Would you be willing to be teleported? I couldn’t do it if it were around. In my mind it is killing oneself and a copy being made. I know it is fiction, but it terrifies me.
I know, I know. It’s weird.
Ho boy, this argument has been done to death around here. I agree with you, by the way, but you will get people who swear up and down that it would be no different than when you wake up in the morning and that your stream of consciousness is only an illusion.
Thing is, I KNOW that I will be the one experiencing the events when I wake up in the morning, and everything that comes after. In the case of the teleporter, I know I will NOT, so … no thanks.
Just don’t let a fly get in the teleporter with you.
As long as it’s not during an ion storm or any variant there of, sure!
I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggie’s heart away
And I got Sidney’s leg-- D. Adams
By the time of The Original Series, the technology was a hundred years old. So yeah, I probably would.
The transporter from the series Enterprise, maybe not. But they all used it ok, mostly.
Powered flight is about a century old. Peeps still die.
I am not sure, but I think the OP was really asking a philosophy question, not a question about the transporters’ mechanical reliability.
If I recall, the transporter is described as disassembling a person molecule by molecule, atom by atom, and somehow converting it to “energy”. Then the process is reversed on the receiving end. In short, it kills YOU, and builds a duplicateYOU elsewhere.
The idea is that if the transporter is good enough to exactly replicate every atom, and in the exact state in which it was recorded as being in, then rebuilt, the copy of “you” would be absolutely no different from the original.
I suspect those who believe in an unquantifiable “soul” are going to have problems with stepping in that first time.
For background info.
It was just recently done to death and back (and then to death again, only to be resurrected so it could be beaten, poisoned, hanged, shot three times and dumped in a freezing river to make sure it was done to death properly) in this thread.
I would only be willing to use it if I believed that my essence is in my soul and that my soul went along for the ride. Otherwise the main purpose would be to make duplicate bodies to put in stasis until my current one gets old. Too bad about the duplicated brain though.
And then there was The Prestige, in which…
…the “teleporter” was actually a duplicator, and the magician using it drowned one of his two selves after each act. He never knew, though, if he was killing the duplicate or the original. Not that it mattered much.
I haven’t read the book, but what I found interesting about the movie is that there was no hint of science fiction until the second half.
Perhaps fortunately, that thread has just stepped outside the tent to see to some matter or other in the snowstorm, and has said it might not be back for a while.
I haven’t flown since before 9/11 and I wouldn’t now, but that’s not because of aircraft safety.
Transporters are safer than airplanes. So what’s your point? 
That little twisty knob/lever/rheostat thingy on the control panel that they sometimes do a wah-wah looking manipulation with? That’s the soul filter. Doesn’t work on Ferengi. Klingons portrayed by black actors don’t need it, that’s why you never saw it done to Worf.
You just have to learn how tothink like a dinosaur.
Dinosaurs! On a SPACE SHIP!
Think the Trek Transporter causes soul issues, how about the TARDIS taking us back to Adam and Eve? (As in dirty old doctors should mind their own business.)
Nothing, but nothing, built by man is infallible. Don’t believe them when they say the transporter is safer than flying.
Picard was also heard to say that they don’t “use money” anymore (claiming that the pursuit of “things” was sooo passe’), and that people “work” in order to “better themselves”. Right. Pull on the other one, it plays “jingle bells”.
Kirk said that too. (STIV:TVH) I think they meant paper and coins. They got paid via Direct Transporter Deposit.
It’s a common affliction. I called it Teleportation Angst:
http://www.teemings.net/series_1/issue14/calmeacham.html
Consider that in the very first story about a teleportation device, it went wrong, and only teleported the guy’s head. It’s as if the very first story about a rocket to the moon had it blowing up.
Then consider that the second story about teleportation also had an accident.
And that probably the most famous story (Langelaan’s the Fly) had a spectacular screw-up. They made a movie out of it pretty soon after the story appeared (in Playboy, so it had wide circulation), followed by two sequels. Then David Cronenburg remade the film, and it had a sequel, too.
Science fiction fans by and large weren’t freaked out by the concept, and it was used pretty frequently, with fewer stories anbout the Horrible Awful things that can go wrong. (and the classic the Stars my Destination looking at how they’d change civilization, as has a recent Dope Board thread) But, even though they used transporters all the time, Star Trek had its share of episodes where Something Goes QWrong with the Transporter, in all its incarnations (And it’s in the very first ST movie, too. And in the parody, Galaxy Quest. And in the first Mad SR parody, come to think of it).
I’m amazed at this squeamishness about a non-existent technology. Other non-existent technology doesn’t, by and large, elicit the same response.
I swear, if I ever invent a teleportation device, I’m getting to that sucker, and taking a fly with me.
On the quantum level, every particle in your body is already constantly disappearing into “The Vacuum” and reappearing; you don’t notice it because it doesn’t all happen at once. (This is possible, but highly improbable.) I don’t see what difference doing the same thing artificially would make, especially when you consider that our souls likely exist on the quantum level too. 