That’s not what I was asking. “Every molecule reassembled just as it was” meant exactly that to me, all the uncertainty accounted for. I didn’t mean “only with molecular resolution and ignore the subatomic level”, which is what you’re reading it as.
I was asking if Procrustus thought there was some component of personality or memories unaccounted for in a purely physical copying, even if it was with complete fidelity. It was a metaphysical question, not a physics one (where such fidelity is literally impossible anyway).
Yes. I’ll confess to not understanding how memory works, but I have a hard time accepting you can arrange molecules in a way that will create a memory.
Isaac Asimov worked some techno-babble explanations into his novelization of Fantastic Voyage that actually improved the story by adding more challenges to accomplishing the mission (refilling the air tanks isn’t as simple as stopping by the patient’s lungs when air molecules are almost big enough to see on your scale, and the wreck of the ship had to be extricated along with the crew). Digressing a bit, another nice touch was to add a “fair play mystery” element in identifying the onboard saboteur.
I should probably just stay out of this. But intuitively, if I had billions of carbon, oxygen, nickle, whatever, molecules and started putting them together, how are they going to know what happened 10 years ago on the beach in South Carolina?
Finney was crackers. “Plan for what happened after” wasn’t on the menu.
The payoff to that gag is, after the Orville crew bust out laughing and then shamefully apologize to the Butt-heads, the Butt-heads turn around, chuckle and say, “You people actually remind us of the growths around our genitals with all that hair on your heads!”
The TNG episode “Relics.” I love it because we see Scotty again. I hate it because it has a Dyson Sphere. That nobody has ever seen before. This object is two A.U.'s across and Starfleet hasn’t spotted it from half the quadrant away??
Plus, the Enterprise is orbiting the Dyson Sphere at transporter range (so, figure 40k kilometers max) and you can see the curvature of the Sphere. At even the Moon’s distance from Earth, all you would see is a wall extending in all four directions to the limit of visibility.
The Alien prequels Prometheus and Covenant committed that sin too. Colonists, people who really should know better, inexplicably either taking off their spacesuits or even just wandering about on an unexplored planet without them in the first place. At least in the original Alien film, the crew were miners and not colonists so had a plausible excuse for acting dumb when they broke quarantine.
Yes you’re right, she acted correctly and ignored Dallas’s order, then Ashe intervened (for reasons we later learn). Dallas should never have put her in that position, but his actions are pretty understandable given his character. The decisions in Prometheus are just stupid though.
The writing in Prometheus was stupid. awful film. so much wasted potential.
CalMeacham
I remember from a ‘year’s best sf’ collection a story called Chip Runner. It’s about a kid who believes he can shrink. It deals with many of the issues you describe. The kid’s therapist asks a physicist friend what a photon or a quark would look like and receives scientifically accurate answers.
How about decaying orbits as a plot device? There is no reason for the Enterprise or any other ship to orbit so low that they would experience atmospheric drqg, but every time the power goes out in orbit we learn that they have only hours before the orbit decays and they all burn up.
Here’s a radical,idea: Orbit a little higher so your life isn’t on the line every time a fuse blows. You’d think the Starfleet Captain’s manual would point that out.
Oh, and Giordi needs to stop reversing the polarity on stuff. That’s generally a bad idea.
