i am not touching that devil’s elevator as long as i live.
So does everybody else.
Y’know how there’s the DS9 episode of the sniper who teleports bullets? Yea, I would transport my penis into people then beam it back. The medicine will be there, so it will be like some invertebrates who can rip off their penis so the female can use it to impregnate herself. It’s just the obvious move to make moving into the future, obviously.
I did not have breeder fetish teleporter sexual assault on my bingo card.
Why would you not just transport the sauce? Don’t gotta send the whole dog if octoberfest is the goal.
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
Remember Enterprise (the show), and how the Teleporter was only for cargo due to its newness as a technology?.. but one episode they used it on people for an emergency and ended up with debris stuck in their bodies upon rematerialization?
Aldebaran’s great, okay,
Algol’s pretty neat,
Betelgeuse’s pretty girls,
Will knock you off your feet.
They’ll do anything you like
Real fast and then real slow,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I don’t want to go.Take me apart, take me apart,
What a way to roam
And if you have to take me apart to get me there
I’d rather stay at home.Sirius is paved with gold
So I’ve heard it said
By nuts who then go on to say
“See Tau before you’re dead.”
I’ll gladly take the high road
Or even take the low,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I, for one, won’t go.Take me apart, take me apart,
You must be off your head,
And if you try to take me apart to get me there
I’ll stay right here in bed.Go Stick Your Head In A Pig
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.
That works for teleportation that needs a receiver, like for a phone call. In ST you only need a transmitter, so it’s more like a wormhole whose far end you can put wherever you want.
You would like Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth saga.
Excuse me sir or ma’am (or none of the above) do you want to co-write a movie? lol this is an amazing premise if it hasn’t been done (and my apologies if you’re referencing a movie i’m not aware of)
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.
The universe is a poop and our physical brain is just a toilet plumped into the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness sits inside of your body like diarrhea in a butt, so if the transporter flushes your consciousness down the doodoo shit pipe, you’ll just fill it up again like toilet water.
Interesting concept. There could be a sci fi story about the brains of two intelligent creatures on vastly distant planets whose brains happen to have the exact same tuning and are attached to the same consciousness, with full awareness of both lives. How they cope with this would be fascinating. On Earth they would probably be considered mentally ill. Or maybe the story is that this is fairly common and is what’s really going on behind a lot of people’s mental problems.
What if the transporter makes an exact copy without destroying the original?
Decoherence swiftly followed by complete cognitive collapse.
Then the copy gets a new consciousness but has all your memories.
Thanks Hugh
What drugs aren’t you on? And can I come along?
No drugs- just look into holographic universe
Yeah, it’s what’s known as a conspiracy theory with zero evidence
Dmt probably, and youll have to ask the entities in the waiting room for that
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?
There are a couple old sci fi stories that feature “time tourism”, where they have to stop sending people to popular events like the crucifixion of Jesus because they’re getting overcrowded. Robert Silverberg’s novel Up the Line and Garry Kilworth’s Let’s Go to Golgotha! In one of them the time travelers vastly outnumber the locals, and swing the vote to release one of the thieves instead of Jesus, because that’s what the travelers think they’re supposed to do.
Can I just teleport the poop out of my colon and the piss out of my balls, so I don’t have to get up to go to the bathroom?
But that would enable bioterrorism, where you teleport your waste into the body of someone you want to kill. We would all have to wear tinfoil suits.
Or you could eat whatever you want and then teleport it out of you. No more fatties – unless they like that shit.
Where are you storing your piss again?
Piss is stored in the balls
Depends on how the technology works. It’s more likely that you would need someone’s how to receive or both ends, even if it were technically possible to just teleport randomly from point a to point b I feel like that feature would be disabled on commercial models precisely to stop the above from happening.
I would be the guy who says, “Open-source teleporters only.”
I ain’t risking having myself modified surreptitiously. 😑
uses teleporter
is inexplicably desperate to try the New Improved Coca Cola
In that case if you’re a union leader, you just get deleted
But if they were open source they’d have the worst name possibly, and possibly an equally awful UI.
I guess we can be glad that “the GIMP” is taken so nobody will reuse that for a future FOSSeporter
The first one wouldn’t have a ui, it’d be a Unix-style command, probably called tsck, or killu or something.
- Bob’s Alternate Teleport Engine - A reimplementation of the standard protocol.
- Ben’s Unified Teleporter Template Placed Largely Under Ground - You do need to dig a big hole, but the result is very neat, with just the teleport pad and controls showing.
- Complex Linear Indoor Teleporter - Works like a corridor, letting you just walk from one building to another.
For number 2 there’s a derivative which can also vibrate, which is said to make the process much more pleasant. Oh and it’s entirely built out of rust, nobody really knows why though.
The faster you walk into number three, the sooner you reach the destination.
But you need to have the endurance to make it to the end.
The important part is to start with the acronym and then try and figure out what it can stand for.
Yes. The H.R.U.M.F. principle!
FOSSeporter makes it sound like everyone is dancing lol
No worries, its not you that was modified its your clone. Youre dead!
have the kids ask the grandparent if they voted trump. if so, which it probably is. just means the grandparent is nothing more then a moron with nothing but nonsense and lies for their arguments.
In the Star Trek universe transporters were invented in 2124. The grandparents wouldn’t have been alive to vote for Trump, unless there is another Trump in Star Trek canon I dont know about.
And the eugenics wars were in the nineties, so Trump would have probably been purged by Khan and his fellows long before Putin even came up with the idea of making him run for president.
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.
Yeah but once you step in the teleporter you stop being. The copy is only useful for other people to keep interacting with your clone, but the actual you is dead.
What happens to “you” several years from now when every cell in your body has been replaced by mitosis?
So what? There would be persistent awareness. The new me would remember everything up to the old me’s death and keep living. I’m fine with that.
As far as you know. You wouldn’t know what they modified.
Id be more fine with not remembering but to each their own
There’s no “actual” you. Your body creates a sense of an “I”. If you copy that body including the brain, the copy will have the same. You wouldn’t say that the copy’s sense of smell is somehow different, so why make a distinction for the sense of self?
A man cannot step into the same river twice
I think this idea and confidence hold extremely true until you think about Elon Musk.
I have no idea what you mean lol
His machine would not work very well.
Actually, now that I think about it, it’s far worse than that. If a company has a teleporter that can build a copy of you, they can also build an almost-copy of you. Say, a copy that is less rebellious. More obedient.
Yeah, the idea’s cool in fiction, but in reality I would never touch a machine like this. I will walk my ass over in analogue.
I’m a biologist. Perfectly recording something is very very far removed from understanding something enough to make targeted modifications.
Specific changes, maybe. But broad ones? “Uehhh, make the amygdala smaller. Squash it. … Well, find a mapping of a guy with a smaller one, then. Do like a copy paste.”
All I’m saying is they would try, and trying is enough for me to nope the fuck out of all of it.
Who guarantees the copy is exact? I don’t think we can do checksums on living bodies.
We can, but we won’t.
Try new Coke.
Well I imagined we were talking about an imaginary sci-fi technology. Obviously it would be more complicated and possibly at risk for some kind of manipulation in real life. If I were presented a teleporter where the only fault is a philosophical question about being a copy, then I don’t mind being a copy and my original self dying.
That feels like a very different statement than saying you don’t mind stepping into the teleporter knowing you will die while a copy continues from where you left off on the other side.
yeah I did realize that after thinking about it. Still I’m not sure. I guess it depends on what that experience is like.
Everybody says it’s fine
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.
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.
muscle cells too. the muscle cells you have now are the same cells you had as a kid (not entirely sure how far back it goes). they dont even divide when you gain muscle, the cells just get bigger and absorb nuclei from neighboring cells to support the extra mass. the cool thing is the nuclei stick around even if you let the muscles atrophy, so theyre forever changed by having once been big. thats probably part of why its easier to get back to muscle size youve been at before.
Just believe we’re inside a simulation and transporters won’t matter.
Its kinda crazy actually if you think about it, our ability to anticipate actions is our ability to land in outcomes expected to be made by the reality generating around us if you imagine the reality outside our bodily sensory input as a big monte carlo field of potentials in the form of intertwined variables…like a big llm.
Will they anti matter then?
That is why nervous system damage usually means life long problems. Brains and all their wiring are so arcane and complicated, even our bodies don’t know how to grow more than one of them, and we often don’t get it right the first time either unfortunately.
Well clearly you didn’t get it right.
But what about the atoms/molecules that make up those neurons? Do they last a lifetime?
So far that we know of, neural cell DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines, never have their atoms replaced.
Which is to say that we are a ship of theseus, and a transporter does not kill us. The only reason these atoms are not normally replaced is because there is no natural mechanism to replace them.
Radiocarbon Dating of the Human Eye Lens Crystallines Reveal Proteins without Carbon Turnover throughout Life Lynnerup N, Kjeldsen H, Heegaard S, Jacobsen C, Heinemeier J (2008) Radiocarbon Dating of the Human Eye Lens Crystallines Reveal Proteins without Carbon Turnover throughout Life. PLOS ONE 3(1): e1529. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001529
Not sure I would tie my identity to my neuron DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines. Definitely agree with you that we are living ships of Theseus. I’m pretty sure there’s no natural mechanism to replace those parts because it’s really hard, and we work “well enough” without being able to.
Yeah but we don’t know if consciousness lives in the meat or in the chemistry.
Yun Tianming: am I joke to you?
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…
A transporter is just Jason Statham in a suit. SCNR
Iirc Thomas is not Will’s copy. Basically the transporter has a malfunction where Thomas and Will are both constituted on a transporter pad. So both are the “original” and also both are neither. In a sense, the William Thomas Riker who stepped onto that pad that day ceased to be, forked into two different lives.
I used to use this episode to talk about identity when I taught ethics back in the day. Both men carried on their lives under the belief that they were the same man who stepped onto a transporter pad on Nervala IV. Their experiences defined who they were, demonstrating that it’s more than biological material that makes any one of us us.
Now the deeper question is: since you can’t add matter to the universe, what’s missing to give life to two Rikers?
The energy that was used in the original teleportation. I didn’t think it was that deep, it used more energy to reconstitute more matter.
Sounds like trek had the technology to copy people. You would think if they are sending people out into the unknown to explore galaxies light years away they would just send a copy. Or at least keep a copy.
I wonder what earth piccard would be up to…
Just copy Data everywhere.
You know what, now that your mention it, wasn’t the explanation that the signal was reflected back to the surface due to the ionising radiation of something, so the beam was kinda split or doubled. So my premise was wrong.
Yeah. They tried to split the beam to account for the radiation, half of it made it through, the other half mirrored back. I’m guessing the computer can extrapolate the remaining matter based off of data saved in the pattern buffer?
Either way, Thomas Riker was way under-utilized in Star Trek. I also love how “okay, sure” everyone is about this situation.
Someone needs to. At least you put thought into it.
To transport just means to move, so if anything the term “transporter” implies physically moving people rather than copying. The term “teleport” is the more ambiguous one…
The are other methods from Star Trek that could potentially be size as well.
Like “hey you actually travel through this other dimension where your physical form is undisturbed and no time passes in this dimension”
Which sounds ok, but “by the way it’s kinda a hell-dimension and your consciousness gets tortured for a distance-relative time there but won’t retain the memories after…”
Stop giving your time to corporations! W this, T that. They have played us for absolute fools, there is no need for economy class.
Seize the means of eldritchticity production comrade, don’t believe any nonsense about colors. The trains are always on time under the F co-op too.
Oh dear lord. Yeah I could definitely see a variant where the hell dimension is just “work all the hours that it would have taken to traverse in normal space so that EvilCorp can generate profit for the pan-dimensional empire”
Well, no, “transporter” means the first one, because that’s how they’re explained to work where they’re called transporters.
I’m glad you did.
Now I understand why such and such movie about magicians calls the trick “the transported man”.
his lack of death is considered a transporter accident
Must do wonders for his self worth! 😄
They both got converted into energy, Thomas is just as much a copy as Will. Also, apparently your experience is constant across the process, as seen by Barclay grabbing someone out of the matter stream. Presumably someone would notice if it hurt…
Isn’t Tom just another copy? He came out of the pattern buffer the same as Will iirc.
Yet he is the one treated like the copy…
no matter what, they were like 1000th generation of copies. “the original” died when riker stepped into the transporter for the first time. so discussing whether this one is 1001st, or 1002nd generation seems not that exciting…
Warhammer 40k: Can I interest you in a trip through literal hell?
Also: what kind of immortality would you like?
Hmm… ironic immortality! I have eternal life, but grow increasingly more weary and numb to it’s joys until I wish for the sweet succor of death that will never come.
Sounds realistic as hell that
I don’t think that would be real. People become bitter and weary because they get old and their bodies start hurting and their minds failing more and more.
If you stay sharp and fit, you won’t get bitter.
They become bitter because they don’t know how to handle their own minds. Hence being immortal gives one far more time to learn, but does not make learning inevitable
This is so blissfully optimistic that I’m not even gonna try to bring you back down to Earth with my weary bitterness.
Teleporting will be so expensive and energy intensive that only billionaires will do it. It will be orders of magnitude more disruptive to the environment than private jets. You won’t have the luxury to worry about your molcules.
