Are we any closer to beam me up scotty

[Little_Nemo]

@Czarcasm

I’m asking a technical question: Is your process transportation, or is it destruction/duplication?

I don’t think I understand your question. If you’re putting aside the philosophical issue, what is the distinction you’re placing between the two?

[Czarcasm]

@Little_Nemo

I don’t think I understand your question. If you’re putting aside the philosophical issue, what is the distinction you’re placing between the two?

One is taking Grandmother’s homemade apple pie from her her house to her grandson’s house as promised. The other is not being able to take Grandmother’s homemade apple pie to her grandson’s house as promised because you dropped it, so you take the same ingredients and, using the same recipe, recreate the pie and present it to grandson as if it were the same pie that Grandmother made.

[Trinopus]

@Czarcasm

I’m asking a technical question: Is your process transportation, or is it destruction/duplication?

As noted, at this point in time, it’s a philosophical question.

If we actually had a working transporter, we could address it scientifically, but we don’t, so it has to remain an abstract question which we can’t answer now.

In threads here on the SDMB, there have been advocates for both interpretations. It comes down to a question of definitions and language.

[DWMarch]

@cmyk

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.

The device you’re describing is called the Heisenberg compensator. I don’t know what it looks like but I believe it is painted “Skyler” white.

Heisenberg compensator

[Little_Nemo]

@Czarcasm

One is taking Grandmother’s homemade apple pie from her her house to her grandson’s house as promised. The other is not being able to take Grandmother’s homemade apple pie to her grandson’s house as promised because you dropped it, so you take the same ingredients and, using the same recipe, recreate the pie and present it to grandson as if it were the same pie that Grandmother made.

Then this seems like a philosophical issue not a technical one. You put a person in one end of the machine and they get transmitted to the other; that’s the technical process. If you want to discuss whether the process kills off the person and replaces him with a duplicate, that’s a philosophical issue.

[Mijin]

@Trinopus

If we actually had a working transporter, we could address it scientifically, but we don’t, so it has to remain an abstract question which we can’t answer now.

In threads here on the SDMB, there have been advocates for both interpretations. It comes down to a question of definitions and language.

We’ve debated at length all these things in the other thread: it’s disputed that building a functioning transporter would in itself answer the philosophical question, and that it’s merely a question of definitions and language.

Stating this kind of opinion matter-of-factly here is a hijack.

[Lumpy]

@Lumpy

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 just thought of a couple of caveats: In order to avoid the various conservation problems of just how did a person’s worth of mass vanish from Chamber A, you would have to balance the transfer by using a counterweight mass (see Terry Pratchett’s Interesting Times). This leads to the question of are you really “transporting” someone, or are you using their information to turn, say, a block of iron into a person, and vice-versa. Also since no process can be 100% efficient, even a tiny portion of a person’s mass-energy equivalent would be equal to a hydrogen bomb’s worth of energy that has to be expended each time. I don’t think you could ever trust such a technology around anything fragile- like cities or small countries.

[cmyk]

@DWMarch

The device you’re describing is called the Heisenberg compensator. I don’t know what it looks like but I believe it is painted “Skyler” white.

Heisenberg compensator | Memory Alpha | Fandom

And I just pulled that out of my butt. That is eerily close to what I described.

[MacLir]

In reference to several comments on the subject:

In his books (Way Station is the one I’m recalling), Clifford Simak used a transportation system in which the station had chemicals on hand. Bodies were assembled from the raw materials to hold the transferred consciousness. Transfer out left a dead body which was recycled into chemical components. :dubious:

[Lemur866]

@Little_Nemo

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.

Tell that to Thomas Riker and Tuvix.

[Grestarian]

@Czarcasm

But that’s only half of the entire question, though: The premise is that which is left behind is destroyed to make room for the new creation. Does the original lose all human rights if it is to be killed once the copy is made? Does the original lose all human rights if the original is to be killed before the copy is completed?
Every time this transporter question comes up in a thread I try to pose this question or a variation of it: If you claim that the transporter-created copy is, to all intents and purposes, you once it arrives at the intended destination, if there were a slight glitch and the original you weren’t instantly dissipated during the original action would you be willing to to be taken off to a small room and be killed? No one who has claimed that the copy is just the same as the original has ever replied back.

I believe this question was explored in The Prestige [Jackman, Bale, Caine, Bowie, et al.]

–G!

[sweat209]

@nansbread

Since the phrase was used for the first time on Star Trek have we taken any step in the direction of it becoming a reality. Even the tinest little advancement to beam a person from one place on earth to another place on earth. Lets stay on this planet for this question.

Lets have the dope then.

Star trek has a scanner sorta of like an MRI but way way way better:):) it scan so much detail yes so much detail all the way down to cells, molecules and atoms!! We have no scanner on earth any where close to that detail.:(

It than kills you and destroys you so called a dematerialization. It than rematerialization making a copy of you!!! So even if we had this technology that can do that no one would sign up.

A persons memory, experience, character and what makes up you was part of energy or soul it would not better killing you and just sending the life force energy and than remaking you body.

But unfortunately a person memory, experience, character and what makes up you is part of your brain.:(:( Otherwise we would not have diseases like dementia, Alzheimer’s, Brain injuries and other diseases that effect the brain.

So unfortunately science today points we have no life force energy.:(:( So things like portals ( Well I love playing video games and steeping into portal and coming out some where else in game) cannot exit in real life.

No one would sign up for portal trip or transporter where there is dematerialization and rematerialization.

If there was way to go through a portal, stargate or use of transporter with out use of dematerialization or rematerialization by bending and folding space time and not killing you aka as dematerialization than you may get people to sign up.