If you're teleported, do you die?

I would hope the consciousness that is lost in transport gets a pass to heaven... or an afterlife.

It would suck if it was a "Do not pass go. Do not collect $200 dollars. Go directly to hell.

Then as soon as the new you transports again the soul in hell gets replaced and suffers until the third one gets stupid and transports again.

Or maybe there is just max. two souls and they keep switching.

earth-transporter-hell/transporter/hell/transporter/hell

ad infinitum.

Same with cloning...Imagine the Confusion at The Gates of heaven...

You can't both be on the list Sirs...one of you must go elsewhere...

hi holy,

if your to be teleported it would only be with an aliens ok!its quicker to take your "soul orb"leave your body"running on idle"and move through the galaxy/universe that way.in this solar system"ships"are used.sleeper's blog from his thread im coming clean on et best describes this blogs on p27 appox and is listed througout the legendary thread-melbourne australia

Dennett's Brain

The philosopher Daniel Dennett has thought long and hard about most of the questions we're discussing on this thread. His thoughts, including some provisional answers to these questions, are to be found in his famous essay Dennett's Brain, published in 1978 but still highly relevant.

I don't think the second method mentioned by Nohup in his post is covered, though.

[edit on 14-3-2008 by Astyanax]

Originally posted by Toelint
The interesting thing about Star Trek transporters is the writers never actually tell the audience how they work.

But at least they (the writers) give us visual clues...

consider that as the operator in control of the teleporter slides the
teleporter handle forward the subjects become less 'solid'

(note that the person and all the equipment they take with them
become momentarily 'frozen'...I'v never seen motion in the transporter process)

the inference is that the people and objects a relatively quickly disassembled, turned into digital energy, projected at the speed of light
to any point where 'sensor readings' are reliable/available, and are converted back from digital energy and reassembled into the original item or biological person on the spot.

The transporter 'beam' which is more of a 'carrier' should not be interrupted, or else the 'memory' contained within the 'carrier beam'
will degenerate, and the transported person will become scattered
in that immediate area of space.


i recall in different episodes, when the transporter got interrupted
from ion storms or whatever, the subject was temporarly 'lost' but seemed to remain in a sort of teleporter 'bubble', which the viewer seen as a very nebulous human form, which became more and more 'solid' as the teleporter lever was slid backward to the starting position.
~all the person caught in a teleporter bubble could do was pantomime
as voice and sound was not possible in the transporters' carrier 'beam'~

excellent topic! I believe that it would just be a clone and that continued conciousness is not possible if you are teleported. I guess its because I dont really believe in a "soul".

there was a great thread on another site I read about this. cant find the link but you should be able to google "beam me up scotty, secular web" and find it

Are you guys kidding me right now? everyone knows when you teleport you don;t die, but you do get out of your parents basement. Great topic

RE: the Star Trek beamer-up mabob:

OK, so in Star Trek Next Generation season 6 episode 4 Relics (I just looked this up, thank you imdb.com) the crew is shocked to find a ship that crashed 75 years ago, and even more shocked to find that Scotti is aboard--well, he's not technically aboard, but he has been digitized and has been running in a loop in the beamer-up machine for the past 75 years. He manages to be reconstructed, but his friend's data was too garbled and deteriorated to be of any more use. So the people are most decidedly turned into digital material.

As for the actual topic at hand, I would have to say it does depend on whether or not you remain in your own atoms at time of transfer/digitization, or if you are recreated with new atoms. Of course, provided that all your energy remained converted, you are for all intents and purposes the same person. So, maybe you are a clone, but can you tell the difference?

On the other hand, I also remember the "interrupted" looking people, all fuzzy and indistinct, which leads me to think...maybe they're using Willy Wonka technology and they're actually transporting people on TV waves. You know, like that chocolate bar and Mike Teevee.

If you were teletransported would you die?

If they were ever real then there is one thing you could be sure of - You would never get me in one to find out!

hello everybody
i read before about the atom teleporting in a previous post, and just wanted to say that the original information is destroyed before the "teleporting" happens its the information thats moving
-so if you google quantom entanglement for referances
-another big issue about teleporting is that people think that you have something called a soul, and that it's not made of matter, well unfortunately we live in the real world and out conciousness is nothing more then the patterns of neurons in our brains that make up our memories feelings and thoughts, (it's alittle more complicated but i think you get my point).
there is no soul to move, just a pattern of information, wether you think that patern needs the same matterials its made of to transfer with it
(im tired and lazy this morning so please dont mind my quick explenation and spelling)

reply to post by doctormcauley


Well theres the whole issue with thereprobably not being an afterlife, atleast in a scientific viewpoint.

But presumably, in a wildly hypothetical situation, a "soul" would go to heaven.

I agree it depends on how you are being teleported. But lets go this way just for fun

You are dissembled in New York. The information about your atomic structure is then sent to LA. You are then recreated on the other side.

Now, lets for fun assume all body functions (heart beat, breathing) all function as normal.

Did we just create a new life?

Originally posted by Shadow_Lord

You are dissembled in New York. The information about your atomic structure is then sent to LA. You are then recreated on the other side.

Now, lets for fun assume all body functions (heart beat, breathing) all function as normal.

Did we just create a new life?

No, its not a new or unique 'life',
it's a re-constituted life... think of instant mashed potatoes...

a spud from the loam/humus/dirt was ripped from its nutrient source (aka heaven?) the sud was then pared, sliced/diced, cooked, then dehydrated for storage life and shipping/handling.
Then the box of dry (disassembled) spuds are sent cross-country (at less than light speed) when you add water to the disassembled & transported spuds...
Are They new spuds? or are they only reconstituted spuds, original and not clones !

We did not map out the genome for that particular spud, and send that info across time/space, for a highly exotic computer crucible to cook-up or create a copy.

There--- you've answered your question

There is just one thing that you need to remember when referencing Star Trek....Although the mechanism of their transportation was supposed to dematerialize them then re-materialize them somewhere else, they were sill conscience and AWARE while in the matter stream!!!!!! So if it is as most of you have stated that what comes out on the other end is nothing more than a perfect copy, how does the "mind" follow?

Could it be that while yes the transporter is basically killing off the old you and using those molecules to build a new you, that the energies that are held in us, our "soul" if you will is somehow reattached also?!?!?!?!?! Basically they are not allowing the energies in our bodies to dissipate, upon death of the original "you".

Sooooooooo the way I see it while the original person is destroyed the soul, conscience, life energies, what ever you want to call it, are sent through the matter stream and materialize along with the new body!!!!! It is thereby the same you only with a new body.

Originally posted by Shadow_Lord
Did we just create a new life?

In that case, yeah. You created a duplicate. Theoretically, if you were able to record what you did holographically, you could create a thousand copies of yourself. All of them apparently alive, in any way we can currently define it. As for a "soul," well, I've never seen any particular proof of such a thing existing.

The Star Trek transporters have been explained in a little better detail in the novels, which are a good, brainless read. The idea is that the particles in the disintegration are not duplicated on the other end but actually transmitted via the carrier wave. So it's not a copy of the person, but a reintegration of the original bits and pieces. It's the carrier with the wave pattern that's held by a delay in the transporter buffer. There's too much information to store it in anything like a computer memory. Supposedly, this will ensure that your soul is transmitted along with everything else, so you're not dying, just being moved.

The food replicators, however, are only synthesizing duplicates of smaller, simpler things, so they use memory-stored images to recreate their stuff. It wasn't available to Captain Kirk, but Captain Picard could get his tea that way. It was only possible after memory availability grew, thanks to advances made by folks like cyberneticist Noonian Soong.

The Prime Directive (never to interfere with a non space faring culture) was violated many many times

However there were several Ultra Secret Prime Directives, that had built in safeguards
that were never violated, one of which was:

There was nothing (but this Ultra Secret Prime Directive) preventing re-use of the digital info in the pattern buffer, everyone was told one thing, but the shutdown command (levers pulled all the way back) also erased,
deleted, purged all info in the pattern buffers, Scotty was able to survive as the shutdown after reconstruction didn't occur for many years.

The point being that if this information had gotten out the transporter technology would have been banned. Star Trek Transporter tech only worked over fairly short distances due to the the soul transfer taking place not thru the molecular beam but thru normal OOB and remote viewing, the silver thread only reconnects over short (in space terms) distances. This was the main reason Bones hated Transporters, he suspected that they all were vulnerable to possesion (or loss thereof) for a split moment during the reconnect of soul threads.

If the pattern buffer was reused (early experiments proved this) a body was
created with no soul and was quickly inhabited by denizens of foreign planes of existence.

If anyone read Battlefield Earth the Transporter control was protected (in this case from duplication and analysis) in this same fashion for many thousands of years. The protection worked until someone very stupid
gave the secret away.

A Theoretical Treatise:-)
I won't get into the orphaned soul catchers placed on many moons
in the Galaxy to rescue lost souls

also the food replicators likely didn't serve soul food

[edit on 14-3-2008 by Eagle1229]

[edit on 14-3-2008 by Eagle1229]

reply to post by Incarnated

Energy Cycles? Isn't matter involved in energy? Or is this another dimensional shift concept? The more we talk about this the more I am inclined to believe that the star trek version leaves a lot of room for cosmic interference. What is your soul gets hijacked. heck maybe Mr. lear's moon based soul catcher will grab it. Kind of reminds me of that Schwartzeneger flick. ( sixth day?) about cloning.

reply to post by TXMACHINEGUNDLR

Good point. probably won't be a volunteer, might be an inmate in a NWO refugee camp. Whoever he or she is they are going to be able to write one hellava book after.

The first subject being transported will most likely be a religious fanatic, a military volunteer, or a combination of both. Makes sense IMO.

Unless there was a humane reason for becoming the test pilot for such a device. I must say, the pioneers of aviation, and test pilots of new engines have done great things for the rest of us. One quick point that I will like to bring is that the transporter seemed to use lots of energy in the first ships of the Star Trek Universe, not counting that they were mostly not moving. It seems that the energy required to decode your body plus creating (or riding) a wave at the subatomic level is to much. Even for the powerful generator capable of sending a huge ship and the crew in to warp 10; or something to that effect.

I just remembered! There was an episode of Startrek TNG where Will Riker was duplicated by a transporter malfunction, where safe guards sent his signal back to it's origin but the signal was also sent to the destination. The Enterprise (and the Will who made it to his destination) found the Will that was sent back to the planet many years after the event. Because Will had arrived at his destination, nobody had suspected that he had also been sent back to the planet, and the Will on the planet was abandoned. It was one of those stories where you just think "this is so neat".
So, there may actually be some concept inconsistencies within Startrek.

Hmm, well, it's my opinion that the "other you" would actually be you. It wouldn't be just a copy. But we don't know for sure. What could we do to prove such a thing anyway? How could we prove it's the same person and not just a copy?



[edit on 16-3-2008 by GrayFox]