• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Here's something that bothers me about teleportation.

nkarafo

Member
Ok so lets say in 500 years from now teleporting is mainstream. But how do we know its the version that doesn't kill the person who steps in?

Lets say its the only version thats possible and it completely destroys your atoms and makes a perfect copy of you on the other side. That copy thinks nothing bad happened and believes teleportation was succesful. But he is just a clone. The original person is destroyed. How can you prove that other than spying on the inventors to see if they want to use it?
 
It's a plot device. If you have a machine that can literally put every atom of your body in another place in mostly the right order, why do you even need to go there in the first place? Nothing in Star Trek should be happening. They should just be teleporting robots or teleporting devices that project holograms, or whatever that look like them, and that they can control. I mean at the point you have that kind of technology it's hard to understand why people are doing almost anything that looks like normal human stuff.


Half the stuff that goes on in Star Trek only makes sense if you,


1: Believe that people actually outlaw a bunch of technology due to ethical considerations and people only rarely get away with breaking these laws. That an intergalactic government has actually gotten people to not use their technology to develop certain weapons or ways of waging war, except in very limited circumstances which are either backstory or the plot of individual episodes.


2: People largely do not commit ridiculous war crimes or use futuristic equivalents of nuclear weapons or child armies.


3: People in the future are incredibly uncreative and are not risk averse.


Assuming they can't use robots for whatever reason, does anyone think they'd let the Captain or even someone close to that level on half the away missions? I mean I get that there is a real question about if you got taken apart and reassembled somewhere else if that's you, but most of Star Trek seems ridiculous if you just get a little bit creative about what you could do with the kind of tech they had. I really liked Star Trek, but seeing how technology has developed and some of the clever things people do with it, I have to suspend so much disbelief when I watch it.
 
Last edited:

justAjohn

Member
Ok so lets say in 500 years from now teleporting is mainstream. But how do we know its the version that doesn't kill the person who steps in?

Lets say its the only version thats possible and it completely destroys your atoms and makes a perfect copy of you on the other side. That copy thinks nothing bad happened and believes teleportation was succesful. But he is just a clone. The original person is destroyed. How can you prove that other than spying on the inventors to see if they want to use it?
Put´em in the Schrodnger´s box, maybe?

Seriously now, if the process of it could be observed, then you could see the destruction and the creation, but if no one is allowed to observe or record the process, then the perfect copy is virtually as good as the original. If there is no meaningful or distinguishable difference, then aren´t they the same thing? Maybe the difference would be in the resources spent - just the transporting one needs energy to do the teleporting, but the recreating one needs the actual material to create the copy for the completion - wouldn´t that be the tipoff?
 

nkarafo

Member
Put´em in the Schrodnger´s box, maybe?

Seriously now, if the process of it could be observed, then you could see the destruction and the creation, but if no one is allowed to observe or record the process, then the perfect copy is virtually as good as the original. If there is no meaningful or distinguishable difference, then aren´t they the same thing? Maybe the difference would be in the resources spent - just the transporting one needs energy to do the teleporting, but the recreating one needs the actual material to create the copy for the completion - wouldn´t that be the tipoff?
its the same thing for the observer but not for you if you use it. Because if you do you will die. Your clone will continue life for you but you won't be here to see it.

Would you still use the teleport if you knew that information?
 
Last edited:
its the same thing for the observer but not for you if you use it. Because if you do you will die. Your clone will continue life for you but you wont be here to see it.

There is also a question of, if there is a such thing as a soul, does it go with you? Does God move it from here to there? Or is it somehow contained in the atoms? Maybe everyone that's been teleported is now soulless and their soul is in the afterlife going like "wth, my body is still out there running around?" There were religious groups in Star Trek, but I never really understood them beyond they had a belief in God, and in the case of the Klingons they basically had a form of viking like paganism.
 
its the same thing for the observer but not for you if you use it. Because if you do you will die. Your clone will continue life for you but you won't be here to see it.

Would you still use the teleport if you knew that information?

Does the clone know he/she is a clone? Or will the clone just think everything is normal after the teleportation?
 

nkarafo

Member
Does the clone know he/she is a clone? Or will the clone just think everything is normal after the teleportation?
The clone will think everything is normal since the state of the brain is copied 100% so all the memories are intact. This is why i think its going to be hard to prove there's death involved.
 

justAjohn

Member
its the same thing for the observer but not for you if you use it. Because if you do you will die. Your clone will continue life for you but you wont be here to see it.
Then that posits that humans are more than just biological bodies, but also have some unbiological "soul", which would mean that upon the completion of the copy, even though the biological parameters are the same, the soul issue is different. Your teleporation would have to account for the affixation of the soul to the body as well, and it would have to be the very same soul of the body you teleport. If you don´t account for that, then no soul might be affixed to the body at all, or some other soul would be affixed for some reason so the new soul would act differently with the same body, which would make the change readily obvious.

Then you might say, so they create the perfect copy of the soul as well and put it in. But then we go back to your original question and modify it to reflect this - HOW can you tell if the teleportation was done in this way IF they make a perfect copy of your body and soul and put it in the body and nobody knows it was done this way (except the people that oversaw the procedure, and they won´t tell you, because that would spoil the fun)?

Well, if you have the technology to do that, then how about you get the Deathclock scan (the clock tells you how much time you have left until death)? The pre teleportation dude sees the time until the teleporation, teh new dude sees the time until death or the next teleport. By your rules, he has memories so he would know the difference.

There is also a question of, if there is a such thing as a soul, does it go with you? Does God move it from here to there? Or is it somehow contained in the atoms? Maybe everyone that's been teleported is now soulless and their soul is in the afterlife going like "wth, my body is still out there running around?" There were religious groups in Star Trek, but I never really understood them beyond they had a belief in God, and in the case of the Klingons they basically had a form of viking like paganism.

His teleportation method is about material recreation and destruction. If soul were some material, then that would be recreated too under his conditions. I believe soul is not material, it cannot be created as a variation of atoms or any other particles, and therefore, the only solution to
 
Last edited:
That's Star Trek teleportation. I'm all about BAMF teleporting. Let me hop through another dimension to cross space in this dimension.

Event Horizon?

giphy.gif
 

Airola

Member
Teleports move your physical body from one place to another but destroy the soul in the process. The person that comes out from the other end of the teleport is only an imitation of what it was before, there is no self-experience for that 'person' anymore, it is merely just a machine with no sense of self.

I would watch that movie instantly.
 
The clone will think everything is normal since the state of the brain is copied 100% so all the memories are intact. This is why i think its going to be hard to prove there's death involved.

Pretty sure the first teleporters made people nauseous, I think it's said in either the one of the shows or one of the movies that it doesn't actually put everything exactly in the right place just "good enough" that outside of mild symptoms you can't really tell. Pretty sure the engineer in DS-9 didn't trust teleporters for this kind of reason, but it's been so long since I watched so it I'm not sure if I'm positive what his whole hang up about teleporters was.
 
Last edited:

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
It's an ancient question. Look up the ship of Theseus thought experiment.

I can boil it down: do you think your conscious "self" is entirely comprised of the atoms and electrical charges of your material body? If you are a materialist, the answer is yes. If you believe there's a metaphysical or spiritual "self" that exists apart from your body, the answer is no.

Teleportation is just one modern version of the same thought experiment.
 

Azelover

Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams, and it was. It really was.
Maybe not people, but you could teleport most anything else. Including your consciouness.

We can do that now, to a degree.. When we use the internet and cameras, and microphones. It's basically a very early version of a teleportation, without the risk of dying. Therefore there is no need for people to physically teleport, we can just use VR and at best teleport objects.

It's not necessary to move everybody physically, when you can connect their consciousness digitally by using tools, like cameras and microphones, and body controllers., In the future we'll be able to do that, and feel exactly the same as if we were there in person.
 

SKM1

Member
Teleportation technology is so farfetched that it's mostly a waste of time thinking about it.

In the hypothetical, I would not use it. It's obvious that you die, and I've never understood people that try to argue the contrary.
 

TheMan

Member
Yeah i'm pretty sure star trek addressed this very issue. I agree with you OP- teleportation would essentially mean committing suicide and continuing on as an exact copy that has your memories, etc. To the outside world, indistinguishable perhaps. But the line of consciousness that stepped into the teleporter is dead. Fuck that, i'll catch an uber thanks
 
Last edited:
Also, if you have this technology it basically means everything you are can go into a computer (except maybe a soul part depending on how that actually works), in which case death is kind of meaningless outside of any religious/spiritual implications. Why get sad when red shirt dies? We kept a recent copy of him on the hard drive, let's just use that one and pretend like nothing happened. He'll be happier if he doesn't know he got violently murdered on an away mission.
 

Sejan

Member
What keeps teleportation from being weaponized. Its a technology that can completely de materialize someone with perfect accuracy and recreate them somewhere else. What keeps people from just dematerializing them and skipping the part about recreating them elsewhere? If that doesn't work, what keeps them from rematerializing their enemies in space, above a volcano, or at the deepest depths of the ocean?
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
What keeps teleportation from being weaponized. Its a technology that can completely de materialize someone with perfect accuracy and recreate them somewhere else. What keeps people from just dematerializing them and skipping the part about recreating them elsewhere? If that doesn't work, what keeps them from rematerializing their enemies in space, above a volcano, or at the deepest depths of the ocean?
Maybe there's some sort of galactic treaty.

Y'know. To never abuse an extremely powerful tech that could let you beam their crew into the void of space before the battle starts, stuff like that.
 

nush

Gold Member
TNG fans help me but wasn't there a whole plot revolving an episode around this with Chief O'Brien?
That was Riker and they made a clone of him when using a second transporter beam to get him off a planet becuse it was hard to get a lock. The second beam was bounced back and it made another Riker that thought he was left behind.
 

MaestroMike

Gold Member
Have you seen The Prestige?

That's how I think it would be but it'd probably be only legal for older people and not kids. I probably wouldn't mind destroying myself and rebuilding it after im like 50 years old and get 15 more years of work in as long as my future clones can travel he!la fast and Im making more dough for the fam I'm good. Probably take off a year before I do and play a sh!t ton of games before original MaestroMike gets destroyed.
 

MetalAlien

Banned
It definitely kills you. It's just like the other "you's" in the multiverse. If the multiverse is real there are countless copies of you... perfect copies. They are not you though... they are just copies. If one of them comes here, kills you, and replaces you... no one would know but the copy... but you would be dead.

Same with a teleportor except the copy wouldn't even know it was a copy.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
i wouldn't be the first in line to test it, that's for sure

what happens if you become both minds and corrupt yourself into a haze of madness

endlessly shattering halls of mirrors and all that, fuck that shit
If the system was accurate enough to recreate your brain-state, then it must be able to scan your brain state. And if they have the technology to scan your brain-state remotely with such flawless accuracy that they can recreate your train of thoughts and your memories of the day in a remote location, then you're fucked anyway. That's remote mind-reading. At any point they could dump you into space, make a clone, and alter the neurons that make you WrongThink. They could teleport out problematic sections of your brain and replace with 1:1 clone brain.
 
Last edited:
Yea so keep in mind that your body is always regenerating new cells.....so when you go to sleep at night where does "you" go when you are not dreaming ,and when you wake up in the morning are you a different person with the same memories or the same person. Have fun sleeping tonight!
 
Last edited:

MetalAlien

Banned
If the system was accurate enough to recreate your brain-state, then it must be able to scan your brain state. And if they have the technology to scan your brain-state remotely with such flawless accuracy that they can recreate your train of thoughts and your memories of the day in a remote location, then you're fucked anyway. At any point they could dump you into space, make a clone, and alter the neurons that make you WrongThink.
What if they scanned you just for medical research? It's not you it's a copy. They could torture your copy over and over and every time it dies just print up a new one. You could live out your life in peace but all your copies could be in a living hell for as long as they wanted.
 
Last edited:

Tesseract

Banned
If the system was accurate enough to recreate your brain-state, then it must be able to scan your brain state. And if they have the technology to scan your brain-state remotely with such flawless accuracy that they can recreate your train of thoughts and your memories of the day in a remote location, then you're fucked anyway. At any point they could dump you into space, make a clone, and alter the neurons that make you WrongThink.

aye

wouldn't surprise me if there's a really ugly firewall somewhere tho, nature loves its experiments
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
What if they scanned you just for medical research? It's not you it's a copy. They could torutre your copy over and over and every time it dies just print up a new one. You could live out your life in peace but all your copies could be in a living hell for as long as they wanted.
Ain't the first time sci-fi has played with the idea. There was a Black Mirror episode about a mini-You living inside your Smartwatch. A few books and movies have played with the idea of clones used for organ replacement. Then there's the idea of copying your consciousness to a cyber-brain and living indefinitely (as long as the brain itself isn't broken, or some other limitation as such). It all goes back to the idea of the self, identity, the eternal soul, death, etc.

aye

wouldn't surprise me if there's a really ugly firewall somewhere tho, nature loves its experiments
How many people would they allow to come out the other end as empty husks if it meant we could perfect it and possibly make it work? :pie_thinking:
 
So basically, if we develop the technology to carbon copy someone from one place to another (and call it teleportation), we also need the technology to transfer that person's entire consciousness in the process, or else it's basically suicide?
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
So basically, if we develop the technology to carbon copy someone from one place to another (and call it teleportation), we also need the technology to transfer that person's entire consciousness in the process, or else it's basically suicide?
Yes, in order for us to prevent The Prestige problem, we need to develop the technology to also scan people's brains remotely, preserve every thought and memory in perfect digitized form, and then send that to our magic 3D printer without ever once looking at the data or maybe even fiddling with it.

Trust me, we wouldn't abuse this technology.
 

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
Technically if you agree that you can replicate the order of every atom, then you are duplicating the consciousness of the original being as it is just another defense mechanism for self preservation.

You cannot solve “teleportation” using copy without avoiding the Prestige problem.
 

StormCell

Member
I'm no Trek expert, but wasn't there a concept of a matter transport buffer? I believe they were going for the concept of actually transporting your matter from point A to point B via a data transform method, and throughout the show you would see them struggling with transport beam degradation. The truth is that the transport bio filter maintained a perfect copy of your body -- they had no problem replicating you via the copy in the bio filter. The problems that arose always seemed to be losing the matter in the transporter beam -- whatever the hell that meant.
 

Kenpachii

Member
If you can store a copy of somebody u can make a army of the same person by just endlessly rebuilding it i assume.

Teleportation would be heavily beneficial to cure people's diseases and reconstruct there entire body's without effort as result.

It was clear in star trek they didn't go there and even got people killed and not recoverable after a certain time frame elapsed. I always though they had some time delay device that would slow the beams down to rebuild itself on the deck they wanted them. The teleporters where nothing but somekind of light wormholes that kept the body and brain intact etc but it dissapears for the viewer as the speed of light thingy.

But that's was just mine assumption.
 
Last edited:

Sejan

Member
if your teleporter computer crashed mid-transport would it give a new meaning to the blue screen of death?

If you got a virus on that computer demanding money would it be safe to call it ransomware?
 
Top Bottom