Thomas Riker is younger than William Riker, so this is observed fact, not just crazy “Jesse” theorizing…except that we continue aging when not being transported, so we wouldn’t stop aging unless the transporters were set up to keep a specifically aged body to materialize, but also have a current version of our brain. Sounds pretty complicated.
If the meme is correct that people are rebuilt at the molecular level, then cell damage would be preserved across iterations.
That said, if you have sufficient resolution and detail to rebuild someone at the molecular level, I see no theoretical limitation that would prevent actively using modified transporters to heal damage, etc.
That said, I subscribe to the philosophy that your subjective experience / perspective / consciousness ends the moment you’re first disassembled by a transporter and never resumes (i.e. transporters are actually duplicators). So it’s not the fountain of youth in any meaningful sense if transporting is modified to repair damage.
That said, I see no reason why a heavily modified transporter couldn’t be used to Ship of Theseus your whole self cell by cell, thereby completely rejuvenating yourcellf without the pesky cessation of consciousness / death. So, yes, it could be the fountain of youth.
If I we’re to create a transporter like device, I’d have it copy my brain to a robot at the other end. Then when the robot was done I’d have the new memories added to my own.
I’d possibly add some sort of death expectation to the robot mind too so it didn’t seek to continue living, maybe just an acceptance that it’d be used as a tool by possibly thousands of people.
Might cause other problems, but at no point is the human broken into atoms.
This sounds a lot like the book Kiln People (David Brin). The dittos are born knowing they have specific expiration dates and the original human can decide whether to add the ditto’s memories to their own.
So maybe transporters could be used for closing by sending the transmission twice or three times or hell just like don’t disassemble the person just rebuild them.
This discussion always gives me that sort of naseus disoriented feeling, in the good ‘makes you think scifi’ sort of way. Whenever someone brings it up I can’t help but try to figure it out and it basically goes through these thoughts each time:
Does consciousness require some kind of continuity that would be broken by disassembling our bodies (death, replacement)? Or does it emerge from the cells in a way that only requires the certain configuration of our bodies (sort of like waking up, or being unfrozen)? And will we ever know because if I teleported the way they do in Star Trek, I’d feel like the same person to me and you, so the me that left that teleporter never gets to chime in about wheter they’re still around. But then the person who went to sleep last night similarly doesn’t get to chime in either…
Also always think of that one Outer Limits episode, “Think Like a Dinosaur” with the teleporters.
This sort of teleportation also effectively kills you, right? Once you are molecularly demolished, your direct stream of consciousness stops, while “you” who steps out of a teleportation machine in a destination point is your perfect copy with implanted memories.
You die every time you go into the transporter. The transporter has a heck of a time saving your consciousness/soul. A husk that resembles you and has your memories comes out the other side, but the moment you enter the transporter its nighty night.
No it doesn’t. People always think that even though Geordie explains it perfectly well in the episode where Riker gets duplicated.
In the universe of Star Trek, matter and energy are interchangeable.
“But that’s not physically possible…” someone ALWAYS says, so I’ll cut you off right there.
It’s FICTION, and in the FICTION of Star Trek it’s always been possible from the very first episode.
Your atoms are ripped apart and converted to energy, the store in a confinement beam to prevent them scattering all over the place and mixing in with the ambient energy. A pattern is sent along with that confinement beam; basically instructions on how to convert the energy back into matter and put it together. Think of it like sending a jigsaw to someone along with a picture of how it’s supposed to look.
When Riker was cloned, it’s because Geordi initiated a second confinement beam, thinking he would need it. But he didn’t so he terminated it. The beam, however, bounced off the atmosphere. So we have a second confinement beam, and a second pattern, but no “Riker” matter. So it used the ambient energy to recreate the pattern.
That’s just how it is. That’s how it’s always worked. The “That’s not actually possible crowd” just need to deal with it.
Atoms aren’t consciousness though. Matter is energy. However, your consciousness exists in a non-corporeal sense. There isn’t a glob of atoms somewhere in your brain where the continuum of consciousness resides. They didn’t explain that on TNG.
Actually yes, there really is. Memories are just connections between neurons and synapses firing in an individuals brain. Emotions are just chemicals and hormones secreted from the pineal gland and regulated by the hypothalamus as part of your bodies endocrine system.
There is no such thing as a “soul”, or even of some magical idea of spiritual consciousness. Everything we are, every memory, thought, emotion, phobia, personality trait, intelligence…is all biological.
Now maybe this isn’t a part of the fiction, but being turned into energy sounds a lot like dying. Now I don’t believe in souls, but do they exist in the fiction?
So your getting killed then revived at your destination. Edit considering the debate in our existence is it possible that there are people in the star Trek universe that refuse to use transporters for the same reason we are having this debate. They’d probably be the star Trek equivalent of the Amish.
There’s still a fair amount of the world that wants to believe there is some inate “special” sauce that makes us conscious, when in reality it’s all chemicals, hormones, and synapses.
I suppose if we got to understand the human body well enough transporters could be used to modify you. For example like giving you a bigger dick or even more extreme, turning your dick into a fully functioning vagina.
i mean it’s effectively just cloning, which doesn’t transfer any memories made after the last scan, since it… isn’t magic…
i think dark matter is the closest i’ve seen to a show that actually acknowledges that this is how that kind of tech would work, and it’s a damn shame it was cancelled…
i imagine that in the trek universe the tech would be extremely regulated, probably only allowed to be used in situations where people are very likely to die and thus circumventing the death entirely. Now, with away missions that becomes more difficult as you can’t strictly know when someone’s actually dead, and i’d imagine the federation would look very dimly upon having two copies of people walking around…
Read an old Larry Niven story where he used this idea. Back in the 1900’s scientists theorized that aging was caused by garbage building up in the cells. If you transported and left the garbage behind your body would revert to a younger stage without memory loss.
There are multiple answers, with different degrees of truth
The patterns aren’t (typically) stored long term, something implied about transporter buffers seems to indicate they can hold incredible amounts of data that starts to degrade very quickly. New patterns are taken each time they transport AFAIK.
But, instead maybe that “cell damage” is just part of the details you get when you retain enough pattern detail to include peoples recent memories.
But, instead maybe the actors age in real life and keeping track of making them look perpetually youthful with makeup would be really hard so whatever the excuse is it’s just an excuse.
something implied about transporter buffers seems to indicate they can hold incredible amounts of data that starts to degrade very quickly
Exactly. I always understood the difference between replicators and transporters to be the level of detail in the scan. The replicators don’t need as much detail to make a convincing steak or a cup of tea. So they can store those scans at a much lower resolution and have a full, permanent library.
The transporters need an immense amount of detail to perfectly store your pattern, to avoid messing with your brain chemistry and causing transporter psychosis. It’s too much data to keep on hand for every crew member.
The book series undying mercenaries has fun with this. When a soldier dies, they can just print a new one, with most of the memories of the old one. They also hold a pattern of the body, so you come out the age you last updated your scan. There are a few quirks of galactic law involved. Most critical is only 1 copy is ever allowed at a time. Being caught breaking this law is grounds for summary execution (species/planetary, not individual).
Nothing quite like calling for an evac, after winning a battle, only to have a friendly missile drop from orbit to vaporise you (and so can be printed out back on the ship). Shuttles are slower and more expensive.
Repeat until the enemy runs out of ammo. And you only have at most one redshirt with PTSD. You could even be clever and use the dead as raw material. Take your one red shirt and make him throw the hundreds of his previous lives into the recycler. Or to save time just make a bunch more redshirts and have them do it, then have them jump in the recycler. The end result is 0 casualties, since you have the exact number of individuals as you started with
Or to save time just make a bunch more redshirts and have them do it, then have them jump in the recycler. The end result is 0 casualties, since you have the exact number of individuals as you started with
reminds me of “The Teleporter Problem” by Merryweather Media
www.instagram.com/…/Cd_kP8oKg3u/?img_index=1 - unfortunately the only non-paywalled, non-reddit link I could find (there’s a reddit post with higher quality comic strip panels)
I don’t accept the premise – the pattern is read on transport, yes? Rather than a fixed record of one’s composition. Therefore, the only aging you won’t be doing is for the duration of the transport process itself. Chump change.
Like how Scotty sat for decades in the transporter buffer. How the doctors kid in strange new worlds was stashed in the transporter buffer most of the time.
Multiple TNG references using “last transport” as a reference point for Crusher to talk about mysterious space sickness of the day.
Sure, but I don’t think those are used as a matter of standard practice. The idea of some immutable, archival pattern being used for each trip doesn’t track.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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