Is Star Trek's Transporter Actually a Murder Machine?

[@J0MBi]

There's a 4th option - the transporter DOES effectively kill you and create a replica, but the characters just haven't figured it out because of normalcy bias and the implications that come from this technology being in such common use and likely used by them multple times. That answer would be very difficult to come to terms with psychologically and most people would just go into denial and accept any answer given to them that makes that internal conflict go away. Just like they did when they found out their warp engines destroyed the fabric of reality and then just ignored it.

[@vaylon1701]

I remember Roddenberry explaining at a convention exactly what a transporter was. "The transporter was a technical marvel of its time created with a goldfish bowl, water and a pack of glitter that saved us thousands and thousands of dollars on new set pieces we didn't have to build for shuttle craft and expensive models of ships landing on planets."

[@MaskOfAgamemnon]

The Gene Roddenberry explanation always suited me. He was asked "How does the Heisenberg Compensator work?" He replied "Very well, thank you."

[@sentinelmoonfang]

So, I totally believe the transporter is a murder machine, but I think the more troubling inconsistency is something I realized after watching TNG again. Let's say that in the Federation's moral stance is that the copy of you is still the real you. But then we have a Season 2 episode where they talk about 'transporter traces' which are an entire person's data stored in the transporter for an extended period of time... so if transporter copies are the same person... then why should anyone die in Star Trek? When that red shirt dies on the mission to a dangerous unexplored planet? Why not use the transporter trace and rematerialize them on the ship as whole and living again? For those of us in camp 'The transporter totally kills you' the answer is obvious, the copy isn't the original person. They're dead. But if the Star Trek universe believes them to be the same person, then any captain or transporter operator who simply lets people stay dead is a confirmed monster. Before anyone argues that a transported dead person would have to stay dead, they state very clearly in the episode that one can compare a person's last transporter trace against their current state and 'correct' any differences... So you totally could transport a dead person back and have them living on the other end. Hell, even if someone died on some random shipboard accident, you could just use the trace from the last time they transported and resurrect them. No one in Star Trek should die ever according to that episode.

[@johnfoltz8183]

If that fails, then the ship can slingshot around the sun to go back in time.

[@DavidBaronStevensPersonal]

That shares a bit of an idea with Altered Carbon and Westworld, where a digital backup of our consciousness can be used to replicate a soul after its destruction Interesting. If you have the power to grant a 2nd life but deny it, is it considered murder??? 🤔

[@Borgcow]

If they really think duplicates are the same person they woulda promoted Tom Riker though

[@Klee99zeno]

this goes back to an old philosophical problem called The Ship of Ageus. The ship was important to the ancient Greeks, so they kept it for many years, Each time a board would wear out, it would be replaced. After some time had passed, every single piece had been replaced. So now the question is: is it still the same ship? The answer depends on whether you believe in the pattern theory of identity or not. This is the theory that what give a thing or person identity is the particular pattern of components instead of the preservation of the actual components themselves.

[@uncledavid5344]

Jacob, while this is an interesting debate topic, the human body does not replace all of its cells. Cerebral neurons are never replaced (so once they die, they're gone forever), so your brain still contains original cells, not duplicated, copied, or replaced cells.

[@ashesreignited]

I'm glad someone brought this up. I don't think people realize how brillant this question is when it comes to this whole transporter reassembly business. thanks Johnathan Lewis

[@jamesb.8940]

If the principle of identity of the human person is, not the material body, but, the spiritual soul, maybe that helps answer the question. Not that the soul - on this understanding - is another "component" of the body; it would be the entity that is the metaphysical cause - not the biological cause - of the being and action of the body. The soul is not material or corporeal, so it would not undergo the changes undergone by the material of the body. BTW is not some explanation needed for how the atoms of ppl's clothes, and the atoms of their bodies, are never jumbled together ? What prevents disastrous mix-ups like those in the various versions (and sequels) of "The Fly" ?

[@Moxxuren]

Also if you took all the old parts and made another ship do you now have 2 ships of Ageus?

[@erikklein7618]

Ship of Theseus

[@joeywilson3]

I'm not sure if some one else mentioned this, but another bit of evidence for Possibility #1 is the TNG episode "The Next Phase" (S5 Ep24). This is where Lt. Cmdr. La Forge and Ensign Ro are out of phase with with everyone else because of a transporter accident.

[@ermixonscraziesttheories]

Except that in an Enterprise episode the guy who invented it said that he'd proved definitively that it doesn't kill you and replace you with a copy. The only answer is that the disassembled pattern remains you in transit until it is put back together. Which when you think about it makes perfect sense because physicists are always saying that the idea of solid matter is just an illusion anyway. So, what we are really talking about is a machine which can break that illusion and then restore it in the exact right way. Either that or the part which remains conscious is supposed to be their soul.

[@ChateauLonLon]

We also see that the body, the seat of consciousness, can be completely removed from someone's "neural patterns". If the body is completely shredded, would it really matter so much so long as the consciousness is in some way preserved and transferred into this reconstituted or entirely new body?

[@swiety1981]

In Star Trek Enterprise Trip said you can feel to be in 2 places at once for a part of second

[@allyouneed71]

My understanding of the transporter is that its like LEGO blocks....you get taken apart in one location and get reassembled in an other. Based on the fact that matter and energy are interchangeable, your individual cell are taken apart to the constituent atoms, converted to energy and sent down via a particle beam, converted back to matter and then reassembled atom by atom, cell by cell ...this is not a "duplicate"...its the very same atoms put back in their proper place....If I buy a house in Europe, and have every brick ,joist and shingle and nail in it numbered and moved to Canada, and reassembled exactly as it was, is it a duplicate?....Food for thought...good video Steve

[@carlrood4457]

The one aspect to the transporter is it's ability to bestow immortality. We've seen it revert several people to children with their full adult memories, so why not be able to take a couple years off every now and then to be perpetually in your prime? We've seen it restore Pulaski to her proper age when she got the aging disease. All they needed was a hair sample from before she got sick. They only actually needed the hair because she'd never used the transporter and there was no record of her previous pattern. This was also done in the TOS animated show. This second one is interesting in that it should be able to cure anyone of anything by just "restoring" them back to how they were before. Why would Worf need dangerous surgery for that shattered spine when a stored transporter pattern could restore him to full health? Heck, even if that's not possible, Scotty was able to jerry rig a transporter to keep himself alive for decades, so why not use that for the terminally ill until medical technology catches up with their condition? Could you mess around with a genetic sample and use it to "fix" congenital conditions like Geordi's blindness? One the whole, the one thing I hates about Wrath of Khan was the talking while being transported, especially since there was nothing that couldn't have been saved until after materializing.

[@MikeRosoft]

"What we got back... didn't live long... fortunately." -Star Trek: The Motion Picture, transporter tech

[@jamesb.8940]

One thing that has always puzzled me about that speech is that it comes almost without an interval after the fatal - and extremely painful - transporter accident. So the speech seems rather pointless. If it come a fair while after the accident, that would have made sense. Or am I overlooking something ? And why was the assimilation of Decker and Ilia to Vger not also painful ?

[@Peepholecircus]

I saw that film in the cinema as a kid, thought it was utter shit, like, really really bad. Watched it last year, damn. Love it, a lot! I was too young.

[@Pendragon667]

That scenes haunts me til this very day...

[@RustyTube]

I’m surprised you didn’t mention the episode in which a malfunction resulted into two people being combined into a third person who was screaming murder when Captain Janeway decided to force him into the transporter and restore the two original people who then thanked her for it.

[@ThePwnageHobo]

Voyager S02E24 Tuvix. Tuvok and Neelix go in to the pattern buffer, Tuvix comes out.

[@RustyTube]

ThePwnageHobo Yes,that’s the one.

[@paulweaver5624]

There are certain episodes that are best left unmentioned, despite Pegg dropping a tuvix mention into Beyond. The bastard. At least it wasn't Threshold.

[@histguy101]

Tuvix was a great episode. Two honorable characters are combined and produce a not so honorable, manipulative third

[@jackblap]

I always wonder about the poker games they play in TNG. La Forge admits he is capable of cheating with his visor, Troi is a psychic, Data an android. Poor Worf must loose every time, won't be good for his anger managment..

[@Andrew-qg5bu]

Plato discussed this over 2000 years ago, with the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. It basically questions whether a ship, that has over time replaced all of its parts, is really the same ship. If the human body replaces every one if its cells every 10yrs, are you really the same you? If instead a transporter disassembles every part of you, including your thought patterns, and reassembles you verbatim does it really matter the original you is gone? In every possible way, you are still YOU.

[@Words-er5ez]

Clearly the answer is yes. Your molecules are scrambled, stored in a buffer then put back together at the new point. You die. But the you at the new location can't tell the difference so everyone just ignores the reality.

[@davidbeppler3032]

When you go to sleep for 8 hours you cease to exist. Then you wake up a new you, who thinks they are the same person that just went to sleep. Sleeping is much more terrifying than using a transporter, ask anyone with night terrors.

[@sharperguy]

There's another possibility: maybe in the future they figure out the philosophical problem where someone reconstructd from a memory pattern actually IS the same person even though the matter in their body is different. It's the Ship of Theseus.

[@maaderllin]

Dr. Polasky also feared the transporters. And it was used to cure her of a higly contagious disease that made her age super fast by combining her previous transporter scans.

[@rickconsort2671]

maaderllin That's right, she did hate the transporter. Good call. But they didn't have her previous transporter scans because she had never used the Enterprise-D's transporter at that point. Picard contacted her previous ship the Repulse but they had already wiped her transport patterns from their system. They ended up using a hair from her hairbrush to get her original DNA template programmed into the transporter.

[@dmancluster2631]

Fun Fact about the Transporter for those who may not know: It was created due to lack of budget, as having the ship on the planet of the week every time would've been expensive. To think, if the original Star Trek had been given more budget or had more technology (after all, it was the 60's) that there'd be no transporter at all and so many plots just gone.

[@stryletz]

Fun Fact: Originally the Enterprise's saucer was suppose to seperate from the engineering hull and land on planets. But, it was deemed too costly so they decided to use shuttles to transport the away teams to planets. But because of budget and time issues the hanger set wasn't ready in time to film the pilot, so they put some sprinkles in water, stirred it around and made up space magic.

[@scottgardener]

Given the mention of "Heisenberg compensators" in the technobabble, it seems a plausible assumption that the answer to the question is similar to that of whether light is a particle or a wave. And, some reassurance on the "break you apart and murder you" concerns: the human body completely replaces itself over the span of time, about one complete makeover molecule-by-molecule every seven years. Some parts, like stomach goblet cells, swap more frequently, while others, like cartilage and ligaments, tend to stay put for much longer. But, real-world nature basically does the same thing that the transporter does hypothetically, just much more slowly. I would therefore believe that as long as one's stream of consciousness remained uninterrupted throughout the beaming process, then one arrives on the ship or planet one's self, not having been murdered and replaced. It really is the safest way to travel, Mr. Sonak. Especially after the refit; she's a totally new Enterprise...

[@Draknfyre]

This was canonically addressed and laid to rest in the Enterprise episode "Daedalus" where the inventor of the transporter, Emory Erickson, mentioned how many questions and objections people had about his creation and specifically said he had to prove that the person on the receiving end was the same as the one who left and wasn't "a transporter clone." Ergo, canonically the transporters do not kill you and create an exact duplicate; you are the same person on the other end when you arrive.

[@avernion]

I agree. Though, there is that problem when Riker got split into two people because the beam was bounced. It it dose’t create new mater, how could he be multiplied by two?

[@Draknfyre]

@@avernion It didn't create new matter, but at that point Riker was pure energy. The unusual environment of the planet combined with the storm duplicated the *energy*, which just so happened to get shunted back and reformed another Riker. Like a souped-up food replicator. That food doesn't exist before it's ordered; it's formed from energy. All is needed is a pattern, which is encoded in the energy stream.

[@multienergy3684]

I agree, also because in the new star treks the persons can also move while they are teleporting, that means that there is a "continuity". So, in this case, teleportation doesn't kill you

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

There is a Twilight Zone episode that explored that point. They have a teleporter which doesn't dematerializes the original, they wait for confirmation that the person arrives, then destroy the original. The conflict of the episode comes when they don't get the confirmation at first and the original lives on. Later the confirmation comes in and the transporter operator has to deal with his orders to kill the version of his end.

[@Prizrak-hv6qk]

The Outer Limits S07E08 "Think Like a Dinosaur". That was a good one. The matter is complicated by the fact that this is basically the "primary directive" of the super powerful dinosaur-like alien race, which lets the humans use this technology to flee from the dying Earth. Also, by the fact that the operator develops romantic feelings for the woman which needs to be destroyed in order to "balance the equation" (as the dinos call it). There's also the disturbing aspect of discovering that before they are vaporized, the original copies go through an incredibly-traumatic and hellish experience.

[@johnmccnj]

If nothing else, I do hope that the transporter operators make sure that the transport grid is kept free from flies at all times.

[@AnthonyEmmel]

The Blish novel "Spock Must Die!" (1970). "Doctor Leonard McCoy and Engineer Montgomery Scott discuss McCoy's fear of the transporter. McCoy posits that an original person is killed upon dematerialization and a duplicate is created at the destination. Scotty explains that the technology converts matter into energy, transmits it and reassembles it into the same original object, but McCoy is not convinced and he wonders what happens to the soul in a transporter beam."

[@GANGSTA2285]

I lost my mind and wrote a college essay long rant about Star Trek transporter tech. Sucking up the particles in the air, oxygen and helium and stuff, then reassociating them back into the world would probably cause a sonic boom or a few seconds of a vacuum where the body materializes. If it's creating a new body from new atoms. My thought was that the transporter disassembled your atoms into basic units, able to move them unhindered by solid objects or other atoms, and reassembled them on the other side. The flow of information is the literal particles of your being. If it was just information gathered, there would be no distance problems. You just send a message across space with that information to rebuild the atomic structures in the correct order. Or hell, it would be like a song file. Megabytes of info. You could create infinite people anywhere in the galaxy. Only difference is the new memories the person creates. You'd have to download the update lol the newest memories up to the point you wanted to transport them. And i believe this idea would freak people the fuck out lol. The transporter seems to be similar, but unlike, the food replicators. Everyone talks about how the food doesnt taste as good as the real thing. Like something is missing. And they can add extra stuff to the chemical structure of the food to make it more nutritious. If they were the same, you could add memories and skills to people just by downloading the thoughts. No need for school or training. I just read a great comment talking about how an atomic particle can be in 2 places at one time. I forgot about this idea, and it's true scientificly. You effect one it effects the other, or rather you effect itself in two places at once across any distance simultaneously (faster than the speed of light). Problem is, how do you get all those halfs of the particles of a body to the same location? If this was the way they traveled, again no distance would be an obstacle. It would eliminate the need for space crafts. Or you could use it to move the whole space craft and its occupants instantaneously to anywhere in the universe, or to anywhere there was a machine that created this effect if there was a range limit, like the horizon line of space. Cant see farther than a group of stars you'd have to transport there, and then again. Jumping or skipping thru space like a stone on water. Or maybe that is how they make ships travel faster than the speed of light. And there is a limit. Rematerializing every second a few billion kilometers forward. But there appears to be a difference between transporter and warp. Yeah, warp bends the galaxy around the ship. Anyway traveling would feel like transporting if they used the materialization method. I wonder which is faster? What if they set up a line of space bouys along a straight section thru space? Each one just a bit shorter away from another than its possible to transport. Like planet to planet travel with transporters. If a ship left at level 9.9 warp at the same time someone transported, who would arrive first?

[@maxwellschmidt235]

On a tangent, when there's a transporter accident that creates a duplicate, such as the one that created Tom Riker, how can law actually establish which one has claim to being the "real" version? The episode glosses completely over this, but because Will Riker has claim to all birth records and other documentation of identity, Tom is effectively an undocumented immigrant. With that said, Will's only claim to that documentation is audience sympathy. From Tom's perspective, Will is an identity thief and a usurper. I just think there are a huge number of implications that need to be settled. Which is why I propose the steamiest new legal procedural on television: "Riker and Riker, Attorneys at Transporter Law". A transporter accident victim and his duplicate partner boldly at a law firm dedicated to helping star fleet explore and settle strange new worlds of science fiction law. But as they represent the little Maquis against Big Transport Pad, can their partnership survive an old flame trying to navigate a love triangle only ethical because she's cheating on her man with a version of himself which was never trapped at a desolate outpost for seven years? Or is it vice versa?

[@anicetune]

* The transporter can create identical duplicates * The transporter can re-materialise people as children * The transporter can merge people, creating an entirely new person with combined memories * The transporter can de-merge people, creating two entirely different beings * The transporter can restore a person to an earlier form using saved DNA, causing that person to lose memories If you cut and paste a computer file, is it the same file or a copy? If your parents conceived you 1 second later or earlier, would your consciousness still be you? Do clones share the same consciousness? I think there's enough philosophical controversy to suggest that a person may be killed and copied. For the transporter to be commercially viable there would have to be solid scientific evidence that souls don't exist and human consciousness exists solely in the brain as a set of arranged atoms, that are moved rather than copied. In DS9 and Voyager, religion supposedly still exists and it’s suggested nobody fully understands consciousness. I think The Orville has it right when it comes to transporter technology. They realise what a messed up idea it is and have sensibly not included transporters in the show.

[@TheDiabeticGameMaster]

Bro, you got it totally backwards. The only way the transporter is viable as most people assume it works, is if a soul does exist. Cuz, otherwise, when you get ripped to shreds, you fucking die. However, if you have a soul that is attached to your body only tangentially then, fuck. Doesn’t make a difference!

[@brianarbenz7206]

Imagine working in Tech Support for the Transporter manufacturer -- "You say your First Officer was beamed up from a planet, but they won't beam into the transporter room? Try turning the whole Transporter off, waiting 60 seconds, then turning it back on... That didn't work? Well, just load the copy of the First Officer's data into the Transporter.... You didn't make a copy of the First Officer's data? Then I'll have to transfer you to Starfleet personnel. They can make a hard copy replacement of the First Officer."

[@sarahscott5305]

I personally prefer Possibility 3, though I do have a very, very quantum answer. And no, it isn't about quantum cloning. Read on at your peril, hypothetical reader. OK, so, in a nutshell; all matter is effectively an illusion. There is nothing as certain as "these are the particles that make up a person" rather, there is only "if you were made of particles, this is where they would most likely be." This idea of a particle existing as a wave with no definite fixed point location was proposed by De Broglie, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. The De Broglie wave function of every particle of your body exists at basically all points in the universe, though at vanishingly low probabilities. There's lots of things that can affect the amplitude of the De Broglie wave, like moving closer to the speed of light, for example. If you walk across a room, it can be mathematically viewed as the peak amplitude of the De Broglie wave changing place. If you could, using some basically magical device, know the exact properties of an object, down to its combined wave equation, you could potentially just "move" this information somewhere else. That wouldn't clone the original, it would just make the original be somewhere else, exactly as if you walked across the room. If anyone subjected themselves to reading that, then have a cookie. If anyone who read it actually understood it, then have another cookie. I wrote it and I can't decide if *I* understand it.

[@OGdadpool]

"Spooky action at a distance" transporter

[@bobingabout]

Actually, in Enterprise, The guy who invented the transporter talks about how it was protested about "Is the person who arrives the same person who left" and all that... so it is mentioned, just... once.

[@Yatsura2]

Did they answered the protestors question tho'? XD

[@Matthew_Murray]

I think the interesting thing about the transporter debated isn't how it relates to StarTrek but how it relates to the real world. If we ever invented a transporter would it be a murder machine. StarTrek is great in how it is used as a vehicle to explore interesting concepts that we can then debate and explore.

[@VirginPrince]

I can't believe you got this one wrong. The answer is neither #1 or #2, but rather somewhere in the middle. The transporter essentially scans you like a Xerox machine, making a blueprint of you, then uses that blueprint to break you down into subatomic particles. Those same subatomic particles are then transported inside a matter stream to the location you are going to, and reassembled on the spot. You are very literally the exact same person, all the way down to your original molecules. Memory Alpha does a great job of explaining this. If you want to argue whether the transporter kills you, I suspect the best analogy would be to imagine if you were to drown in a swimming pool and be immediately resuscitated by CPR, only there's less brain damage by lack of oxygen, via the transporter. Scotty used the transporter to break himself down into his core sub-atomic particles and contained them within the buffer, because in that form, he did not need to eat, breathe oxygen, etc. It placed less of a demand on their tiny ship with limited resources. (Also, convenient for the sake of the show, as he gets to show up at his same age.) If the transporter could simply duplicate beings, no crew member would ever stay dead, and furthermore, Janeway wouldn't have needed to murder Tuvix, as she could have simply used the transporter to make a duplicate from him, and then recreated Tuvok and Neelix from that duplicate. Heck, she could have just avoided that step and recreated them from computer memory. Quite simply, the transporter technology can not, and does not, create duplicates. This is made very clear in a first season episode of TNG where a somewhat hostile energy being possesses Picard and forces him to beam out of the Enterprise in energy form only, leaving all of his physical matter in the buffer. Despite his physical matter still existing within the ship, the crew still can not simply "reform" him as his energy (soul, essentially) is gone, and they'd essentially be beaming back a corpse. The dialogue is very clear in this episode in explaining this. As for the duplicate Riker? We already know that multiple parallel universes exist in Star Trek. We also know from multiple series that people can cross over from mirror universes via transporter accidents, going all the way back to Mirror, Mirror. This was re-emphasized heavily in DS9 and Discovery. Who knows which is the original Riker, but the other is just a near parallel from a very close mirror universe. A universe where Riker never made it back from the planet.

[@k.m.186]

Finn McCool ahhh! This makes sense! That would align with how there’s a microbe filter for disease and that Riker couldn’t be transported without taking the disease in an episode because they had bonded with his cells or smth. The disease would also be transported sub atomically and couldn’t reconstruct the same cells without them

[@MrHatoi]

If your memories are intact, the last thing you would remember would be what you were just saying, which explains uninterrupted speech.

[@MountainRaven1960]

Their transporter doubles drop into a water filled tank below the transporter. The remains later are processed in the food replicator. Picard: ‘Computer, Solent Green - Earl Gray - Hot’.

[@CynthiaWarren]

In the Season 2 episode "Unnatural Selection," Dr. Pulaski comments that she's concerned that her atoms will be scattered across the galaxy every time she steps into a transporter. And Dr. McCoy is afraid of having his atoms scrambled when he gets into the transporter. He insisted on being transported to the Enterprise by shuttlecraft in "Encounter at Farpoint."

[@retluoc]

Here's my analysis of the transporter -- yes...the "you" that is transported dies, and a duplicate "you" is created at the other end..but "you" don't know that because "you" still think you're "you". And why not? The "you" that materializes is still "you", but the one that was dematerialized is "gone", and a duplicate is created -- like a clone. This was demonstrated when a duplicate Riker was stranded on a planet for 9 years because his pattern was reflected...how could it have created two of him -- which one is "real"? Are they both "real"? Yes, they're both real, and both were created from the pattern of the dead Riker who was being beamed up.

[@TSZatoichi]

Considering the way Food Replicators work, I'd say Transporters operate like option #2. For the people who say 'who cares,' I would just like to remind them of Tablet computers , Flip/Smart Phones, Hyposprays, 3D printers, Cloaking devices (look it up), Voice interface computers, Bluetooth, Google Glass, Portable memory (floppy disks, USB sticks), Focused ultrasound technology, Biometric data tracking for health and verifying identity, GPS, Automatic doors, Big screen displays, Real-time universal translators, Teleconferencing, VISOR bionic eyes for the blind, Diagnostic beds and probably more that weren't on this list that I found on the Internet within 5 seconds of thinking 'what were some Trek inspired inventions.'

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Doesn't the replicator basically takes a saved pattern, puts it over a blob of generic material #47 and transforms it while beaming into food. A bit like a fancy 3D printer that transforms a roll of plastic wire into a dinner plate, only that the replicator works on subatomic level with the power of scifi tech.

[@hdjksa52]

I don't know if I agree with you about the 2nd Riker's promotion. You have to remember that he has been down on the planet for 8 years. He has been out of service. He has to become reacquainted with life in Star Fleet. In the matter of fact there is a chance that they would have forced him into retirement (he hasn't seen his own family and he has to accept the fact that they may not accept him) or taken his rank away until he had a full psychological evaluation to make sure that he psychologically sound. He has been in solitude for 8 years. Today if you leave the US Armed forces for a period of time and return, you will lose rank. We do this to retrain you on your responsibilities and make sure you're up to the task. Riker is the 2nd in command of a star ship. The Federation has to make sure that he can handle the stress. I'm not too sure how the Armed forces handle people who have been POW's or in a situation that isolated them for long periods of time, but I highly doubt high ranking officials are given the same responsibilities they had. At least not right away.

[@trent7904]

They could have used the same phenomenon that created Thomas Riker to save Neelix and Tuvok without killing Tuvix.

[@gixnla]

What really bugged me in the "transporter is totally safe" is that Geordi said to Barclay that transporter is safe and accidents are very rare literally 2 (or 3?) episodes after he and Ro had been made "ghosts" due to a transporter malfunction... Yeahhhh

[@brandonflorida1092]

Wasn't it due to properties of the space they were in?

[@markarich159]

Based on the star trek next generation technical manual(which is considered absolutely canon), the answer is B. The transporter demolecularizes you at the quantum level by decoupling the binding energy of the subatomic particles which make up every atom in your body. HOWEVER, it maintains the exact quantum state of each particle in quantum operating mode(as opposed to molecular mode which is only safe for transporting non living matter). This ensures that when the person rematerializes it will be you( not a facsimile of you) as every scintilla of quantum information is exactly preserved. According to the manual, this exact quantum fidelity is responsible for it being you that rematerializes rather than an exact duplicate that simply thinks it is you. Also, to get around the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that states the exact position and momentum of every quantum particle cannot both be known with exact certainty; the transporter has a Heisenberg compensator that counteracts this and maintains perfect quantum fidelity.

[@alankeegan5870]

I think both versions exist. Type 1 is the preferred method, and that's what most people are taught about how transporters work. But while it's reliable, and easier for people to accept philosophically, it's not quite as reliable and more technologically demanding than type 2. What transporter engineers get taught, but don't "speak with outsiders" about, to paraphrase Worf regarding the appearance of Klingons, is that most transporters use Type 2 as a backup! The transport engineers would rather beg forgiveness for "murder" when a transporter accident or negative space wedgie occurs that would have killed you anyway. This also would help explain why engineers with transporter specialisation like O'Brian are a thing, they're the people who actually know about Type 2, and in a pinch have the wisdom to pull off the miracles and then just shut up about how they do it. However this unspoken taboo starts to unravel if you work on starships for long enough to hear about or witness close calls with the transporter, or when smart people like people in Starfleet start using their brains rather than blindly accept the transporter as an appliance like a toaster. And some factions, I suspect the Romulans and the Dominion just use Type 2, and have no qualms about it. Ironically as it's so obvious, it's not widely spoken of either.

[@Ataluta]

Let me start by saying I am such a HUGE fan of yours. I LOVE yours vids. What I wanted to say was ; watching these 3 year old vids (which are ((content wise)) just as good as your recent vids) I am so proud and happy for you for how much you have grown and improved! Compared to these vids, particularly your setup and background, have improved so much! You're great. live long and prosper.

[@DeadDancers]

I’ve never seen the ‘interacted with other people trapped in the beam’ episode. I always assumed that mid-transporter experiences were never real at all, but were the hallucinations caused by interrupted brain activity - both before and after transportation - potentially attuned to expectations, fears or subtle other factors (like cross-contamination as bits of phased brain brushes against their own) . We know that in IRL, people can experience vastly skewed perspectives of time and hallucinate long scenarios in the span of seconds.

[@151ldur]

Great video! Ray Kurzweil, in his book The Singularity is Near, has thoughts about the transportation of consciousness. He doesn’t refer to the ST transporter directly but he writes about the possibility of uploading the mind to the Cloud. In this process, the questions of what happens to one’s self arises -as in will I die and a duplicate of me will have a virtual life but that will not be the actual me? I find his answer original: He thinks that if the organic brain is gradually replaced using electronic sections one small part at a time, the self -the I- would not consider that has stopped being. And when the whole brain is finally electronic, the consciousness would be transportable by electronic means, which is to say, as information. The nature of the self will be different. It would be able to be replicated, for example. But it won’t cease its existence -I won’t feel I’m ceasing existing. Actually, I think the question about the transporter as a murder machine is a question about consciousness. What is consciousness? Is it necessarily linked to the body? Or can it be considered something like a pattern, which is Kurzweil’s point? And if we consider that consciousness is what makes us human, then the question of the transporter would the question of what is it to be human.

[@lordofsparks]

I never really had a problem with the idea of the transporter. The technobabble about it was always about messing with quantum indeterminacy. Them talking about needing a Heisenberg Compensator always implied to me that in some way when it is working properly the transporter is making a person experience "spooky action" at a macro scale. Meaning the way It works would involve there being one version of a person who exists at two points simultaneously, but as quantum locality is restored they only exist at one of those points in space.

[@archonmarch3965]

Exactly.

[@cjc363636]

I've wondered, in transporter duplicate cases, just where is the transporter getting the extra 'matter' to make the duplicate? ....Must be wherever Voyager got all those extra shuttlecraft......

[@StoneXZ4]

The 2001 "The Outer Limits" episode 'Think Like a Dinosaur,' expands on the 2nd possibility. The episode goes into the ethical ramifications of a failed transfer where the original is not destroyed as per proper procedure. It is discovered later on that the transfer was indeed successful, and the human operator is ordered to "balance the equation" by his dino counterpart. It's a good episode.

[@p.bamygdala2139]

There are FOUR lights!

[@savagegardenrox]

In realm of fear, Barclay and Deanna talk about the transporter "breaking you up into a million pieces".

[@morgantollhall]

Personally, I think the phase shifted state is the default form of transportation. The person's information is simultaneously gathered as a backup copy that would be automatically reassembled in case something went wrong with the phase shifting. It explains why some characters are only nervous about something going wrong with the transporter, because they won't know if everything went according to plan and they are the same person, or if something went wrong and the backup system of reassembling them had to kick in.

[@morgantollhall]

Replying go my own text here, but I believe that the disassembling/reassembling explanation might be a bit more realistic, so there's that...

[@MrKreinen]

6:39 There is a reason they were astonished scotty was able to keep his "signal" or "pattern" from degrading in the buffer for so long by putting it in a maintenance loop. Note they didn't say that this is a fix for patterns degrading if they are held in the buffer too long, just that this trick seems to hold a pattern for an astonishingly long time in that particular case. They keep persons matter (matter stream not data signal) in wave-form using entanglement networks to hold the "patterns" in the matter stream. The pattern buffer is taking minute samples for renormalization and then extrapolating huge portions of the persons pattern from it; data used to help keep the "resolution on the pattern" tight by adjusting the refraction fields used in the Buffer in realtime. Those recorded patterns can be used to reinforce that pattern in the buffer, or "imprint" a matter stream with it, but the system is doing everything it can to keep the matter stream intact. Even pumping energy into a degrading signal (thus the half powered matter streams emerge from a beam splitter split matter stream can each be "charged" back up to full and rematerialized. The DS9 incident killed them, and then used a completed pattern sample (which would have destroyed their matter stream signal anyway) particle scan, and then from the ridiculously huge file, imprinted it on to a newly generated matter stream. Sysco is the Bajoran's prophet, and jakes dad. Everyone was all to happy to avoid calling this what it was. They died, and transporter replicants were made. Still remember that the matter stream moves and holds patterns like it's light, or like you are a hologram being beamed by the light making your pattern up. If that light goes through a beam splitter your pattern/image will be duplicated. If your matter stream goes through a polarizer, your image will be duplicated with opposite chirality. All these matter streams patterns will be too weak to rematerialized from, but thats not a problem cause we can just dump energy into a pattern and make it materialize:D

[@simonpurist4499]

7:52 What's most amazing is the past duplicate of himself chose to grow the exact same BEARD for 8 years, despite living in entirely different circumstances. Seriously, it's EXACT. Couldn't they just put a long beard on Will Frakes, because he wouldn't care about his appearance while living alone enough to trim it constantly? He didn't even HAVE a beard 8 years prior.

[@bcr666-cvn68]

There was a TV episode of something (sci-fi short stories or something like that) where space dinosaurs (Saurians) had developed space travel and transporter technology. The process scanned you, transmitted the data to the destination, where a new you was created, then a message was sent back confirming they got you, then your original body was disposed of (the Saurians called it "balancing the equation"). The episode centers around a technician and the woman he is performing the process on. The process is interrupted when they lose communication with the destination, so they don't have a confirmation, so they can't dispose of her. So she gets a little room and the technician falls in love with her. Then hours or maybe days later they restore communications and get a message that the process completed successfully. Now it is the technician's responsibility to kill and dispose of the woman he has now fallen in love with.

[@damenwhelan3236]

I knkw The episode. He hid her. There was a delay. Then he lied about a broken component. After nearly a year together he gets the message about the returning her. So he tells her the machine is fixed. Obliterated her seconds before she arrives. When she arrives she is tattooed to fuck and cold and not even like she was before they got to know each other. I think it's an outerlimits episode.

[@mauteman]

Just the title of this is amazing. Well played.

[@JohnJackson-mn4ts]

The Star Trek technical guide says the subject is disassembled and then reassembled down to a quantum level at the destination point.

[@KuraIthys]

It's very hard to conclusively answer a question when the nature of the question raises philosophical points about what it means to be alive or dead that we as of yet have not been able to answer credibly in a consistent way in general. The question at the heart of this one is, what is consciousness, and in what kind of situations is it preserved/transferred, and in what context does it just... End? And that, has no firm meaningful answer because it is about as far removed from an objective question as you can possibly get. It also runs headlong into solipsism (the only thing of which I can be truly certain is my own existence. Everything else is guesswork), which is a philosophical point most try to avoid, since by it's nature you cannot really prove or disprove it's validity. And of course, that's why you cannot conclusively answer such a question, because we have no meaningful objective framework to even address the basic concepts involved, much less the implications for this specific example.

[@hagerty1952]

I've always wondered about more mundane things, like when anything transports out, isn't there now a void that has to be filled with the surrounding air? Do the transporter operators' ears pop every time someone (or anything, actually) leaves? It's just the opposite when they return. Also, how much of the surrounding environment transports up with them? We've seen characters being beamed out of volcanoes and disintegrating planets. Do all the poisonous gasses in the immediate area, like maybe trapped in the weave of the clothing, contaminate the ship?

[@costajunior1956]

Hey Steve Shives, I must say that you are the one. Congratulations, very nice video, simple direct and very well articulated. You really trust what you are saying, and you know what your saying. What I mean is: Keep going, KZbin need guys like you. " Live long and prosper. "

[@uncledavid5344]

The mind fills in gaps of missing information, often without us even knowing it. One thing that is amazing, I call it "the frozen second hand" but I don't know what others call it. When you're looking away from a clock, then shift your eyes to look at the clock, that brief moment your eyes are moving are not transmitting data. But the brain can't just process that no data is perceived. So when your eyes rest on the clock, it takes that image and uses it fill in the missing data, even though that time has already past, your brain crams that image in and makes you think you saw it during the time you saw nothing and you don't even realize it. That's why when you look at the second hand just right, that first tick takes longer than all the other ticks. So when you're dissembled or killed off, your brain isn't able to process information and when your reassemble, the brain makes up stuff to make you think you were conscious the whole time.

[@uncledavid5344]

Another way to see this, is look into a mirror. First look at your right eye (with both i.e. focus on the right) then look at your left eye, without moving your head (kind of like the follow the pen drunks are told to go by cops) and back to the right, to the left, etc. If you do it (and you're honest with yourself) you won't perceive motion, but you shouldn't since you're not really having to move your eyes to look from one to the other. But also video yourself doing it and watch the video of your eyes.

[@geekchris105]

I have an interesting topic: should Sisko be tried for war crimes after he destroys that maquis planet's atmosphere? DS9 has a lot of space politics, I imagine there's enough there to get a good argument either way.

[@gimtek]

geekchris105 typically, the winners in a war don't answer for war crimes.

[@TdotSoul]

There was an episode of "The Outer Limits" that discussed this, where the device created an exact copy but killed the original.

[@danielhedgpeth2009]

Given the title of this video, I'm surprised there was no mention of the episode of Enterprise when aliens take over the ship and are going to execute Captain Archer but he fools them by telling them the transporter is an execution device so they use it on him. This leaves them thinking he's dead, but of course he's really transported to another point on the ship where he can begin coordinating an attempt to retake Enterprise from its captors.

[@RobbyBurney]

There was an early episode of Next Generation where Picard has his essence trapped in a planet's atmosphere (a "Nirvana" like cloud covering) and he exists as the cloud's energy for a period of time. The crew want him back and say something to the effect of, "We'll widen the confinement beam and transport him back. The version we have stored of his physical make up is from before his merging with the cloud so he won't remember it." This was a VERY early episode of TNG (first season, before ep10) so I've always taken this as somewhat of a fluke and misrepresentation. That said... it does pretty much "prove" that the transporter kills Ver1 and creates Ver2 with tech-magic.

[@JanetStarChild]

I'm surprised there was no mention of "Tuvix". That was a messed up Voyager episode.

[@JDPwatching]

Okay, I haven't watched this yet, but before I do, I have to mention a short story outline I've had lying around since the fall of 2022, and it concerns the human soul and transporters. Basically, every time you get transported, you are effectively killed and replaced by a virtual clone, and your original soul departs on the first transport. My struggle with this story idea is does all of your subsequent selves get a new soul eventually after the transport? Or are all of tham just soulless hunks of meat that are not sure how to explain that empty feeling that they all feel inside, and share with other transportees? And if you get a new soul after every transport, does the afterlife fill up with multiple copies of you only differentiated by the length of their varied lifetime experiences, only different from the last one to come along because of cause of death; all of them except the last killed in transport, but the oldest one hit by a hover-car, crushed by a falling piano, or was an unlucky bystander near a hover-by phasering? Sounds like a plot for a Trek episode if it ran on one of these stupid spiritual programming-only networks. How real-world scary is that? 😁😆

[@christianbasehart4767]

These theories are not what the show says, but I understand that this discussion is often had. No, it's not a murder machine. It converts matter into energy, transports the energy through a beam and converts that exact same energy back into matter. This has been addressed many times. However, your second theory is the basis for the popular sci-fi story "Think Like A Dinosaur".

[@Zeupater]

It’s also possible there are different types of transporters based on different technologies. The transporters in older episodes are noisy and clunky and take longer to work - while later transporters are comparatively fast and seem like a smoother ride. Also, there’s an infamous transporter accident you didn’t mention that I would have liked to hear your analyze. It’s in the Star Trek motion picture called Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Was Kirk responsible for making scrambled molecules of the unfortunate officers he ordered to the Enterprise ahead of schedule or was it just a literary bad omen? My clock says it’s 11:11.

[@ElizaHamilton1780]

I had to watch this a couple of times before it occurred to me: Who says there’s only one way for a transporter to work? Why just the two choices? Either or, and not a combination of both, or something else entirely? The thing is, the universe is a very large place. Who is to say that transporter technology can’t arise X different ways within the universe, with each method of transporting objects or people being different? Perhaps some methods of transporting people or objects really does involve “killing” them and recreating them. Perhaps some don’t, and it’s a matter of knowing how each transporter works. Also: I’m assuming that the Federation went through rounds of soul searching with transporter technology before folks decided it wasn’t a murder machine after all. But imagine what they must’ve been talking about when the first transporter prototypes came out. I’m pretty sure they would’ve been somewhere between dazzled and disturbed by the technology. And since this is the Federation we’re talking about, folks must have sat down and talked about the pros and cons of this technology before deciding that: 1) ultimately, this is good technology; 2) it’s safe; and 3) it doesn’t kill living beings after all. After watching this video, I have to wonder now: Did the Federation guess correctly? Did they back the right horse?

[@wiiagent]

The second your body is completely destroyed you died, a clone of you is created with your memories, thats it.

[@flounder2760]

also noone in star trek should ever stay dead. you can store your transporter pattern in the computer and if he should die down on the away mission they can just rematerialize your energy pattern.

[@Rainmanpdt49]

So if the transporter machine has the ability to create 2 different Rikers, does that mean it has the ability to clone a person as well?

[@davidleblanc5271]

Dr. McCoy HATED the transporter "I enlisted on this ship to practice medicine not to have my atoms spread across the galaxy by some stupid machine"

[@aidanscarletwolf]

One example that I find wasn't mentioned but should have been was the transporter malfunction scene in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture".

[@Ken-n1h]

There’s a novel that explains this. When u teleport it moves your molecules and assembles them at the other end. The transporter is not reassembling new matter it’s the original matter.

[@jasminerivers7446]

Being ripped apart molecule by molecule will still kill you even if they get reassembled on the other side

[@epicstyle1000]

@@jasminerivers7446 and would be painful both ways

[@Moxxuren]

In 20 years every single molecule in your body will have replaced itself with another. Assuming you're still alive, have you died in that 20 years just because you're now made of different molecules?

[@christopheratkins6640]

Moxxuren No. If you cut off my finger, I don’t die. And I’m still me. Replacing me one atom, one molecule, on cell at a time does not kill me. Replacing all my atoms at once would kill me.

[@rifter0x0000]

Doctor McCoy actually expressed this very concern - that the transporter destroys the original self and copies it, leaving the first potentially dead. He also suggested this might mean he no longer has a soul because the one he had was not transported or copied. As I recall Scotty told him if the soul is eternal, it must remain and can't be destroyed. I remember this was in a book, but it seems to me it might have partly been covered in an episode.

[@Isolder74]

Yes which is why an Admiral McCoy insists and gets to have his way in only traveling by shuttle craft. Don't feel bad Steve you can sit next to McCoy and Barckley!

[@zetizahara]

That would be a religious, faith-based answer to the problem.

[@KoewlBag]

MORE TREK DISCUSSION PLEASE

[@Comicsluvr]

Bones always hated being transported, especially as he got older. In the pilot episode, he was shown as an admiral and the story goes that he was promoted solely because it warranted him using a shuttle instead of being transported. So, Star Fleet's most capable DOCTOR disliked being 'taken apart and reassembled.'

[@Joe-lb8qn]

Indeed, i recall at least one episode where he mentioned his 'soul" having been destroyed because he had been transported and was now a mere copy.

[@MatthewOstergren]

Two Rikers! Before I watched that episode I didn't know I had room in my heart to hold so much love.

[@danielferris7960]

How do you know that the You are the same You that went to sleep last night? I mean, you have (some of) the memories of that person from yesterday, but there's no continuity of consciousness. So basically you're just a copy of someone who died last night, but programmed with a slightly degraded copy of their memories. Scary thought, eh?

[@HuggieBear39]

I just thought of all the "RED" shirts that beamed down and were killed. Their pattern should still be in the buffer if now one has use the transported since they beamed down. The transporter chief could just make a copy of that person.

[@Super_Middleman]

I think people in the TNG era say it's "the safest way to travel" because they don't want to deal with the psychological and philosophical ramifications of finding out that their beloved piece of technology is a mass murder machine.

[@WhiteRhinoPSO]

Personally, I think the transporter doesn't kill you - it just changes your body into another state, one that can be temporarily stored in the pattern buffer. But I do see how the argument could go either way. There have been plenty of other stories where a character "ascends to a higher plane of existence," or otherwise changes their biological and physical state, without people thinking that they died to cause it. On the other hand, having a character's soul sent to heaven or hell almost always happens because that person died. The inconsistencies in transporter technology that you pointed out really don't help. On the one side, Barclay is just standing around in a matter stream while having terrifying encounters with worms (and thank you for reminding me of another of the scariest TNG episodes that I had forgotten), but on the other there's Scotty just chilling in the buffer for decades. If he had been in some state of conscious stasis for that long, he would have completely lost his mind. As an aside, I don't think that Kirk and Savik being mid-conversation as they arrived suggests that they're fully conscious during the process. I think that it was more like pausing a movie on your phone, and resuming play once you've gotten comfortable in another room of the house.

[@markkdrew]

A fiction book called “Spock Must Die” was based on the premise that the transporter killed the person and made a copy. Scotty modified the transporter so it would leave the original person being transported on the ship and the copy would be beamed to the destination and then dematerialized when the mission was concluded. There was some sort of malfunction and the copy got bounced back so there were two Spocks on the ship. They were mirror images so the copy was the evil spock.

[@IZZYINN2]

Heisenberg uncertainty principle or indeterminacy principle, That's why they have a Heisenberg compensator.

[@Beery1962]

I've never been able to figure out a way that the transporter can actually convey a person's consciousness from the guy who steps into the beam to the guy who emerges at the other side. It has to be just a copy. Sure, the copy doesn't know it's just a copy, but there's just no way it's the original person.

[@SuperflyGaming]

Prometheus Well technically every 7 years your body has replaced all the atoms in it. So... Are you the same person barring the last 7 years the same? We go to sleep every night and yesterday, consciousness becomes a memory. So do we die every night and are just carrying on the legacy of our former selves?

[@SamNeedsCoffee]

Transporter Murder Machine would be a great nerdcore band name.

[@matthew.datcher]

You're right about inconsistency. Have you seen the Outer Limits episode "Think Like a Dinosaur"? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur_(The_Outer_Limits) That's my interpretation of the Star Trek transporter and the reason I will never use one.

[@williamozier918]

My strip of latinum says: A) the episode Dead Stop showed that in-universe no matter how advanced your transporter or replicators you cannot create replicate life, only iinert matter in the exact shape of a lifeform, but not actual life. The episode lonely aong us, where Picard got beamed into a cloud, they seemed to imply that for the transporer to work it must be the original matter which was transported in the first place, because they had to find Picard's energy signature in the cloud, THEN apply an old transporter pattern to that matter stream. We have also seen many times that "nueral energy" is a thing, and it is where consciusness but NOT emory resides, and it can be re-integrated into a body by the transporter. So I contend the transpoter does not kill you, the transporter can only work because it si your pattern, your original living matter, and your nueral energy all moved at once by the same beam.

[@simon201063]

"I teleported home one night with Ron and Syd and Meg. Ron stole Meggie's heart away and I got Sydney's leg." Douglas Adams, Life, The Universe and Everything.

[@neonknights]

I'd recommend you to watch The Outer Limits episode "Think Like a Dinosaur" or read the short story by James Patrick Kelly it was based on, it deals exactly with the 2nd theory of how the transporter works.

[@WingedWyrm]

About possibility 2. We all eat, breathe, drink, etc. We replace bits of ourselves with other bits that become bits of ourselves. On the molecular level, we do replace ourselves on a fairly regular basis. The fact that you've gone through an entire set of skin cells in seven years doesn't mean that you have entirely different skin now. If you're willing to say that you are the same entity that you were a decade ago, potentially as little as three months ago, then the transporter just does the exact same thing faster. Think of yourself less as a physical component and more as the continuity of you. If you are in a continuity with the baby you used to be, then the "exact copy" isn't a different person, but you... maybe with different atoms, but that was always going to be the case anyway.

[@JadieJamz]

You never talk about Miles Obrien's original dying, and his double taking his place to Take care of Keiko.

[@ponder1117]

In Enterprise "Daedalus" there's a line about how early transporters caused controversy, but that everyone just kind of stopped worrying about it. I imagine it's kind of like us with anesthesia - no one really knows if it prevents pain or just erases memories of pain.

[@discocorco]

Ok, Encounter at Farpoint-McCoy refuses to use the transporter. Remember, Data suggested he take the shuttle and McCoy keeps calling Data, "boy" and asked Data if he was a Vulcan. McCoy is 137 years old. He is a Doctor, who probably knows better than everyone else in the entire series. The transporter ain't healthy enough for the Doc.

[@cripplious]

Pulaski hated the transporter too

[@MyNutcake]

I think the transported works like cutting and pasting on a computer, you take the original, save it in the clipboard and paste it in where you wish, your consciousness is phased and your original atoms moved. When it malfunctions it acts like copy and paste, where multiple duplicates can be produced and a new consciousness is constructed

[@stepheng1523]

Think how paranoid you would become, knowing that almost everyone around you is a replica of someone you know. Surprising that Barclay wasn't even more fucked up than he was

[@andymac4883]

Other examples of preserved consciousness during transport include STVI. When Gorkon's entourage is being beamed onto the Enterprise, General Chang among others is show to be looking around (as in turning his head) while still materialising on the pad, and (be it deliberately or by restrictions in SFX) he's visibly fading into existence as opposed to being reassembled. And while being beamed up from Rura Penthe Kirk manages to keep up a stream of curses while fading out of and into existence.

[@andrebrynkus2055]

Lieutenant Riker was a missed opportunity. That was another time that they could have had Commander Riker finally take command of his own ship. From there Data could be promoted to first officer and now Lieutenant Commander Riker joins the crew of the Enterprise. The new character isn't wasted. The old character takes the growth he earned. And a shake up of characters on our favourite ship.

[@FFVison]

Going along with theory #3, When asked about how the Heisenberg compensators work, Michael Okuda replied "They work just fine, thank you." Essentially saying, it's a TV show and in order to describe how some technology that hasn't yet been invented works, they go with the Apple notion of "it just works".