Just believe we're inside a simulation and transporters won't matter.

That is why nervous system damage usually means life long problems. Brains and all their wiring are so arcane and complicated, even our bodies don't know how to grow more than one of them, and we often don't get it right the first time either unfortunately.

But what about the atoms/molecules that make up those neurons? Do they last a lifetime?

Yun Tianming: am I joke to you?

Yeah but we don't know if consciousness lives in the meat or in the chemistry.

uses teleporter

is inexplicably desperate to try the New Improved Coca Cola

But if they were open source they'd have the worst name possibly, and possibly an equally awful UI.

I guess we can be glad that "the GIMP" is taken so nobody will reuse that for a future FOSSeporter

No worries, its not you that was modified its your clone. Youre dead!

You would like Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth saga.

Excuse me sir or ma'am (or none of the above) do you want to co-write a movie? lol this is an amazing premise if it hasn't been done (and my apologies if you're referencing a movie i'm not aware of)

That works for teleportation that needs a receiver, like for a phone call. In ST you only need a transmitter, so it's more like a wormhole whose far end you can put wherever you want.

Someone needs to. At least you put thought into it.

Iirc Thomas is not Will’s copy. Basically the transporter has a malfunction where Thomas and Will are both constituted on a transporter pad. So both are the “original” and also both are neither. In a sense, the William Thomas Riker who stepped onto that pad that day ceased to be, forked into two different lives.

I used to use this episode to talk about identity when I taught ethics back in the day. Both men carried on their lives under the belief that they were the same man who stepped onto a transporter pad on Nervala IV. Their experiences defined who they were, demonstrating that it’s more than biological material that makes any one of us us.

Now the deeper question is: since you can’t add matter to the universe, what’s missing to give life to two Rikers?

The are other methods from Star Trek that could potentially be size as well.

Like "hey you actually travel through this other dimension where your physical form is undisturbed and no time passes in this dimension"

Which sounds ok, but "by the way it's kinda a hell-dimension and your consciousness gets tortured for a distance-relative time there but won't retain the memories after..."

To transport just means to move, so if anything the term "transporter" implies physically moving people rather than copying. The term "teleport" is the more ambiguous one...

I’m glad you did.

his lack of death is considered a transporter accident

Must do wonders for his self worth! 😄

They both got converted into energy, Thomas is just as much a copy as Will. Also, apparently your experience is constant across the process, as seen by Barclay grabbing someone out of the matter stream. Presumably someone would notice if it hurt...

Isn't Tom just another copy? He came out of the pattern buffer the same as Will iirc.

Now I understand why such and such movie about magicians calls the trick "the transported man".

Well, no, "transporter" means the first one, because that's how they're explained to work where they're called transporters.

A transporter is just Jason Statham in a suit. SCNR

Also: what kind of immortality would you like?

Can I just teleport the poop out of my colon and the piss out of my balls, so I don't have to get up to go to the bathroom?

Depends on how the technology works. It's more likely that you would need someone's how to receive or both ends, even if it were technically possible to just teleport randomly from point a to point b I feel like that feature would be disabled on commercial models precisely to stop the above from happening.

There are a couple old sci fi stories that feature "time tourism", where they have to stop sending people to popular events like the crucifixion of Jesus because they're getting overcrowded. Robert Silverberg's novel Up the Line and Garry Kilworth's Let's Go to Golgotha! In one of them the time travelers vastly outnumber the locals, and swing the vote to release one of the thieves instead of Jesus, because that's what the travelers think they're supposed to do.

There's a book where people have figured out teleportation so they have to hide women to prevent kidnappings.

Honestly, I'd never thought of it, but if they can reconstitute you, memories and all, they can probably just straight read your fucking mind.

Jesus Christ, imagine a government that can know every single thought you'd ever had, and assassinate accordingly

Nah, Google would just lift your interests and then inject time-delayed ads into your brain...

GITS, clever

If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.

That's definitely not a given.

That's like saying that if you can perfectly scan and reproduce a book down to the smudges and crumbs, that you understand the contents of that book.

To us right now in 2026, mapping an entire brain, simulating it perfectly, then editing it slightly without breaking it seems a lot more doable than breaking down a human quark by quark and rebuilding them somewhere else. But, that isn't necessarily the case.