this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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I assume there's some in universe reason why they can't / don't keep copies of the teleportation data, otherwise everyone would be effectively indestructible
"Oh no the captain got eaten by a space tiger"
"No problem, I'll teleport a backup from an hour ago, he'll be there in 5 minutes"
My first thought was wouldn't that reset our memories to that point too?
Granted losing some memories or being dead is a pretty easy choice, but using it to reverse aging or other physical things would be a costly one
Would YOU lose "some memory", or would you be destroyed and the transporter would recreate a person who believes to be you from a previous point in time?
And how do we know that isn't what happens every single time someone is beamed somewhere?
Calm down Theseus
But yes, I'm on the "it's essentially a clone" and the original is killed side of that argument, so it would just be a copy of you that believes they lost time somehow until someone told them what happened
We do know they hold genetic templates, per Picard season 3. No reason they couldn't hold full templates for VIP's.
And now we know the real reason why Picard never aged....
If you'd start this game, it's hard to end it. Immortality, swarms of clones created just for labor, identity steal, and worse of all – people would grow negligent and the series would lose any stakes.
I think that at some point everyone agreed that the cycle of life is a core of what makes us humanoids and pushes us to strive for self-improvement.
It also prevents societal degradation, because immortality goes hand in hand with tyranny and lack of meaningful natural change.
That's the only real reason
That is why whenever you see old people having to wait in line or dealing with retail workers they are so understanding and polite. Which is also reflected in their voting, you know how they always want to raise taxes to pay for welfare programs they do not benefit from, peace despite not having anything at stake, and a more tolerant understanding society. Also their TV choices. I just think Fox News (average viewer age in 60s) is so gentle and naive.
I would argue that the transport buffer isn't big enough, but I think they stored a pile of settlers in there one episode.
They've done that sort of thing a couple of times, but it's always been a dirty hack that happened in an emergency. For example, in the TNG episode "Relics," Scotty put himself effectively in stasis for 70 years by setting the buffer to continually refresh itself like DRAM, and in the DS9 episode "Our Man Bashir" there was a transporter malfunction and they had to wipe the memory of almost the whole station in order to find enough space to store the command crew's neural patterns, overwriting Bashir's holosuite program so the crew's likenesses replaced the characters.
With zero knowledge on the series, I'll just go ahead and fill the lore:
They have tried it in the past with someone who died but the recreated body was just an empty entity. It had vital signs and reacted to stimuli, but it wasn't the person and didn't have a will to live.
There's no scientific explanation, it's one of the mysteries of life.
The end.
I know you said you have no knowledge of the series, but there's actually one character (Riker) that does get teleporter cloned in an episode of tng. That's probably the basis of this whole post.
And if I recall correctly they also used teleporter shenanigans to explain how scotty from the original series could still be around to rescue in tng.
So it's a bit of an elephant in the room
A wizard did it
https://youtu.be/sVgVB3qsySQ?feature=shared
I was thinking about this as a deep philosophical question yesterday. Wondering, if that technology was available would I be totally unafraid of accidental death, knowing that I could simply be restored to a recent backup. I came to the conclusion that I would still feel, and act, the same as I do now. Which made me realise that I must believe there is something more to us than pure biology as the backup wouldn't be "me". I'm certainly not religious and have no concept of what this "more than biology" might be - it just came as a logical result of my feelings about my backup.
The Trouble with Transporters
If we had these back ups, are you sure they are you though? If you died, the 'you' that you feel you are right now would be gone, but a new one based on a saved state of the old you would be born with your memories. Unless there is another form of energy our consciousness takes then we would die just the same, but with a new clone that would feel like they are a continuation of the same person.
Yeah, they're you.
If my convoluted comment made sense, it would depend on how you define 'you'. Like say there is an afterlife, if I died and was replaced by this backup, 'I' would experience this life after death, being a ghost or whatever, while a new 'me' would come about thinking they were saved and living.
It's at least as likely that "afterlife" you is a copy as any backup.
Heck, you today aren't really the same you as yesterday. You identify with yesterday you because you share most of the same memories.
That is true, and the whole 'ship of Theseus' thing. I enjoyed the game Soma, this concept is a main theme of the game
Still a difference whether you turn into a different person through change and learning or whether you end. Period. While a different person does whatever, believing to be a continuation of you.
What is the difference? If somebody stops you then restarts you, are you the same person? If half your brain is destroyed doctors recreate it from a back up and merge it with the surviving half, are you still you, half you, someone completely new?
I don't think that anybody has enough knowledge on that matter to answer that question. From the outside, it may well look like the same entity boots up in both cases, because the new version may run on the same processes. However, we do not know whether there is person #1 who simply does not return and is survived by person #2 who is and feels identical. In today's technological situation, ripping someone apart with the caveat "don't worry, we'll build a puppet that is identical to you in all details somewhere else" would not fill me with confidence.
The transporter question, the "backup" question, are only difficult if you take the body to be the "vessel of the soul", but it isn't.
The body creates the soul, or even better, the soul is a normal process of the body.
You say that there's no way to tell which is you from the outside. There's also no way to tell from the inside.
Imagine a copy is made of you while you're sleeping. When you awake, how would you tell which you were? Your only chance would be to find out what happened to your two bodies while you were sleeping, to look for external clues.
I posit that there is a way of telling whether I am. And if I am no longer, that status would stop. Whether someone else someplace else thinks they are I at that point is irrelevant in that regard at that point if I have stopped being.
Read "Schild's Ladder" by Greg Egan. It's a hard sci-fi novel where "backups" play a significant role in people's lives.
AFAIK the hand-wave for transporters is that it's not a disintegration ray slash 3D printer with a file transfer in-between. It's space magic. You are physically moved from one location to the next.
Because the implications of anything else are both fucked-up beyond measure and exploitable in miraculous ways. Consistent recognition of fan arguments for how it should work would drastically change what kind of science fiction Star Trek is. As soon as you can "restore from backup," death ceases to matter. Have as many Tashas Yar as you please. Feed 'em all to the goo monster, see if that calms it down. Or don't: crank out Soong androids by the ship-full. Duplicate your chief engineer so they both have time to sleep. Let your captain's Number One be Number Two.
But that's not conducive to horror-tinged moral dilemmas among naval officers, so it doesn't work. The minovsky particles interfere with the anti-cavorite deck plating through wibbly wobbly timey wimey shut up. Shut up is why.
Even though writers make exceptions all the damn time. Even Stargate, which is all explicitly done with wormholes and the literal physical transport of your actual material body, has episodes like "48 Hours" that are straight-up transporter-buffer scripts. Even guest-stars John de Lancie.
Do you want Eve Online? Because this is how you get Eve Online.
Off the top of my head: When Pulaski got old age disease, they just transporter beam deaged her to fix it.
In Rascals, they made several people about 12, despite them starting from various ages (from maybe 30 to hundreds of years old). Of course they beamed them back to older in the end.