No Copying Allowed by John W Campbell presents a scenario where people from 1920 are baffled by a 1948 air-launched cruise missile. Same conclusion…
Getting back to the original question, and assuming that we mean “beaming” the original from point A to point B, what we have is a 3-part problem.
Part 1. Breaking the body bits down without destroying the body or killing the person.
Part 2. Safely transporting the body bits in whatever form they have been converted into from point A to Point B without killing the person. At first, they might want to try doing this via a controlled conduit rather through open air.
Part 3. Reassembling said body bits in the proper order to make a living human bean.
At this point in time we have made an ant’s fart worth of progress in any one of the three parts of the problem.
I see you’ve cut-and-pasted part of your reply from that earlier thread—either that, or your mind runs in some extremely well-worn grooves. 
As I understand it, the transporter was included in Star Trek for reasons of technical and narrative convenience, and not because the creators didn’t know or care that it wasn’t scientifically feasible.
We do, however, have a methodological breakthrough that seems to have been lost in the 23rd century: The concept to developing the above parts using smaller animals (like mice) instead of humans as test subjects.
I think you’re overstating the situation.
Part 1. Breaking the body bits down without destroying the body or killing the person.
This isn’t correct. Disintegrating the body of the person being transported is part of the process we’re seeking. Transporting somebody without destroying the original leads to the duplication problem we’ve already mentioned.
So I think this step should be revised as Part 1. Breaking down the body is such a way that all of its relevant information is recorded.
That said, we haven’t made any significant progress on such a process. We can only record the most basic physical information about a person.
Part 2. Safely transporting the body bits in whatever form they have been converted into from point A to Point B without killing the person. At first, they might want to try doing this via a controlled conduit rather through open air.
On this one, I think we’re making clear process. Once a person is broken down and recorded, it’s just a matter of transmitting information and perhaps energy. We have technology that transmits both of these and we continue to advance in this area.
Part 3. Reassembling said body bits in the proper order to make a living human bean.
The opposite side of Part 1. Even if we somehow developed a means of recording all of the information a person contained, we don’t have any means of assembling a person from that information.
This “information” you talk about: are we still talking about transporting the original from point A to point B, or creating a perfect copy at point B using information about the original?
Actually, we do have the tools, right now, to sequence and then re-write DNA molecules.
This is currently a proposal for Mars exploration. If we find Martian DNA, we don’t have to bring it back physically, but can transmit the data and build the DNA here.
This is very definitely duplicating technology (including destroying the original) as opposed to “transporting” technology, but when it comes to a DNA molecule, what’s the difference?
It’s fine and/or dandy for “transporting” technology-It’s when you get to people…
“Now that we have confirmed that we have successfully recreated you in our remote base, would you mind stepping out onto the middle of that large plastic sheet over there? Bruno will be with you shortly.”
The difference is that you are not just DNA; you are the cumulation of development, environmental influences, and experience. To suggest that we could “transport” a person by recreating their genome sequences is like saying we could transport Notre Dame de Paris to Mars by carving stone and building flying buttresses to the same plans. Sure, it would look something like the famous cathedral as long as you don’t examine it too closely, but it isn’t the same building by any practical definition. Even breaking down the structure and transporting the materials somehow to a new site isn’t going to give you the same object, any more than the London Bridge of Lake Havasu is the same structure as the original bridge built by John Rennie.
Stranger
Sure the copy is me. Just like the original is me. I wouldn’t want to die just because someone made a copy of me, and neither would the copy want to die just because there’s an original out there.
Or to put it another way, what’s all this talk of “original” and “copy”? I’ve split into two people, both of whom can plausibly claim to be the same person as the person I was before I was split.
I wouldn’t agree to be killed, no matter which of me you ask to volunteer. That doesn’t mean the thing that arrives at the other end isn’t me.
I see some shades of the Ship of Theseus problem here. In most of this whole discussion, actually.
Not really, because in this case the original parts are still there unless they are deliberately destroyed.
It’s even more distant than that. The “Ship of Theseus” paradox posits the identification of an object as such when parts of a whole are replaced; as more are replaced, the whole is less composed of parts of the original, to the point that it may be the form without any original components. In the case of “matter transportation”, the body is replicated in toto, the fidelity of which is limited to the amount of information that can be processed and transmitted, and the lmitation of the process reproducing it. In the case of Notre Dame, the Martian copy is made to the same pattern, but not of the same material, nor will it have the same characteristics flaws and intrinsic differences. It is in no way the same structure and more than one tract home is the other, even though they may be built to the same floorplan.
Stranger
You make a jump too far. I didn’t say that scanning and duplicating DNA was the same as scanning and duplicating a person. I said, “When it comes to a DNA molecule, what’s the difference.” You immediately addressed the question, “When it comes to a man, what’s the difference” – which I didn’t ask.
That’s more true than you might think. While the granite blocks on the surface were numbered and put into their original positions, they’re just a façade on a concrete structure. The stones of the interior were also transported but sawn into one-inch cubes to be sold or given away as souvenirs.
You guys are thinking too classically. There is a conceivable method of teleportation, although it bears little resemblance to the Star Trek method. It goes like this:
First, let’s postulate a Brobdingnagianly huge what-if: that some way exists to place a macroscopic object, like a human being, in a state of quantum superposition. In this (presumably extremely well protected from interaction with the environment) state the thing to be teleported exists as a wave-function of probabilities like Schrödinger’s cat. The teleportation device then consists of two chambers linked by, essentially, a pipe. Person goes into one chamber, becomes a wave-function, which starts out as having 100% probability of existing in the source chamber and 0% probability in the destination chamber. The wave function is then “smeared out” between the two chambers, then shifted so that the probabilities become 0% at the source and 100% percent at the destination. We then assume that the person can be safely decohered at the destination and step out of chamber two. This may strike some as less like teleportation and more like squeezing someone unharmed through a pipe, but we probably could do it now for single atoms or perhaps small molecules, and it would be either light-speed or at least very very fast transport.
This form of teleportation is featured in many of Larry Niven’s science fiction stories; or for that matter, the Flue Network in the Harry Potter stories.
I’m not sure if you’re asking a question about technology or philosophy.
If it’s technology, my answer is that I’m staying within the topic. I’m talking about a Star Trek style transporter; a device that disintegrates you at one location and reassembles you at a different location. So there’s never more than one of you in existence.
If you’re asking a philosophy question, something about whether you’re still the same person after undergoing such a process, then I feel that’s beyond the scope of the thread.
I’m asking a technical question: Is your process transportation, or is it destruction/duplication?
In the Star Trek style of teleportation, the technical explanation is quite simple really.
The person being teleported is put in a state of quantum homeostasis, a field that brings all matter to a stop, for a few seconds using a Schrödinger phase field transducer. This allows the sub-matter scan to make a full analysis of all subatomic states to store in the ships matter-buffer. Beforehand, a vector in spacetime has been pinpointed relative to the ship, and all matter within the buffer is transported through subspace to its final destination, where is can then be safely restored, verified and the Schrödinger phase field transducer shut down.
QED.
We’ve made no headway on this, because none of that makes any sense.
Of course, nor does transporting parties of crewmen into often hazardous situations and hostile environments rather than sending a remotely operated or autonomous probe. In fact, by the time of the New Generation show, the computer appears to exhibit sufficient artificial general intelligence (e.g. understanding natural language as well as a person, performing complex analysis give very vague criteria, navigating routes, self-diagnostics, et cetera) that there is really no apparent need for a human crew at all except to interpret data or perform specific scientific obserations. It seems more likely that the crew of the USS Enterprise aren’t the best and brightest of the Star Fleet, but more likely untreatable ADHD sufferers and social malcontents which were shipped off to interstellar space on a vessel that provides their every need including stimulation in the form of hazards and plot commplications.
Stranger