CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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The Flaws of Sci-Fi Teleportation

Sunday, August 14, 2011

this entry brought to you by glasser, "home"


Basically, the way teleportation is explained in science fiction universes like Star Trek is that your molecules are disassembled, shot through space, and then reassembled in the exact order they were taken apart in.

There are two problems I've had with this since I was in my late teenage years.

If all of your molecules were, in essense, obliterated, when they were put back together, even if in the exact same order, all the electricity that linked them together would be gone, and in essense, a clone of you would be made with no memory whatsoever, not of who it was before, not of any of its surroundings, nor even how to speak or use motor skills. You would essentially be killing an adult person and making a clone of it with the mental capacity of a baby, unable to walk or feed itself, and you'd have to re-teach it everything.

But even if we assume that things like memories are all stored in the cells and putting them back piece by piece then the memories still stayed in tact. I don't know how this would make any difference to you as a person. Essentially you would be obliterated, and a clone of yourself would be created with all the memories you had, including the part where it was obliterated and re-composed. In terms of how the universe works, you would still be you. Except that you wouldn't have any knowledge of it. You would just be instantly killed and then replaced, and everyone else would continue to go about their lives, including your clone, only you wouldn't know it.

I have the exact same problem with the science fiction concept of uploading your existence onto a computer to become immortal. What the hell do I care that a version of myself is on the Internet having sex with all other cyber beings simultaneously if I died before being able to see it?
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with love from CRS @ 5:54 AM 

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