Tractor beams and "startrek" type transportation

[Dustin Kesselberg]

I just read an article on scientists transporting proteins in beams of light or something like that.

My question is this..

If/When scientsits figure out how to transport large things by scrambling their atoms or molecules and then transporting them over a long distance only to be put back together at the destination...What would this mean for consciousness?

If your entire body including your brain is taken apart by the atom or molecule doesn't this mean you're dead? Technically speaking you're dead. No consciousness. Even IF you're put back together at the destination the new you with your same atoms won't really be "you" but will be someone else with your atoms or molecules. Your consciousness will end and then a new consciousness will appear at the destination once put together.

Transporting life would destroy the consciousness of that life only to re-create it at the destination. You'd die and be dead. You as you are now would end..Done..Dead. But the atoms you consist of would be used for another "thing" identical to yoruself physically and mentally.

This would be sort of like copying yourself but destroying who you are now. The "Copy" would be made of your atoms and molecules and would be physically and mentally identical but you'd be dead.

Discuss this.

 

[Starthinker]

I just read an article on scientists transporting proteins in beams of light or something like that.

My question is this..

If/When scientsits figure out how to transport large things by scrambling their atoms or molecules and then transporting them over a long distance only to be put back together at the destination...What would this mean for consciousness?

If your entire body including your brain is taken apart by the atom or molecule doesn't this mean you're dead? Technically speaking you're dead. No consciousness. Even IF you're put back together at the destination the new you with your same atoms won't really be "you" but will be someone else with your atoms or molecules. Your consciousness will end and then a new consciousness will appear at the destination once put together.

Transporting life would destroy the consciousness of that life only to re-create it at the destination. You'd die and be dead. You as you are now would end..Done..Dead. But the atoms you consist of would be used for another "thing" identical to yoruself physically and mentally.

This would be sort of like copying yourself but destroying who you are now. The "Copy" would be made of your atoms and molecules and would be physically and mentally identical but you'd be dead.

Discuss this.

Wow, this is something that always bugged me about Star Trek. You'd appear in the teleporter, knowing full well who you are, have all your old memories and personalities and even "feel" like the teleportation didn't effect you, but in reality you were just created and given all that. The real you died on the sending end. In fact, I always thought they should meet a race that believes this and would have banned transporters from use in their area.

Then I thought, well, if you are the same then what would it matter? It WOULD matter, as you would be dead! It's a hard concept to put into words.

On a side note, it's nice to know I'm the only one who thinks of things like this.

 

[Dustin Kesselberg]

Wow, this is something that always bugged me about Star Trek. You'd appear in the teleporter, knowing full well who you are, have all your old memories and personalities and even "feel" like the teleportation didn't effect you, but in reality you were just created and given all that. The real you died on the sending end. In fact, I always thought they should meet a race that believes this and would have banned transporters from use in their area.

Then I thought, well, if you are the same then what would it matter? It WOULD matter, as you would be dead! It's a hard concept to put into words.

On a side note, it's nice to know I'm the only one who thinks of things like this.

Absolutely. I find it hard to believe the writers of startrek didn't think of this or make up some explanation of why this would not occur.

In reality if your atoms were broken up you'd be dead. Simple as that. Even if you're put together you're still dead and the new you is a whole different consciousness.

I found it was hard to try to explain it though also as I was posting it.


Such transportation technology would be a great benefit to society but I don't think life should ever be transported. It would kill the consciousness present in whatever it was that was transported.

Transporting materialistic things like food or whatever else seems fine. But life? Noway i'd ever allow myself to be "De-atomized".

 

[Shrinker]

If you think of it as taking a snapshot of the person, memories, thoughts and all then disassembling the body and mind, the new guy at the other end won't have any memory of the disassembling part. Becasue it happened after the snapshot, that experience dies with the owner. Now, what if it turns out that it's the most excruciating death ever? Nobody would ever realise, and would put themselves through it repeatedly. Eek!

 

[kedo1981]

Not to commit on the “science” of trek but wouldn’t the transporter be the most powerful weapon in the trek universe; think about it; Kirk was all the time beaming onto enemy ships with so much as a “who goes there”. Why not beam a low yield nuke onto the Romulin “wessal”

 

[Dustin Kesselberg]

Not to commit on the “science” of trek but wouldn’t the transporter be the most powerful weapon in the trek universe; think about it; Kirk was all the time beaming onto enemy ships with so much as a “who goes there”. Why not beam a low yield nuke onto the Romulin “wessal”

Because it takes away from the drama in the story?

 

[Hazen]

There's no particular need to send the matter itself to the destination, only the information on how to build it. You could then manufacture a new 'you' at the receive end from local material. But then you would have to kill off the original you at the send end. Roger Penrose covered this in 'The Emperor's New Mind'

 

[JohnF_73]

As a former Trek geek, let me point out this issue has been done in Trek.
(Can't remember which of these appeared in non-canonical sources. Some did, I'm sure.)

Dr. McCoy (original Trek) hated Transporters for such a reason.
The idea was brought into the show that before you transport something, it's surrounded by a stasis field first. (To explain why the actors freeze-framed just before the special effects kicked in)

This was ret-conn'd in Star Trek II (the movie) when they had people talking during transport. This continued in several of the movies.

They then got the idea of the 'matter' stream (by now we're into The Next Generation territory) so that individuals could be conscious within the matter stream and during transport.

So to sum up, originally, they glossed over the philosophical implications of the transporter and consciousness. Then they technobabbled their way out of it.

 

[Ziggurat]

Not to commit on the “science” of trek but wouldn’t the transporter be the most powerful weapon in the trek universe; think about it; Kirk was all the time beaming onto enemy ships with so much as a “who goes there”. Why not beam a low yield nuke onto the Romulin “wessal”

Actually, they were pretty consistent that you couldn't transport through shields. You either had to catch them by surprise or knock their shields down first.

What I always found confusing was why they could only ever fire a few torpedoes at a time. Seems to me like they should be able to launch hundreds at a time, have them swarm the enemy ship all at once to take down its shields. I also don't recall torpedoes ever getting shot down - seems to me like they should have some more active counter-measures than just the shields.

 

[JohnF_73]

Kirk was all the time beaming onto enemy ships with so much as a “who goes there”. Why not beam a low yield nuke onto the Romulin “wessal”

Aside from the 40,000 km range of the average Federation transporter, transporter beams couldn't go through shields.

 

[JohnF_73]

What I always found confusing was why they could only ever fire a few torpedoes at a time. Seems to me like they should be able to launch hundreds at a time, have them swarm the enemy ship all at once to take down its shields.

I seem to recall that the yield of the photon torpedo was so powerful, it could damage your own ship (if you were close enough and had no shields). See TNG Season2, Q-Who (first appearance of the Borg).

Presumably, if you launched many many PT's at nearby enemy vessel (has to be near, or they'll warp out of range) then the resulting BOOM would quite possibly damage your own ship, shields or no.

 

[Starthinker]

It wasn't a weapon for boarding enemy craft as the "shields" prevented this. Also, in several episodes they showed that they not only remember being transported but they carried on conversations during the transporter process and even saw and rescued men trapped in mid-transportation that were able to communicate their predicament. I never bought any of those situations.

It might also be pointed out that in some of the books and in one of the movies, I think, the transporter was used to transport bombs into other ships and such.

Edited to add: I see you all beat me to it.

 

[Crossbow]

Star Trek Geek Alert!

The book The Physics of Star Trek discusses how the transporter technology proves that humans do not have a soul since the transporter converts the matter of the body into energy, then reassembles that matter in exactly the same way but in a different place. Since it only functions with matter (and not anything intangible like a soul), and the person is the exactly same at the other end, therefore, humans do not have a soul.

By the way, in the episode "A Taste of Armageddon" the way the enemy attacked was with fusion bombs materialized over there targets. So transporters can be used as weapons (at least in Star Trek TOS).

 

[Dustin Kesselberg]

Let's stay on topic here...

 

[Bronze Dog]

Of course, souls have the magical power to recognize their freshly reconstructed bodies and travel faster than light to them, therefore Crossbow's argument is refuted.

 

[Ziggurat]

Presumably, if you launched many many PT's at nearby enemy vessel (has to be near, or they'll warp out of range) then the resulting BOOM would quite possibly damage your own ship, shields or no.

With an r^2 dropoff to any possible blast effect, doubling the range of a torpedo should allow you to quadruple the number you can safely deploy. Doubling the range of a missile in deep space should be easy, and the payoff quite significant. No reason not to swarm them.

 

[Ziggurat]

Back on topic, let me propose a few hypotheticals to further complicate the situation. I'm going to ignore the part about moving, because I think that's not actually where the interesting question is.

So we start with a situation where we break up a body into individual and separated atoms, then reconstruct the person with those same atoms in the exact configuration they were in before we disassembled them. This looks to me a lot like we've killed the person and made a new one.

Now suppose we put the person in perfect stasis (all motion and activity halts completely and instantaneously), then pull them out of stasis (all motion and activity resume as before). In this case, I think we haven't killed them.

But what if you cut the person in half while in stasis (right down the middle, so the brain gets cut in half too), then put the two halves back together again, then pull them out of stasis. Did you kill them? I don't think so, but this isn't quite as obvious a case.

What if, instead of 2 halves, you cut the person up into 4 pieces before putting them back together again? Or what if you don't cut through the brain? What about 100 pieces? What about a billion pieces? What about 10^24 pieces? Obviously, if you cut them into enough pieces, then you're back at our first case, with the sole provision not made explicit before that the breaking down into pieces happens after the body is placed in stasis. Would that provision alone be enough to draw the line between the person getting killed and an exact copy being reproduced? If the non-cut-up body is never killed, but the atomic-level deconstruction is killed, which step should be our dividing line (no pun intended) between whether we killed them or not?

Or perhaps I have it backwards: maybe simply putting someone in stasis is killing them, and reviving them is really creating a copy. That interpretation is unsatisfying to me, but from the hypotheticals I've constructed, it's the only consistent, non-arbitrary answer I can come up with other than to assume that none of them is killing the person (which I find even more unsatisfactory).

 

[aggle-rithm]

Back when I was in junior high, after Star Trek was cancelled but before any of the movies were made, this issue was covered in the book "Spock Must Die!" Dr. McCoy was arguing with Spock and Kirk about the transporter, and he asked "Haven't you ever considered the fact that you die every time you get in the transporter?" or something to that effect. Kirk and Spock weren't bothered by it. I found it pretty disturbing at the time.

(The book was pretty non-canonical. It described the ship as being on the other side of the galaxy, then rushing back real quick when a crisis came up. It also talked about ships going into "subspace" when travelling FTL, and said that they would look wierd and distorted when viewed in this circumstance. Was he trying to explain crappy special effects?)

Edited to add parentheses, since this is off-topic.

 

[Timothy]

Star Trek Geek Alert!

The book The Physics of Star Trek discusses how the transporter technology proves that humans do not have a soul since the transporter converts the matter of the body into energy, then reassembles that matter in exactly the same way but in a different place. Since it only functions with matter (and not anything intangible like a soul), and the person is the exactly same at the other end, therefore, humans do not have a soul.

What twaddle! Who's to say that a "soul" isn't an inherent property of the particular combinations of subatomic particles that makes up a body? That is, if anywhere in the universe there exists the exact arrangement of particles that represents your body, a soul will spontaneously generate to inhabit it.

Since no one has (and by some people's definition, no one can) measure the properties or characteristics of the soul, putting arbitrary constraints on when and where souls exist is nonsense.

(A lot of other things are nonsense, too, in my opinion. Can you guess oneof them?)

- Timothy

 

[Anti_Hypeman]

What about the 2 Rikers? People can be duplicated so why dont they all just back themselves up before dangerous missions?

Trying to make sense out of trek is completely impossible unless you ignore all the time travel episodes and Voyager.

It also bugged me that they were so fond of beaming down and figthing wars at close range with hand phasers. No artillery, tanks, robots, rockets, or defense systems better than ducking behind rocks.