Risa

I'm taking shuttlecrafts.

I'm terrified of transporters

Geordi: Reg, transporting really is the safest way to travel.

Barclay: Maybe you're....wait a second. Didn't it turn you and Ro into fucking ghosts like...2 weeks ago?

It's funny that when it's transporter people freak out at this idea, but technically every single person goes to sleep not knowing if the 'them' that wakes up was the same as the one that went to sleep.

We could effectively have individual consciousnesses dying each night and new ones picking back up the next morning.

Something to think about as you lie drifting off to sleep tonight.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/teleporter-3

Source to give credit and so you can read the title text, the panel that was cropped off, and the bonus panel.

I don't subscribe to the Star Trek teleporters killing you. They turn you into energy on one side, shoot that energy across subspace to the other end, and recombine you back into matter.

Why do I believe this? Because of several episodes where transported crew members, including Barclay, describe the sensation and what they see as they stream through the energy/matter conversion field. If they can describe the feeling and visual stimuli from end to end, I don't see how it's 2 different entities. It's the same one, converted from matter to energy and back again.

This also explains how Tuvix was created because of some plant getting mixed in with them. The weirder, harder to explain things, are the straight up transporter clones.

Transporter accidents prove transporters work this way and are murder machines. To an outside observer a perfect clone is the same person, impossible to differentiate. But to the individual's experience, they die every time they are disintegrated in a transporter. It's a new consciousness being created when reassembled that thinks it's continuous. It's hand-waved away because it's how it's always been and transporters are a key part of the Star Trek setting.

There is a chapter or two from a book by philosopher Derek Parfit that tackles the transporter issue pretty head-on. It draws what I feel to be a pretty compelling distinction between the continuity of your conscious mind, referred to as Relation R, and the personal identity that is lost when using the transporter. He then asks which is more important. Worth a read if this stuff interests you.

There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.

In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will 'balance the equation' (destroy the original) every time. That's easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who's already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to 'balance the equation'...

This is the struggle session that launches a million "a sufficiently high fidelity copy of a person is literally the same person" takes, which often conveniently require the original person to die to maintain that "literally the same person" take. If the person didn't "go anywhere" and was told "congratulations, you teleported! Now kindly step into the biomass recycler because literally you is already at the destination" I don't blame that original from not going quietly.

https://www.existentialcomics.com/comic/1

Does that mean transporter clones are when the transporter ACTUALLY worked?

OK I'm not even a Trekkie but I was doing some elecromag homework and I have a really cool theory on this:

The teleporter thingy actually acts more like a guitar pickup, in a more E=mc^2 type of way, entirely perfectly converting the person into energy - not matter. (This would require an analog encoding from matter to energy). The biggest difference is the pickup totally uses up the entire person, so like if you strum a guitar and it converts to a perfect electrical wave (but the guitar goes mute).

This energy is a lot easier to transfer than just matter, but the person encoded within it still only exists once in that energy. (for the guitar analogy a speaker at the other end that picks up the guitar wave, and turns it back into sound)

Its then entirely used up to power the 'person builder' in an analog way, much more accurately than were able to recreate digitally (aka why tape record are the truest form of music recording we have, it accutate to a way smaller scale than we can capture digitally.)

This would then mean that we can't just duplicate the creation process, cause the energy only flowed into the machine one time in that exact fashion, and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person; then a way to accurately recreate that energy waveform to power the machine.

This also opens the possibility of the transporter 'missing' if somehow they moved faster than the speed of light, while the person was still being transported, and them being just a flash of light endlessly propagating throughout the void.

Idk if the things have range in the series, but it could also be that the angle a transporter can accurately capture that energy is limited, and so really far away things are too large to be able to accurately capture (unless you have a massive radar dish or something alike)

Transporters are death machines!

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/ webcomics has a very interesting story arc about teleporters and why they were replaced.

Okaaaay, just because you've brought it up.....

Transporters in Star Trek are shown to definitely not be duplication machines. "Our Man Bashir" (DS9) is probably the most definitive proof of that.

Personally, I think transporter technology explains the staunch atheist (but still open-minded and sometimes spiritualist) Federation mindset: they know that their entire being can be reduced to a matter/energy stream. The transporter makes a devastating philosophical challenge to the idea of a "soul." Which is, ironically, why so many Federation officers refuse to accept anything that challenges that assumption (VOY "Sacred Ground").