By the Law of Theseus, does it matter?
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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By Grabthar's Hammer, by the Suns of Warvan
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Since Picard 3 it’s canon that the transporter is a meat printer that relies on cached DNA to do shallow copies.
Hacking that cache was the big plot reveal of how the borg-changelings infiltrated starfleet.
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It would be interesting to have a series where they take the best of the best Starfleet personnel, intentionally copy them with a transporter, and stick them on their own ship to do an extra dangerous, super difficult mission.
Intentionally send them on Boarding runs to take over other ships.
But then of course eventually you will have the problem that you need one Picard to rule above all others. Space is apparently only so big - given the constant politics.
Your body replaces most of its cells over the course of about a decade, give or take a few years (except for brain cells, which admittedly throws a wrench in my point). What’s not to say it didn’t kill the version of you 10 years ago?
Further more, think of yourself from 1 day ago. Can that exact version of yourself still act on the world, or is that version effectively dead as the result of your mind changing over time? That exact version of you isn’t somehow carried on by soul.
In some sense, the very continuity of consciousness could be viewed as a continual process of death of the old self; all the transporter does is create a brief gap in that continuum.
In a nutshell, we’re always dying in some form as a product of the nature of time itself. Why should we get mad at the transporter?
Maybe the soul is how we transcend these deaths; maybe there’s no such thing as a soul.
Uh huh, when the gleisners show up and offer Introdus, accept.
The idea that we aren't working on anti-aging and life extension has always been bizarre to me, but seeing what humans are like, it's probably for the best we don't try, as upsetting as that is.
Why can't we accept that the transporter "moves" matter, but warp travel does. I always saw it as similar things at the end of the day.
I get you. I want it to be that too.
But there's a difference. Don't read on if you prefer your version of reality (it's all just made up anyways... to a large extend, at least).
Transporters don't technically "move" matter in the traditional sense. They dematerialize a person or object into an energy pattern, transmit that pattern to a destination, and then rematerialize it using stored molecular data.
Philosophically, this raises questions about continuity of consciousness. Some argue it's more like copying and deleting than moving.
The Warp Drive on the other hand manipulates spacetime. It creates a subspace bubble around the ship, allowing it to travel faster than light by distorting the space ahead and behind it. This means that matter isn't converted or transmitted. It stays intact and is carried through warped space.
So yes, both are “movement” technologies. One is teleportation via disassembly, and the other is locomotion via spacetime manipulation. But they are inherently different.
I will geek out for the rest of my day after this.
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What exactly defines you as "you"?
Why do you say it's a suicide if you never saw or felt anything, and you manage to say around somewhere afterwards?
if we had those machines, people would just stop having this discussion.
Because technically, it's a scanner + printer and not a mover. It's just that the original is deliberately destroyed every time (unless something goes wrong *looks at Miles*).
IIRC, it's even mentioned that people going through the transporter are cached. Like, they store snapshots, so you can compare the changes between older you and newer you. You can also store a person in buffer digitally, meaning you can copy and print as many as you want.
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