Because if your matter was not transmuted back and reassembled into your exact form, we would describe being disassembled into constituent particles to be a form of death?
But it is. By the simplest definitions, “death” is harm so great that it’s irreversible. If it’s not irreversible, then it’s not death. That, after all, is why we don’t regard sleep as a kind of death.
A society that’s so much more advanced than ours that they can disassemble and reassemble people on a subatomic level can probably reverse all kinds of harm that we would consider irreversible.
If in their world you can fall off a cliff, break your neck, and bleed out due to a compound fracture of your spine, and three days later they can find you, scoop out your brain, polish it off, and stick it in a robot body - a task that’s very likely easier to accomplish than transmuting your body into exotic particles, firing them off through space, and reconstituting them elsewhere - that doesn’t mean the broken corpse at the bottom of the cliff isn’t “dead” on day 2, it just means that their magitech can resurrect people.
I wonder if we are getting a bit off-topic, since the OP says “gene mutation” and not “mechanics”?
Listen, I can settle this. I got teleported, and I definitely died.
As for teleportation, I trust my genes more than I trust Gene (Roddenberry).
If we are talking gene mutations here, we are definitely talking Nightcrawler and his ilk. He doesn’t seem to disassemble, but he does seem to generate some kind of biological wormhole (which involves a strange smell at the same time).
You don’t have to die, or disassemble, to pass through a traversable wormhole. Depending on the aperture, of course.
So I was working on a jigsaw puzzle when I had a flash of inspiration. Orreries, remember them? Those increasingly elaborate mechanical installations used to explain the wacky movement patterns of the planets and moons and sun and all?
None of which were needed. The whole complexity was invented by us by our stubborn insistence on seeing the Earth as the immobile center of everything.
So maybe the ‘‘difficulties’ we are having with teleportation are something similar. If we just disabused ourselves of [some basic illusion] we would then see the obvious: if we only looked at the universe in [this other way] instead the difficulties will vanish like the dew on a sunny morning in June.
I just have to figure out how to look at things properly, and I’ll be able to teleport anywhere, anytime, any distance, any location, with no more than a tad of properly applied will.
Oh! It’s so simple! Why didn’t I realize before? Now I’m off to visit Petra, I’ve always wanted to explore that… Catch you later!
P,S, Some other genius nearly figured this out long ago. Who was it who said the only secret to flying was throwing yourself at the Earth and missing?
Bye!
Douglas Adams.
Of course, anyone with aim so bad that they miss the entire Earth when tossing themselves at it has no chance whatsoever of actually getting to where they are going.