The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

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[Ryujin]

Transporters kill their passengers and replicate an exact but separate and entirety different clone.

Hahah!

There's an entire episode of "The Outer Limits" that's based on that.

 

[Gradine]

There's an entire episode of "The Outer Limits" that's based on that.

I'm pretty sure there's an extra Riker running around in Star Trek because of it

 

[Cadence]

I'd kind of like to take some folks posts, change the context a bit, and then ask them to judge how abrupt/hostile/non-constructive they thought they were... based on how they react to others.

(No fair doing that to me though!)

 

[Deset Gled]

I'm pretty sure there's an extra Riker running around in Star Trek because of it

Also a movie. But if I name the movie, it's already a spoiler.

 

[Guest 7034872]

Transporters kill their passengers and replicate an exact but separate and entirety different clone.

Hahah!

In nerd-world we joke about these things, but in fact a famous Oxford philosopher, Derek Parfit, wrote an entire book about these exact sorts of questions. Especially because of the results of Star Trek transporter thought experiments for the conceptual boundaries of selfhood, he ultimately concluded that the Buddhists are right and there actually is no such thing as a "self."

No joke. The book is called Reasons and Persons. It is an absolute classic in academic philosophy.

The more I look at the real world, the more plausible science fiction becomes.

 

[Umbran]

I'm pretty sure there's an extra Riker running around in Star Trek because of it

So, while this all is true for a lot of sci-fi transport, it actually isn't entirely true for Star Trek transporters.

Canonically, a Trek transporter does take you apart, and turns you into what they something they call a "matter stream" - the stream is you physical form converted, which is then sent (still maintaining the pattern that is "you") and reassembled. Technically, they take you apart, and put you back together again out of the same stuff - you are not actually entirely different. Every bit of you from the start reaches the destination.

Thomas Ryker (eventually using William T. Ryker's middle name) arose when his transporter beam interacted with a "distortion field". To make this work in Trek physics, the information of his pattern was duplicated, and energy taken from that distortion field to provide the matter to reconstruct the second Ryker.

(this is from ST:TNG, episode "Second Chances")

 

[Ryujin]

In nerd-world we joke about these things, but in fact a famous Oxford philosopher, Derek Parfit, wrote an entire book about these exact sorts of questions. Especially because of the results of Star Trek transporter thought experiments for the conceptual boundaries of selfhood, he ultimately concluded that the Buddhists are right and there actually is no such thing as a "self."

No joke. The book is called Reasons and Persons. It is an absolute classic in academic philosophy.

The more I look at the real world, the more plausible science fiction becomes.

For this reason the "transporters" in my Space Opera universe used an "artificial dimensional rift" (ie wormhole) in order to transport. Well, technically there was only one, that my players found in the course of their long running subplot about finding ancient technology, because it was a Forerunner device.

 

[Guest 7034872]

For this reason the "transporters" in my Space Opera universe used an "artificial dimensional rift" (ie wormhole) in order to transport. Well, technically there was only one, that my players found in the course of their long running subplot about finding ancient technology, because it was a Forerunner device.

Pretty nifty idea. It sounds a bit like Babylon Five and Deep Space Nine, but (if I'm reading you correctly) on a smaller and more portable scale.

 

[Ryujin]

Pretty nifty idea. It sounds a bit like Babylon Five and Deep Space Nine, but (if I'm reading you correctly) on a smaller and more portable scale.

In practice it was more like a Stargate ring, but with the ring only needed on one end. This was around 1984/1985. Space Opera came out in 1980 and Stargate was released in 1994, so should I go after them for copyright infringement?

I modified the gate a bit from the original specs. I was running the adventure "Vault of the Ni'er Queyon" as the over-arching story, with other adventures used as the fill in between. Instead of the "spice runner" Millennium Falcon type ship they were supposed to get, I gave them a refitted patrol vessel from one of the Sheldon's Starcraft books. The 'transporter' in the original adventure had a high chance of killing anyone using it, but I liked the concept too much for that. I described it in pretty Geigeresque terms. They ended up converting part of a hold as their "transporter room." Sadly, the campaign started to fizzle out after that point and we only had one more completed adventure.

Vault of the Ni'er Queyon - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org