When you have an NMR scan, the spin of every electron in your body is reversed.
No it isn’t.
I’m definitely pro-transporter. Just think, if we had transporters, we wouldn’t need trains or cars or buses or boats or airplanes! No more auto-exhaust screwing with the environment! No more gasoline!
No more airplane food (which everyone but me seems to hate. Personally, I LOVE airplane food, but I’m insane, so that’s understandable).
No more setting aside big blocks of time for travel; just -whoosh- and you’re there!
You could live wherever you wanted, and never worry about the commute to work. Like, if my job got transferred to Utah, I wouldn’t have to move! I’d just beam over there every day.
With all those benefits, the occasional molecule-scattering accident would be nothing.
re: Linus’s question about memories and personality:RNope, transport would not affect those at all, assuming your molecules got put back together right. Memories and personality are hardwired; they are a matter of synaptic structure and connections, and of neurotransmitter levels. If you’re reassembled correctly, these things would not change, any more than the shape of your heart valves, or the color of your eyes.
[Doug Adams]
I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggie’s heart away
And I got Sidney’s leg
[/DA]
Of course, any transporter technology would require a much more thorough understanding of quantum mechanics and relativity than we have now. Remember, we cannot yet even correlate those two models together. Much less base any technological breakthrough on them.
Sure, we have isolinear chips which use the properties of matter that QM predicts/describes. And we can launch men and machines into the vastness of space and base long term time events based on our rudimentary understanding of relativistic theory.
But teleportation, or “spooky action at a distance” is barely now being explored in equations. A real life test? Not for decades, IMHO, if at all.
The search for an explanation of quantum gravity is perplexing the most capable geniuses of our day.
*Take me home…
Quantum foam…*
Nope. Not what I said at all. Read my post again. I said what if all the pieces were put together including the proper memory and personality, yet it still wasn’t you? What if, the moment that you dematerialized, you ceased to exist and what was materialized was a new person exactly like you in every way.
Let’s look at it this way: suppose I was able to read you down to the last atom and make an exact copy of you. It lives, it breathes, it has your memories and personality, but is it you? Call it what you will: soul, consciousness, essance, spirit, katra - whatever the thread is that keeps you attached from one moment to the next, whether it be spritual, biological, or existing at some weird quantum level - does it survive the tearing down and rebuilding, assuming such a thing is possible? I dunno.
I delve into this further at the risk of being labled the guy who gets all serious in these threads. But I’m just sick enough to think that this side of it is fun too. I also notice that you’re the one who responded both times, Kn*ckers. Must be the Spock in both of us. 
There was an amazing sci-fi short about something like that way long ago…
Transporting was commonplace, but, it was your copy that was reassembled, not you. You stepped out of the booth just as you were, becuase you were read only, not torn aprt and reassembled.
The clone/copy/transportee had all your memories, feelings, whatever, but is was your copy. Not you.
The protaganist was a series of this guy being transported/copied into a very hotile environment. The last copy died.
A previous copy fell in in love with a copy of someone the original didn’t even know existed.
An unusual but thought provoking look at this very question.
One would have to have quantified and qualified data as to what exactly the mind is as opposed to the mere synaptic constructs of the brain. It’s been discussed in GD before. (The mind/brain thing, anyways)
We may as well ask when did God (should he exist) bestow a soul on man? Did Homo Erectus have a soul? Or just Homo Sapiens Sapiens? Or was it even later in the lineage of Homo Sapiens Sapiens?
Questions like that would have to be answered before any viable transporter could be used. If not answered, then shown (once and for all time) to be based on erroneous conclusions/delusions.
Bottom line? IMHO, ain’t gonna happen. Most surely not any time soon.
Speaking of sci fi stuff…I’m working on a short story that puts a spin on this new technology:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99993243
Far out, eh?
Oh, and just for fun:
I love the Peekaboo Phlox in Decon.
I don’t have anything to say, because I’m still embarrassed about being so Spocklike as to have responded seriously to Linus’ philosophical questions. I really need to remember to be more frivolous in these threads. Bewcause IMHO, there’s not nearly enough frivol in the world.
Oh, okay, fine.
As regards not being “oneself”, even if transport went perfectly, I guess that would prove the existence of a soul (or a spirit, or whatever word you prefer).
It would be a damned interesting piece of science, if it ever came to pass. And it would surprise the hell out of a lot of scientists (myself included).
viva - you totally have the best links ever. The Peeping Phlox is most amusing indeed. 
To quote Mr. Scott:
“Any good Scotch will do that.”
I’m agnostic or an atheist, depending on what day of the week you ask me so this whole soul conundrum doesn’t bother me since I don’t believe in it. To me, the sum of who you are is your mind and its synapses, not some ethereal spirit residing somewhere in your body.
With that being said, I can still understand where Linus is coming from, even if we have different interpretations of what makes us, us. If I were to be transported, my mind’s continuity would be interrupted, and possible even destroyed, and then either reintegrated or created on the terminal at the other side.
But if you have the same genes and the same memories, isn’t that all that matters in the end? Sure, the original copy (i.e. you), either interrupted or destroyed, might not survive but an exact copy that believes he’s you and, in fact, is you so far as anyone can determine will. Of course, lacking any sort of faith in religion, this doesn’t bother me whereas it might bother anyone else.
(Did any of that make any sense?)
And, by the way, I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to transport, NCB. I’m no Stephen Hawking but I’m well aware of some of the more stringent limitations standing in our way. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for one. I’d still like to feel it though.
Put a quarter in the vibrating matress at Motel 6.
We’ll leave the pattern buffer on for you.
I’ll be nice and not ask.
Monsters of the Id.
See? It all comes back to what is it that actually makes you you.
If one nueron was left out, or one synaptic channel was severed, who knows what you would end up with.
Remember, it’s not just memories, but also aspirations, feelings, hopes, yearnings, both known and unknown that make up the PERSON of who you are.
Where does the the desire for learning about a certain subject lie? What makes a person fall in love with some one else? Where do your dreams come from? And I don’t just mean REM sleep. What physical, measurable things or forces or events on a quantum level (if that’s where they indeed lie) cause a person to reach out to an ideal? What atom or enzymic function controls curiousity? And we shouldn’t forget all the autonomic functions of different organs.
So, it’s not so cut and dried, is it? How much processing power would be needed to handle the tranfers? How much memory would you want committed to keeping you pure through a transport?
Give me a shuttle, I shant be transporting.
In order to ha
Read The Science of Star Trek. It has a whole chapter on transporting and why it’ll never work.
Good book. Highly recommended.
ve me remain me.
Nor will we travel faster than light.
In the nineteenth centur, engineers calculated that a steam ship could never cross the Atlantic under it’s own power, for it could not carry enough coal.
Don’t forget that the Sonic Barrier couldn’t be broken and that if we detonated a nuclear warhead on Earth, it’d combust our atmosphere.
By the way, that book might have been The Biology of Star Trek instead. I can’t remember.
The sound barrier was merely an engineering problem.
FTL travel violates laws of physics as we know them now.
And my steamship analogy violated the laws of phsyics as they were known then.