Star Trek vs Glasshouse - transporter technology and its implications

Cafe Society
1

I’m currently reading Glasshouse by Charles Stross. The story is something of a mystery in the far future, where humanity has spread across the stars, and developed to the point that they’ve integrated electronics and biology. I haven’t finished it yet, so no open spoilers on plot resolution.

However, what I find fascinating for the purposes of this thread is not the plot, but rather the ideas that Stross investigates by embedding it into the story premise. In particular, their society has developed Star Trek-like transporter technology in two manners: they can teleport over small or vast distances instantaneously; they can deconstruct anything, including themselves, into constituent parts at the molecular/atomic level and then reconstitute the objects/bodies from the stored pattern.

The actual mechanism of the technology is somewhat different between the two universes, but I don’t really want to get caught up in that, unless you can find a way that the mechanism effects the outcomes. From my perspective, the mechanism of Star Trek is mystical technobabble that doesn’t really matter, just gives cover for the desired outcome. There are minor differences in the results of each mechanism; in particular:

a) Star Trek transporter technology has limited distance whereas the Glasshouse T-gates (trasport gates) can cover interstellar gaps.

b) T-gates seem destination linked, whereas transporters can be adjusted to go anywhere within their limits.

c) Glasshouse T-gates don’t actually disassembly people, they are more like wormholes, whereas the disassembly tech in Glasshouse is a separate piece of technology, an Assembly Gate (A-gate). The A-gates don’t transport, they merely construct/deconstruct, but the patterns in their buffers can be sent electronically through T-gates. The effective results of the combined technology is disassembly and teleportation, then reassembly.

d) A-gates also incorporate the idea of Star Trek replicators, in that they can build anything from scratch from feedstock and a pattern.

There may be other distinctions that I can’t think of at the moment.

So you’re asking, “What is the point of this thread?” What is fascinating to me is the haphazard way that Star Trek throws out this amazing concept and then ignores the implications. Every once in a while, some story will reveal some new way to twist the technology for some novel solution to some problem, but then go back to ignoring that capability completely. While I understand this is largely the result of several factors and basically describes much of the approach of Star Trek as a whole, what caught my attention reading Glasshouse is how Stross delves into exploring the ramifications of what it would mean to society to have this technology. In truly fundamental ways, it would reshape society, and Star Trek fails to grasp this.

Here are some of the implications that Stross brings to light:

  1. A-gates mean that humans can scan their patterns, then rebuild themselves. This means that illness and injury are largely curable simply by jumping in an A-gate and running a cycle.

  2. Not only injury, but long term chronic illnesses are a thing of the past. Diabetes? Reprogram your code. Poof. Heart disease? Rebuild. Smoke cigarrettes? No worries, every day you rebuild your lungs from scratch, no risk of cancer or emphasema or any other health risks.

  3. Hell, nobody has to be overweight, or shorter than they want, or the wrong race, or stay a consistent race, or stay the same sex, or be less muscular than they want, or have too small of boobs or too big of boobs, or any kind of physical impairment or dissatisfaction. Lose a limb? Grow a new body. Want to get neat spikes stiking out of your skull? Forget pain, just rebuild your body with the spikes in place.

  4. Humans aren’t constrained to the “orthohuman” body plan. You can have 4 arms, or two heads, or flippers, or even integrate with mechanical aspects and be a cyborg or a robot with a human consciousness inside. Want to be hung like a horse? Hell, you can be a horse. Or a Centaur. Or a midget with a cock taller than yourself.

  5. Because people can be generated from stored patterns, there’s near immortality. You die in an accident? The network senses your demise, and restarts a copy from your last backup. There’s no more definitive life span, people can live for centuries simply by rebuilding their bodies from scratch every day.

  6. In order to deal with the effects of effective immortality and the idea of boredom from having done everything, or deal with significant crippling loss of a loved one, or deal with bad history you want to forget, doctors have developed medical technologies to selectively erase memories, and can be either fairly selective or paint with a broad brush. Memories can also be downloaded and later restored, if you desire. It is not clear how this is done or implemented.

  7. Because human bodies can be reconstituted from stored patterns, you can clone yourself, and make an exact duplicate of whatever your last backup, or current run through the A-gate. You can make multiple copies, each one fully independent.

  8. Because human bodies can be reconstituted from stored patterns, and you can rebuild your body to any shape you like at the molecular level, identity theft is a very serious concern that has to be dealt with at a systemic network level. There are complex but unexplained processes for ensuring a person’s “inner identity” regardless of the appearance.

  9. Embedded computer technology is an essential for this society. Everyone has an embedded network connection and is in constant contact with the net. This is part of the identity validation process as well as synching up time across galactic distances.

Each of these concepts interweaves with the others to show the ramifications of how having the ability to do (1) leads to or necessitates the others. This is a very well thought out and integrated set of concepts, making the universe feel very real, even though it is significantly different than our own. I find all of these ideas fascinating, and the way it all plays from one or two basic concepts of A-gates and T-gates means this is not only believable, but it is hard to see how these ideas are not necessities of the technology.

Which is why I bring up Star Trek, and its woeful inability to consider just what transporter tech would mean.

Anyway, I want to share and explore these concepts here.

One complication that I see that is assumed by Stross and not addressed is the idea of core identity. Stross asserts through implication that by properly recording a person’s “state vectors” and such that a person’s full identity - self - can be stored and replicated. The you that goes into an A-gate and gets ripped apart at the atomic level is the same you coming out of the A-gate rebuilt from scratch. Perhaps you get different enhancement modules, or personality tweaks, or social behavior patterns embedded (one group embed themselves with biological responses that are the thing we call “falling in love” so that they automatically and always feel those in each other’s prescence).

At a fundamental and philosophical level, this question is not something I think we can answer, it can only be assumed by faith. There’s another thread (I think it’s a Dr Who thread) where I tried to make the point from another story where perhaps that exact copy is not, in fact, a continuation of you, it is a fundamentally different person who just has all your memories, feelings, personality, behaviors, etc. A spiritualist can understand this argument, arguing that there is something to existence beyond merely brain chemistry. But it doesn’t take a religious person who believes in an insubstantial soul to wonder about what a break in existential continuity really means. But like I said, this question is probably not answerable other than by deciding how you feel about the issue. If the person on the other end of the discontinuity has your memories, thinks like you, feels like you, behaves like you, believes he is you, then is it you?

Okay, TLDR. Please respond to any points.

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Just because Star Trek didn’t fully explore the concepts (or chose their particular way of realizing them) doesn’t mean that all of science fiction has done so. Have a look at George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral series, which was completely written before Star Trek aired (except for a single much later story), in which many implications of transporter technology change human civilization. (Even Star Trek started considering some of this later – the idea that “gold-pressed latinum” was used as a medium of exchange because it vcouldn’t be transported.) Or read Larry Niven’s “Theory and Practice of Teleportation” in All the Myriad Ways, or his "Flash Crowd’ stories that gave the name to social media-inspired flash crowds. Or Dan Simmons’ teleportation-based society in the Hyperion series.

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While it is true that latinum can’t be transported, its value comes not from that, specifically - in fact, the inconvenience of that no doubt makes most people wish there was a different medium of exchange - but the fact that, for the same reason, it can’t be replicated. (Transporters and replicators are the same technology, just built to different tolerances - you couldn’t press-gang an industrial replicator as a transporter pad, at least for humans or animals, as it just doesn’t have the resolution, though if you needed a replicator, you could use a transporter pad.)

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But that is precisely the point I was making – since it’s the same technology, teleportation is essentially replication, which is what was the issue in Venus Equilateral.

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There was a recent thread in Great Debates on the subject of teleportation which covered some of the points you raised above, put me firmly on the ‘a copy isn’t the same as the original’ side of the debate.

Regarding ‘Glasshouse’, of Charles Strosses works I originally read and really liked, ‘A Colder War’. ‘Glasshouse’ was the first and so far only full-length work of his I’ve read. While some aspects of the story were interesting I couldn’t get over the fact that I don’t believe the technology would actually work as described (well it would work in a physical sense but I don’t accept several of the main premises behind it) and the overaching sneering cynicism of the storytelling, something that afflicts far to many otherwise talented British sci-fi authors these days.

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Within the bounds of ST transporter technology, an exact copy as done in TOS is a lot easier than the edited copies which appear to be possible in TNG. For instance say you want to do something and eliminate a tumor. You run the patient through the transporter, and whoops - there is a vacuum where the tumor was and various parts of the body collapse into it. Say you want to cure someone by eliminating a bacterial infection. Recognizing all germs and their mutations is going to be a bit tricky. Replicating is fairly simple, backing up should be simple, but editing on the fly is not necessarily an obvious application.

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Irishman, we recently had a huge transporter thread in GD about these very same concepts.

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I certainly didn’t mean to suggest so. I just was juxtaposing Glasshouse with a very common cultural representation of transporter technology that relies on its usage heavily, so much so that it defines the common understanding of the tech.

I have read Hyperion and will have to look into some of the others listed.

I would be interested in further elaboration.

It’s a fair question of whether the technology for that kind of screening would be more complicated. The theory is that the computational power required to record the state vectors of all your atoms and such is already going to be far in advance of what we currently have, so IDing and tracking viruses and bacteria as opposed to skin cells or whatever is possibly going to be a small portion of that. On the other hand, it could reasonably be argued that the two phases are different levels of detection and processing, so it wouldn’t be so small at all.

However, editing on the fly isn’t necessarily required. You store the pattern, run it through processing filters, then build from the template. Stross proposes it takes around 15 minutes to fully deconstruct and reconstruct a human adult. This could be drawn out to allow processing time, if required. The key to implementation is that the assembler reads the electronic pattern and builds from that, so making changes is making changes to the pattern file. Thus the flexibility in A-gates that perhaps transporters don’t have, but replicators apparently do.

But note there is are various episodes of Star Trek where the transporter is used to screen out some flaw or illness or whatever. Just for instance, what about the episode of TOS where Kirk is split into his two halves? And then reintegrated? Or the episode of Voyager with Tuvix? Clearly they manage it in some cases.

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What are the opinions as regard the philosophical implications? If your body was disintegrated at the molecular level then reconstituted, how do you know the conciousness that comes out on the other side is yours i.e. your perception? Every time you are transported you could be dying and ceasing to exist as a sovereign being, and a new version of yourself could be created. The new version would not necessarily sense the difference, but the person who went in could be dead. In short that when you stepped in you died, and another biologically identical copy of you was reassembled and went on with it’s own life, indifferent from the motivations of the self which you pursued.