The potential for the possibility that every time someone is taken apart into their constituent molecules, they simply stop living and upon reconstitution are replaced by an identical copy who thinks they are they while the original character is simply dead.
If a perfect copy is no longer “you”, that means if the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, the universe is splitting into copies unfathomably many times every microsecond. That means this universe, and by extension you, are almost certainly not the original anyway. Why would one more instance of that matter?
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t mean this, even a tiny little bit. Even if it did it’s silly to make decisions based on the hypothetical implications of an unfalsifiable interpretation.
Well, it think it’s the fact that you’d ending your current copy by ripping yourself apart at a molecular level. Like, I think the many worlds interpretation is correct, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna blow my brains out because there are infinite versions of me.
Pitch for an episode. Find a rogue starship lost decades ago and the crew is just hundreds of copies of the old transporter chief who found himself the only survivor in a past disaster. Desperate, he did the only thing he could think of to crew the ship and satisfy his loneliness. After so many years of churning out copies of himself from the decaying version in his buffer, he now believes himself to be the ideal humanoid being.
Eddington put them in the holosuite. If he hadn’t they’d just be more names added to the forgotten list of transporter accidents. The only abnormality being that O’Brian wasn’t working the transporter controls when this accident happened.
McCoy would never get in a car, or fly in an airplane, either.
We obviously haven’t seen all of the transporter accidents, but given the implied frequency of use, the chances of bad outcomes are probably pretty low. Probably lower than being randomly killed in an away mission, since that happened to someone almost every episode.
And yet, they’re juuust reliable enough that billions (possibly trillions) continue to use them on a regular basis. A roll of the dice for convenience and expediency.
It might be worth the risk of getting turned inside out (like in the first movie) if it meant I could pop to Burning Man for the parties and the pop home for a shower and a sleep.
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