If teleporters existed, I would use them, but I’d rarely need to. Online ordering would get a serious overhaul, and I wouldn’t even need to leave the house much.
I think that there is an unexamined premise that “killing” is repugnant and immoral and this is what a large part of fear for the teleporter is stemming from. However, killing has only become immoral because life is so hard to create. If indeed, we were able to replicate humans endlessly, then I think that the moral landscape would alter so drastically that any arguments made nowadays would be views as hopelessly quaint.
But RickJay the copy is yourself (- gastric tract) so what the copy does is what you would do if you knew your were copied off of your original self in order to help your original self.
The copy would act differently for different people, and people could probably learn how to think in order to be able to be made into useful copies.
If you learnt the Zen mentality of a 15th century Samurai, you would probably be able to exist and work as a copy in a very selfless fashion. Myself if I was copied in this way. My copy would do all it can to extend its life, and avoid pain, but would neither try to help the original, nor try to harm the original. I think with some psychological training, I would be able to produce copies that would want to help the original me.
I would be totally opposed to the creation of teleportation devices.
Yes sometimes I would want one but you know what would happen.
I live in NYC. My family does not. Do you have any idea how often my mother or one of my brothers or sisters would simply ‘show up’ at my door to go have dinner with me? Do you have any idea how clean I would have to keep my apartment ALL THE TIME? You know some people move away from home for a reason you know.
As far as the copy thing goes I’ve come to the conclusion that we are what we remember.
Teleportation are FICTIONAL devices. Therefore, we can speculate any mechanism for how they work. Whose to say they have to be based on some sort of deconstruction/reconstruction technology?
They can work with any made-up technology I want, as they themselves are made-up technology.
yeah, but this is a ‘what if’ thread. sci-fi teleportation are usually based on deconstruction/reconstruction technology, while fantasy teleportation isn’t. perhaps it is because we cannot yet conceive how it would be possible to do the latter without it seeming like magic.
Wormholes. No messy clone or death business, it’s only you. That’s the only “teleportation” I could trust.
First, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie was The Sixth Day . I thought it was decent, in that Arnold sort of way. It was about clones, though, not necessarily teleportation.
Second, on the Star Trek note, in the book Federation , the famous Zefram Cochrane, out of the loop for centuries, ended up on board Kirk’s Enterprise. He had never seen the transporters before (in the TOS episode where they found him, to which this book is basically a sequel, they had only used shuttlecraft, and he never went up to the ship), and was horrified upon hearing about them. He used the same “but you get killed and reborn every time you use them” argument as many in this thread.
HOWEVER, Scott (I think - one of the bridge crew, anyway) reassured him, telling him that the person/object being transported did not die. His explanation was that the object/person’s actual original atoms were “quantum tunnelled” to the new location, so the original actually did transit that space, just in a different form - hence, not dying.
Obviously, this is mere conjecture, and their mechanism for doing this is pure fiction, but it shows that at least someone in the Star Trek world was thinking about this issue. (I don’t recall if this directly contradicts anything in the Technical Manual, but what the hell.) Since it’s more fun and less existentially depressing, I’ll choose to believe this interpretation of the technology.
(a final note: read this book if you’re remotely interested in Star Trek, as it was far and away the best “extended universe” book, IMO. Nothing else comes even close, with the possible exception of some of Peter David’s work. Several years and two series removed from active interest in Star Trek, this is the only book I still pick up and re-read once in a while.)[/geek]