to correct that which is.

The universe is a hologram, and our physical brain is just an antenna tuned to the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness exists separately to your body, so if the transporter builds an exact copy of your body (and brain) you will just tune back in to your same consciousness when you're done transporting.

I was thinking about IPoAC the other day and had a horrifying realisation of it's implications: teleporting someone will involve moving enough data to reconstitute an identical human being from the sending to the recieving teleporter, and assuming storage technology grows in a similar way, there will be a point where it's faster to be downloaded to a drive, strapped to a pigeon, and flown to your destination for reconstitution than it will be to wait for the data to transfer over.

Well, Vulcans canonically have souls. Maybe everyone does?

I used to think like that, but I have my doubts. Doesn't "Realm of Fear" show that you are conscious during the transfer process? So it's kinda like growing new brain synapses and starting to be conscious through them instead of old ones?

So the real dilemma here is if you believe in a spirit or after life. Essentially you wouldnt ever get where you were going. But you would.

Honestly, who's to say that somewhere in the infinity between every second consciousness doesnt jump from one location to another breaking the continuation of persistent matter.

y'know, it is interesting how fear of teleporters is handled but never stigma against teleportees. this hypothetical star trek grandparent is very understanding, but in the early days of the technology i can imagine many people wouldn't be

This happens now to you every night. Your stream of consciousness ends forever and a new one is created upon waking.

Pleasant dreams