i love that one. sometimes it's a giggle, sometimes it's a gutpunch, always worth reading.

That's a solid one

Oof.

Damn, that's really good.

Assuming it’s a particle transfer instead of data transmission, what the transporter does is disassemble things at an atomic scale. But it doesn’t disperse you, that’s what the confinement beam is for.

(This is grizzly, but hear me out.) there’s a 2cm hole. You obviously can’t fit through. But if you were chopped into 1cm cubes you would. What if that chopping didn’t upset you or cause pain, what if those pieces were held inside a stasis field to prevent them from falling apart or leaking? What if they were put back together perfectly in a matter of seconds. Would your body react like it was chopped into pieces? Would it even understand that that’s what happened? If you chop someone’s head off clean enough and fast enough it takes the brain several seconds to realize it’s not connected to the body anymore.

Transporters take this to the nth degree. It cuts you up into pieces so small that you can pass through solid matter as long as you stay within that (stupid strong) confinement beam. Apparently, if you are carefully disassembled without trauma and those pieces are kept in the general vicinity of each other, you don’t die AND you remain aware. And before your body can declare that something is wrong and react, you’re back in one piece.

Maybe your (carefully spaced apart) brain is confused and thinks you’re dreaming so it doesn’t get upset.

Even when you stay within the conservative rules of how a transporter behaves they are still tremendous hacks on a fundamental level.

The problem with appealing to episode details is that the transporter is presented very differently in different episodes depending on the needs of the story. That's fine for storytelling, but it means we can't pin down a fixed set of rules for how transporters work. To ponder philosophical questions we have to invent rules by picking and choosing presentations of the transporter that seem most interesting, and filling in gaps with our imaginations.

Yes, there's the episode where Barclay is conscious during transport. But there are contradictory presentations where Scotty puts himself in stasis in the ship that crashed on the Dyson's sphere, and M'Benga putting his daughter in stasis. In those cases neither has memories of time during transport.

There is the episode where Picard uses the transporter to convert himself into an energy being to try to live in a space cloud. The story is the transporter converts matter to energy, and energy in Star Trek is another possible state of living existence. Thus continuity. But there is a contradictory episode of DS9 where crew members' physical and neural patterns have to be stored in computer memory, not "pure energy", and we see holosuite character versions of them.

So there's either no suicide booth problem, or there is. You get to pick depending on which scenario you feel like talking about.

Yes but we also meant that Barkley has multiple mental illnesses, and is an unreliable narrator.

If that were the case, Scotty being stuck in the transporter buffer for 100 years would be a nightmare on his subconscious.there has to be a demarcation point where the consciousness can't function without the brain structures in place. That'd be the death point.

What would happen to the people if the buffer were to lose power or malfunction in any way? Even a small risk of anything adverse plus the degradation while being stored would make this not acceptable from medical viewpoint.

I have to wonder why the pattern must be lost in the process of materialization. I'm not saying they should keep them forever, but if they can just not delete the patterns when sending people on a dangerous away mission, they'd leave open the option of restoring them to a back up state if they get killed (or worse).

Of course, while that would raise a lot of questions to be explored in a single episode, it would lower stakes and fundamentally changes the stories they can tell, so I'm not surprised they writers don't do it.

No DNA fixes either, I guess to not break the universe, but still wtf.

there is ethics about body modification and especially about enhancing your self artificially, it's seen as a dead end because people who are artificially "perfected" end up being stagnant and pointless. experiencing aging and illness is a part of ethical behavior, or is ultimately preferable to the alternative.

But they do. On several occasions a ship's doctor has managed to completely restore a mutated crewmate back to how they were before based on data stored in the medical computers. This is only possible if the medical computer contains a full biological backup, in the form of data.

Episodes like Threshold and that one where the Enterprise crew turn into children come to mind. The latter actually involves transporters.

Send a postcard. I'll keep my ass on the couch at home.

Teleporter lets you chose locations

the wormhole seems safer, since its the prophets artificial wormhole and its stable, made more stable later in the series, not so for other wormholes, they seem to have the same dangers as random transporter malfunctions . The transporter seems fickle , numerous incidents where it had cloned, killed, merged 2 people into one, depending on the plot of the episode, or it cant transport fast enough when someone is shooting a disruptor weapon at you, ends up killing the person, or the transporter picks up some wierd pathogen/lifeforms. plus the wormhole doesnt require energy to use, so no problems activating it.

honorable mentions, is other than the ICONIAN gateway, subspace catapults, or even the caretakers intergalatic ftl dimensional rift generator/teleporter, other forms of transporters/rift/interdimensional teleporters are pretty complicated and somewhat dangerous.

Mhm. US centric 3.6. I will skip the first. Have listened to and enjoyed Bobiverse. :)

In all likelihood nobody on the enterprise is an original. The entire ship is run by >!shadow people !<

The discussion around Soma always annoys me because people tend to get really worked up and take its premise as fact, like this must be the way it would really work and there's no other possible way for things to go.

Like, for example, what would it be like if they maintained a perfect shared stream of consciousness between the original and the new body with the new body also having a copy of your memories up to that point?

Would you lose your sense of "self" and experience something like phantom limb but it's an entire body? What would "you" experience if the original body died during this hypothetical experiment? Who knows. ¯\(ツ)/¯

This is intense

Cloning is very different though. In cloning you aren't exactly copying the neurons and their connections. That means the cloned cat will learn different things, be different, just from that very fact. All it takes is one or two small daily differences in routine as the kitten grows and bam, different personality.

It's the classic struggle of how much is nature (genetics) and how much is nurture.

With teleportation the neutral pathways are copied. It becomes more of a question of what makes you "you". Is there some spirit that gets left behind? Is it the memories that do get copied? Is it merely enough that you believe you're you?