From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 04:06:15 MST
On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, James Swayze wrote:
> mjg223 wrote:
> >
> > Take, for example, Star Trek style transporter rays. You take me apart, an
> > atom at a time, throw the remnants away and reconstruct a copy at a
> > distance. In at least an intuitive sense, the copy 'isn't me.' You've
> > murdered me, albeit in a peculiarly baroque way.
>
> "reconstruct a copy at a distance"?
>
> Just an FYI, that's not how the fictional "Star Trek" transporter allegedly
> works.
James, I believe is correct in a classical sense. This is covered in
some depth in "The Physics of Star Trek". If I recall, they basically
concluded that the energy costs were too huge to allow transporters
to ever work in a "classical" sense. However, in my reading of the
text, it seemed to make no sense to try and transport atoms around
at approx. the speed of light. Instead you want the *information*
transported, which given the redundancy in a human body is probably
not alot given a reasonable compression strategy. (E.g. you only
need one copy of your genome and some difference information in
the cells containing mutations [if you don't want to "repair" the
mutations]).
If you are just transporting the information and you encode it
on GHz-THz carrier waves, then reconstruct the individual from
atoms already *at* the destination location, then I believe that
neo-transporters are possible. Technically speaking this would
only be a slight enhancement to an "almost anything box".
But I doubt this would have been a good strategy for the S.T. writers.
Most people (including myself) are inherently uncomfortable with
having themselves dismantled and a replicant assembled elsewhere.
They really want *themselves* to be move at light speed from one
location to another. Until each of us wrestles with the meme of
"what" *we* really are its going to be hard to be satisfied with
replicant transport rather than actual transport.
I would note that there is some confusion in S.T. about how the
transporters actually work. In S.T.N.G. there is an incident
where Riker gets replicated into 2 copies of himself. If atom
transport were in fact the methodology, either you would get 2
dwarf Rikers, or a very big energy bill to create the atoms
of a second Riker from raw energy. That would be unlikely to
have gone "unnoticed".
R.
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