TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

And they treat the one on the planet like he's a copy when he'd logically be the original with the one on the Enterprise being the duplicate.

I'll take the small chance of being cut in half over the guaranteed murder box, thanks.

Good news, I'm pretty sure holes in reality are more likely than the reconstitution beam.

About the time O'Brien was born.

Plenty of folks become more irascible as they age. It's one thing to do something under orders when you're young, and quite another thing to do them when you're retired.

Also, he would have seen more and more incidents as time went on

Star Trek transporters are "destroy and reconstitute" though. They are explicitly described as such. The whole Thomas Riker situation even requires it to be the case.

I think we are still in the realm of a physics problem for teleportation lol

Fusion is an engineering problem. the sun does it. We've done it. We just suck at it.

Teleporting is not possible as far as we know ....unless I missed something huge in science news

Hyperion suggests that you do not think about the fact that this is only a digital reconstruction of your original body, which died the first time you respawned. Do NOT think about this!

Some wild-card ideas to think about here are this:

What we're afraid of is losing continuity of conscious experience, so a transporter brings to mind the concept of just making a copy who has your memories and thus does not share your qualia or experience of life. But we don't even know what retains that continuity to begin with. We have no idea why you seem to be the same person you were last year when most of your atoms have changed. We don't know why you're the same person when you're put under anesthesia... and in fact, you might not be. It may very well be that every time you are put under general anesthesia, a new consciousness emerges inside your brain, with the feeling like they've always lived in that brain with those memories.

Now step that back again. What about sleep? Can you prove you're the same consciousness that existed yesterday or before your last nap when consciousness was turned off and back on again?

Basically, we don't know what happens when consciousness turns off for any reason and why it comes back seeming to pick right up where it left off, but there are also a lot of people who say maybe it doesn't turn back on. And in fact, it can even be scaled up again... can you prove you're the same continuous entity that was aware of the universe a moment ago? What even IS a continual experience? Can it exist without memory?

If the brain just creates a story for our consciousness to make sense of the universe and can create and invent stories and filter things from your senses, how sure are we that there even IS a continual conscious experience? Your brain could be tricking you at every moment, there might not even BE such thing as consciousness ending, maybe when you "die" you immediately occupy the next most-probable configuration. And maybe this also can be tied to the new research that says if you could scan every particle that makes up a human body and recreate it, it would necessarily destroy the old copy, because the more you know about one property of a particle, the less you know about the other. The more you know where they are, the less you know about where they're going.

A lot of maybes here for a technology that may never exist in any capacity, but it's a great insight into how inexplicable the universe and our experience of it really is.

*"...I teleported home one night, With Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie's heart away, And I got Sidney's leg." *

Teleportation Blues, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Transport the waste out of my bladder right into the matter recycler.

Transport the nutrient and vitamin mix into my stomach.

Transport the fat from my body.

This is a cool thought because it's not about being copied but more about the Ship of Theseus.

Why do we sleep?

"The body needs sleep."

No, the body needs rest. Our physical self just needs down time and relaxation and then it's good to go again. Our BRAIN needs sleep. Specifically, REM sleep to process all the new data that was taken in. Converting short-term memories into long-term memories. Sorting and organizing data. A kind of hard drive defragmentation.

Our sleep is normally presented like a sine wave. We regain base level consciousness cyclically several times a night, which is why we dream. Which is why our dreams are usually tied to recent memories. The more good sleep we get, the more our brains can deal with recent experiences.

When we wake up, it's like rebooting a device after an OS update. It's us, but with altered software. We are as much the person we were yesterday as the Ship of Theseus is still the Ship of Theseus after having pieces fixed and replaced. The whole is who we are, not the bits that changed.

Explain.

Dark Matter (the other one: the Canadian sci-fi show) had something called Transfer Transit kinda like that.

They scan you and rapidly grow a clone at your destination with all your memories. Clone has like a 3-5 day lifespan, but is otherwise "you". It goes and does whatever you planned to do at the far end.

The main you stays behind and does whatever until the clone returns to a Transfer Transit pod on the far end. It's memories are then uploaded to you and the clone disintegrates. You now " remember" everything the clone did on your behalf as if you did it personally.