My big beef has always been this:
Wouldn’t having every atom in your body ripped apart then re-assembled hurt like hell?
I wouldn’t. I’m one of the believers that the “Me” that goes in is not the “me” that comes out. Sure, it looks like Me, thinks like Me, talks like Me, remembers everything I remember, but it ain’t the Me typing this post. My consciousness would end when you pushed the three little sliders down. (I’ve thought about this a lot. And yes, I do love John Varley, thank you.)
Nah, all your pain receptors would be rendered non-functioning, you wouldn’t feel a thing.
I have no idea what you’re talking about here. I thought we were talking about transporters, not cloning machines.
Just curious about this remark. Do you drive or take rides in cars and cabs?
To the Op: I would not volunteer to be one of the first users or testers of a transporter, but once they were in common commercial use and replacing airports with greater convenience and hopefully similar or lesser price, I would be more than willing to use one.
Jim
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What happens if the system somehow fails to destroy the original you? Then there’ll be two yous walking around – do you flip a coin on which to destroy?
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Plus how do you really know the death is “painless”? Maybe it’s just “silent”.
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Can you imagine the potential for abuse and murder if some SYSOP goes nuts and starts transporting people to the surface of Jupiter or the bottom of the Pacific.
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Can you imagine the fundamentalist Christian outcry over this? “Murder on a MASSIVE scale!”
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What if they can keep a copy of you in the machine, edit it, and pump out modified versions? If they made me into a boy-toy for wealthy women, well, ok maybe. But with my luck I’b be all the grunts in the conquering zombia army, and then processed into Soylent Green.
No thanks. They’re going have to put ME in a box and get ME where I’m going.
If my subjective experience is uninterrupted, i.e. the new me thinks he’s the old me, just in a new location, then why not?
The only other issue is technical reliability. Every time I hop into my car, onto an elevator, into a plane, or take a pill, I’m trusting the technology will work acceptably. If it doesn’t, I may be inconvenienced, injured, crippled, or killed. We all take these risks every day. A transporter is just one more device that can help you or kill you, just like your car.
Now cars have many more benign failure modes than airplanes or elevators. At first glance it seems like, even more than with a jet, there’d be no such thing as a “minor” transporter accident.
But thinking it through a little more …
If they have the technology to scan me here & reproduce me there, then there’s nothing to say they can’t then scan the result, compare it with the original, and only if the copy is 100% correct destroy the original. Heck they could even wait 5 minutes just to be sure the new copy feels & acts OK. And if the copy is defective, destroy it using the same technique that’s used to destroy the original in a successful transportation.
In other words, because it’s just data, we get infinite retries or do-overs. Try that in a jet sometime.
Now, would I volunteer to be one of the first live humans ever sent through this new, experimental technology? Nope; my attitude is now too old for that much adventure.
But if it was a mature technology, even to say the level of the current Space Shuttle, much less commercial jet aircraft, then sure. Why not?
I don’t see why the two hours early bothers you. It takes 24 hours to fly from the US to the Phillipines, f’instance, which means you’re spending 26+ hours on the trip with your two hours lead time. If the transporter is functionally instantaneous (by which I mean you perceive no passage of time during transit, and the objective time is no more than the five seconds or so it appears to take Jean-Luc Picard), I can’t see how the two hours spent at the gate would hurt.
As for the price–how comparable is close enough? Suppose it began as, say, twice as expensive as a coach ticket at current rates? If it were popular, safe, and reliable enough, that would depress air travel prices pretty quickly. What rates, then, would seem reasonable to you?
Just wondering.
Hmm… let me answer your question with a question: If I told you that I’d just created the technology to record all your memories down to the most minute of details and then I could replay them into someone else so that new person now thought they were you, then after I did this I was going to render you unconscious and then murder you in a particularly grizzly (although painless to your unconcsious body) manner, would you let me?
Because to me, that’s exactly what the transporter sounds like.
Now, if you’re saying that YOUR consciousness continues, meaning you are the same YOU before and after transport, I challenge you to come up with a test that can prove that assertion. It’s impossible to prove that the consciousness pre- and post-transport is continuous, and since there is no way to disprove that I die and an exact copy of me then takes my place, I’ll pass, thankyouverymuch.
For a good fictional treatment of just such a situation, I recommend John Varley’s short story “The Phantom of Kansas,” which can be found in his collection The Persistance of Vision.
Sure, I’d go through. No reason not to. The only problem I have with the scenario in the OP is that I wouldn’t be the first person ever teleported, so future generations wouldn’t have to memorize my name in Teleport History class. However, I could still be the first person to bravely pioneer some other unknown teleporter-based risk. So, I’d go through while holding a ferret.
Let’s face it: if there’s no hard evidence that your soul is annihilated during teleport, then at least some people are going to do it. And as soon as people start teleporting, others will observe that the process seems harmless, and slowly lose their fear of the procedure. Soon teleportation will become routine, and not long after that the airports will start going the way of the horse-drawn carriage. People may fear the loss of their immortal soul, but sooner or later you’ll be unable to get a high-paying job if you refuse to teleport, and many people would fear that a lot more.
I’ve always though that if it worked this, it would be a very interesting alternative to suicide (or perhaps better described as simply another method of suicide).
The person transporting stops experiencing their unbearable life, yet the friends and loved ones of this person never go through the pain of losing that person.
The person at the other end of the transporter has to continue living the unbearable life, but only until he or she decides to go through the transporter also.
Heck, some argue that this is what is effectively already happening when a person goes to sleep every night.
To me any instantaneous transportation device would have to satisfy 3 rules, call them “Lokij’s Laws”
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Continuous Existence. If there is at any point in the system a moment where you cannot point to me and say “There he is” even for a minute portion of a picosecond, all bets are off. Now… I could be in a state of quantum flux, imitating an electron if you will (although this is almost certainly impossible), and be several places at once… fine.
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NO COPIES! The process must be such that it is impossible to use it to make an identical copy of myself. If you have a machine that can pump out an indefinite number of “me” then I have to worry about the potential for abuse.
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No mucking with time. If you have to fiddle with spacetime to the extent that I could also be transported in time as well as space, forget it. Way too many things that could go wrong there.
One type of transporter is a cloning machine, it’s just that the original person is destroyed after being non-destructively scanned and having their data transmitted to the destination for recreation. Does it matter whether your body is composed of its original atoms or atoms supplied by the transporter? One carbon atom is identical to another carbon atom.
James Patrick Kelly’s story “Think Like a Dinosaur” had an interesting variation on this idea; his interstellar transporters sent a duplicate off to another planet - but they did nothing to the original. So there was a person whose job was to wait for confirmation that the person had arrived at their destination and then kill the original person who was still at the departure point.
The concerns that you would cease to exist is based on the premise that the transporter works on the principle of destroying your physical form while preserving the pattern of your structure and brain energy to be reconstituted elsewhere. A new being, with the sense that they are the you who stepped in goes on its merry way, but you are gone.
However, I seem to recall that several years ago, scientists succeeded in making a photon disappear at one location, and reappear elsewhere. Not a new photon, but the self-same one (how they knew for sure, I don’t recall), essentially making it travel non-differentiably through time and space. A transporter based on that principle woul be one I’d try out.
Unless it were powered by software from Microsoft. Then no effing way!
James Patrick Kelley did a brilliant short story about a “cloning” type teleporter, “Think Like a Dinosaur”. The machine works thusly:
1.) Subject is scanned.
2.) Data from scan are sent to destination, where a perfect copy of the subject is re-assembled.
3.) After successful transmission is confirmed, the original is vaporized by a neat-o (but, sadly, not 1920s-style) death ray while paralyzed but conscious.
The plot of the story revolves around a “false negative” - the origin station is incorrectly informed that the transmission didn’t go through, and so the teleport subject is told to go cool her heels while they work out the bugs. She then decides she doesn’t want to go through with this teleporting business after all - but it turns out that the data transmission was successful, and there’s another copy of her walking around Very Far Away. So, now the operator of the transport station has to kill her - just as she’d have been killed by the transport device.
Miserable summary, I know - but it’s a good story. There was also an excellent Outer Limits episode adapted from it.
I should really preview before I post - sorry, Nemo.
Whoops! I lied.
Just checked my my recalled source Entanglement, by Amir Aczel, which has a chapter on teleportation. The particle is not transported. A second particle is given the same state as the old one, and the work was published in 1997.
So teleportation is not for me after all.
Well, that depends. Is my new body hotter or less hot than the one I currently have? Is it one of those bodies that can eat anything it wants and never gain weight?
What does it matter? You’ll be dead. Are you so altruistic that you’re willing to give up your existance so that those around you can benefit from a curvier, higher-motabolism, new and improved, better-than-last-year’s-model you-prime? 
No, my consciousness will simply be transported into another (potentially hotter-with-less-working-out) body. What this question comes down to is whether you are attached to your particular body/set of molecules or whether you think your “self” is something more nebulous that does not require your particular body. I actually rather like my body, so the new one would have to be pretty damn good to make me agree with this, but I don’t equate me with my body. In fact, I would be interested in my consciosness being transported into a male body, just to see what it feels like, assuming I could go back if I didn’t care for it.