Transporter Death in other Sci-Fi

[Admiral_Icehawk]

DarthWong has shown us that Star Trek transporters will literally be the death of you (or at least your counciousness) as shown in the episode Second Chances.

My Question: Does this occur with transporter or teleporter in other science fiction.
-Like the many froms of matter transportation in Stargate
-The strange energy tube transporters in Halo
-Jumpgates from various series'

Or one of the many other teleporter types seen in various sci-fi over the years.

[Vegi]

There was an episode of stargate where the back of a man's head was in the portal when the portal was closed. It severed the part that was on the other side of the portal. I think the guy was Kowalski.

[Admiral_Icehawk]

Spose your right.

I really mean't like go though the transporter with no problems but stil have your counciousness die

Guess I should have been more thorough, oh well good contibution Vebi.

[The Grim Squeaker]

The Authority ("Authority" - Comic) has its own version of a teleporter called "Doors" capable of taking you almost anywhere (Including alternate planets) by stepping through a door of energy.
Unfortunately, if the door closes on you then you'll be sliced in half (And this was used as a tactic a number of times, as well as dumping people into "Poop & shit planet where velocity above 50Mph is converted into sound)

[SilverWingedSeraph]

I think you also failed to understand the damn question, DEATH. I'm not sure about Stargates, though. They've said that the wormhole breaks them down into their component molocules and reassembles them on the other side, but there seems to be some suggestion that they are semi-aware of the process, and some other suggestion that they are technically dead while transporting. Given how the technology works, I'd say the latter.

I'm not sure about the others, but if it breaks you down and reassembles you, then technically, I suppose, it's killing you and then creating an exact duplicate.

[18-Till-I-Die]

He means is there any form of transporter that kills you, reclones you like the ones in Star Trek guys. Obviously they can ALL kill you if used wrong, but he means which actually kill you even when it's right.


Now besides that, i cant really say of any i know. Most forms you mentioned (Stargate for example) imply that the person is conscious throughout, as we 'see' them go through the wormhole. Thus one would speculate that no a Stargate does not work like a Transporter.

Indeed, i cant think of any form of teleportation besides ST which is known to be a literal "kill you/clone you" method.

There was an Outer limits episode (the new series) where this was adressed however. Cant recall the ending.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

Now besides that, i cant really say of any i know. Most forms you mentioned (Stargate for example) imply that the person is conscious throughout, as we 'see' them go through the wormhole. Thus one would speculate that no a Stargate does not work like a Transporter.

Read my post. It's stated in Stargate that the Stargate works in a similar manner to the transporter in Star Trek. Teal'c is trapped in the Gate after a malfunction, and when they manage to get him out, he doesn't realise any time has passed since he first stepped through the gate.

[Imperial Overlord]

The 40K teleporters don't alter you, they just shoot you through the warp and bringing you back to the material universe at your destination. That can be very, very bad, but it doesn't involve destroying your body or your consciousness.

[SirNitram]

Now besides that, i cant really say of any i know. Most forms you mentioned (Stargate for example) imply that the person is conscious throughout, as we 'see' them go through the wormhole. Thus one would speculate that no a Stargate does not work like a Transporter.

Read my post. It's stated in Stargate that the Stargate works in a similar manner to the transporter in Star Trek. Teal'c is trapped in the Gate after a malfunction, and when they manage to get him out, he doesn't realise any time has passed since he first stepped through the gate.

Interestingly, there's lots to suggest 1) Souls exist in Stargate-verse(Ascension, and the comments made by Jackson in Abyss, when he was Ascended and thus damn near all-knowing), and 2) Handle gate travel just fine, considering who we see doing 1).

[Lord of the Abyss]

The Enemy Stars, Poul Anderson. The subject is scanned down to the subatomic level, a process which reduces the body to superheated plasma; the plasma is stored as a matter reserve. The data record of the passenger is transmitted to a receiver, which reconstructs the passenger using the plasma left over from previous transports.

Delta Pavonis by Eric Kotani & John Maddox Roberts; the passenger is recorded, converted to pure energy, and transmitted. Then the energy is reformed into the passenger.

Way Station, Cifford D Simak. Passengers are transmitted as "wave patterns" and reconstructed from a matter reserve at the next station.

[Neko_Oni]

One of the FTL drives in the Hyperion universe kills you when it activates and then you have to be regrown (essentially cloned).

[eyl]

While it's not strictly speaking teleportation, the hyperdrive in Asimov's Robot books (the early version of it, at least) temporarily killed* the users (the short story "Escape!" in I, Robot)

*Possibly the effect was purely subjective, but if so the first robot brain trying to solve the problem shouldn't have crashed (which it did due to First Law violation)

[NecronLord]

Offhand, ones that don't kill you; 40K ones, and probably 40K necron ones, Iconian Portals from Star Trek (presumably) and Culture displacers.

The stargate certainly does kill you. It breaks you down and shoots you as a particle stream through a micro-wormhole. It can even store your 'data' and energy.

[Shroom Man 777]

The one in The Prestige, well, I'm not sure how it really works

[white_rabbit]

There are several ways you can "die" while using a 40k transporter, but I'm not sure they qualify as a the transporter killing you in the fashion you describe.

If they need a homer to get you, and this gets trashed as they initiate the Port, you end up not coming out the other end of the Port, and have a nice Chat with Gzarhgatothugothounicyslawr and his pals for all eternity.

If there are difficult conditions, small problems like your extremities getting left behind, and/or materialising partially inside something have happened.

[Plushie]

And there's just the general hazard of a quick trip into the Warp. Don't Marines sometimes come out with claw marks on their armor?

[petesampras]

DarthWong has shown us that Star Trek transporters will literally be the death of you (or at least your counciousness) as shown in the episode Second Chances.

DarthWong has solved a mystery which still baffles the fields of psychology, neuroscience, A.I. and philosophy??

The question of whether a perfect copy of you, in terms of conciousness, is you is FAR from solved. There are many convincing arguments on both sides.

To be scientific, this conciousness - which is lost during a transportation - must be something which can be measured somehow. You must be able to perform some measurement whereby you can say that the original possesses your conciousness, but the perfect copy does not.

If you adopt the cognitive science view on conciousness, it is defined in terms of the mind which is defined in terms of behavours produced by the brain. A perfect copy of your brain will produce the same behaviours and hence the same mind. Replacing you with a perfect copy of you alters nothing from a cognitive perspective. No measurement can show a difference. If you can't measure a difference then it is meaningless to talk about a difference.

Now, you can point out that a perfect copy of a glass is not the same glass, and that this can be determined by tracing their histories. This is true, but to apply this to the conciousness argument is to say that the histories traced out by the atoms which make up your brain a critical to your specific conciousness. If you believe this, I would ask what your reasons are, and also point out that this goes against the currently held views of most of cognitive science - which views the patterns and information processed by the brain (it's functional description) as being what defines the mind not the specific atoms actually used to produce these patterns.

[Hotfoot]

DarthWong has shown us that Star Trek transporters will literally be the death of you (or at least your counciousness) as shown in the episode Second Chances.

DarthWong has solved a mystery which still baffles the fields of psychology, neuroscience, A.I. and philosophy??

The question of whether a perfect copy of you, in terms of conciousness, is you is FAR from solved. There are many convincing arguments on both sides.

To be scientific, this conciousness - which is lost during a transportation - must be something which can be measured somehow. You must be able to perform some measurement whereby you can say that the original possesses your conciousness, but the perfect copy does not.

If you adopt the cognitive science view on conciousness, it is defined in terms of the mind which is defined in terms of behavours produced by the brain. A perfect copy of your brain will produce the same behaviours and hence the same mind. Replacing you with a perfect copy of you alters nothing from a cognitive perspective. No measurement can show a difference. If you can't measure a difference then it is meaningless to talk about a difference.

Now, you can point out that a perfect copy of a glass is not the same glass, and that this can be determined by tracing their histories. This is true, but to apply this to the conciousness argument is to say that the histories traced out by the atoms which make up your brain a critical to your specific conciousness. If you believe this, I would ask what your reasons are, and also point out that this goes against the currently held views of most of cognitive science - which views the patterns and information processed by the brain (it's functional description) as being what defines the mind not the specific atoms actually used to produce these patterns.

Wow, for all that, you'd think you'd know what was being talked about.

In Second Chances, it is revealed that the "Real" William T. Riker has been trapped on a planet for years ever since his beamout supposedly failed. Due to some technobabble involving the transporter, however, the Riker that's been on the Enterprise since the show began was created.

The copy was so good, in fact, that Troi, an Empath, noticed no difference while engaged in a romantic relationship with Riker.

In essence, this reveals a nasty truth about transporters: They are little more than fancy replicators. To go from one Riker to two Rikers, you need additional energy and mass. Two guesses as to where that came from. This means that under normal operation, all the transporters do is scan you, annihilate you, then build a new you at the destination. If they can't get a stable enough signal, they pump more power into the system to make up for the lost energy. So long as they have a recent scan of you, they can make a new you. Moreover, if you look at Voyager, you have an instance of two people merging into one.

In any event, in Second Chances, one of the two Rikers cannot be the original, it's just that simple. That means that one was created wholesale, and it indicates that the system completely annihilates the original in the process (something backed up by future transporter-centric episodes). If Star Trek believes in a Soul, it must be something that can be replicated through the transporter.

In short, Star Trek transporters kill you and then build a new you somewhere else.

And we'll not even talk about canonical transporter madness.

[Luzifer's right hand]

The faxnodes from Ilium kill.

I never understood the debate about copying, after all you just need to think about what would happen if the original was not destroyed. For one moment two identical beings would exist and to belive that no-one is killed when one of the beings is destroyed in the very same moment seems rather strange to me.

[petesampras]

DarthWong has shown us that Star Trek transporters will literally be the death of you (or at least your counciousness) as shown in the episode Second Chances.

DarthWong has solved a mystery which still baffles the fields of psychology, neuroscience, A.I. and philosophy??

The question of whether a perfect copy of you, in terms of conciousness, is you is FAR from solved. There are many convincing arguments on both sides.

To be scientific, this conciousness - which is lost during a transportation - must be something which can be measured somehow. You must be able to perform some measurement whereby you can say that the original possesses your conciousness, but the perfect copy does not.

If you adopt the cognitive science view on conciousness, it is defined in terms of the mind which is defined in terms of behavours produced by the brain. A perfect copy of your brain will produce the same behaviours and hence the same mind. Replacing you with a perfect copy of you alters nothing from a cognitive perspective. No measurement can show a difference. If you can't measure a difference then it is meaningless to talk about a difference.

Now, you can point out that a perfect copy of a glass is not the same glass, and that this can be determined by tracing their histories. This is true, but to apply this to the conciousness argument is to say that the histories traced out by the atoms which make up your brain a critical to your specific conciousness. If you believe this, I would ask what your reasons are, and also point out that this goes against the currently held views of most of cognitive science - which views the patterns and information processed by the brain (it's functional description) as being what defines the mind not the specific atoms actually used to produce these patterns.

Wow, for all that, you'd think you'd know what was being talked about.

In Second Chances, it is revealed that the "Real" William T. Riker has been trapped on a planet for years ever since his beamout supposedly failed. Due to some technobabble involving the transporter, however, the Riker that's been on the Enterprise since the show began was created.

The copy was so good, in fact, that Troi, an Empath, noticed no difference while engaged in a romantic relationship with Riker.

In essence, this reveals a nasty truth about transporters: They are little more than fancy replicators. To go from one Riker to two Rikers, you need additional energy and mass. Two guesses as to where that came from. This means that under normal operation, all the transporters do is scan you, annihilate you, then build a new you at the destination. If they can't get a stable enough signal, they pump more power into the system to make up for the lost energy. So long as they have a recent scan of you, they can make a new you. Moreover, if you look at Voyager, you have an instance of two people merging into one.

In any event, in Second Chances, one of the two Rikers cannot be the original, it's just that simple. That means that one was created wholesale, and it indicates that the system completely annihilates the original in the process (something backed up by future transporter-centric episodes). If Star Trek believes in a Soul, it must be something that can be replicated through the transporter.

In short, Star Trek transporters kill you and then build a new you somewhere else.

And we'll not even talk about canonical transporter madness.

If you read what I wrote, you will see that this is exactly what I am talking about. There are two identical Rikers. Do they have the same or different conciousness? Well that's the big question. There are many arguments on both sides. I presented one above. If you can answer my above points, then please do....

[petesampras]

The faxnodes from Ilium kill.

I never understood the debate about copying, after all you just need to think about what would happen if the original was not destroyed. For one moment two identical beings would exist and to belive that no-one is killed when one of the beings is destroyed in the very same moment seems rather strange to me.

'Seems rather strange to me' is not a solid argument though. Our concepts of death and killed derive from a reality where you can't rebuild someone if they are destroyed. In a universe where that is possible we need to think about what exactly 'death' means compared to what it means to us.

[18-Till-I-Die]

The key word is duplicate. That is, a knockoff. A really fucking good knockoff is still a knockoff and not the Real McCoy.

[Hotfoot]

If you read what I wrote, you will see that this is exactly what I am talking about. There are two identical Rikers. Do they have the same or different conciousness? Well that's the big question. There are many arguments on both sides. I presented one above. If you can answer my above points, then please do....

It's not even really that big of a question. At the moment of transport, they are the same. You can't make the argument that the Riker on the planet is different, as he is the original. The Riker on the ship is so identical that Troi, an empath who can easily read Riker at the time, noticed no difference.

The only point where they differ happens after the transport. That's it. People can be caught mid-sentence in a transport.

Your points do nothing to answer the fact that the body at the point of origin is annihilated and the body at the destination doesn't even have to be made up of the same matter in order to be identical. You. Are. Destroyed. By. Transporters. Killed. Made dead. Shoveled off the mortal coil into the bleeding choir invisible. What comes back is not you. It may be identical in nearly every way that matters, but it is not you. Nothing is more evident of this than the fact that you can make a duplicate WITHOUT destroying the original.

God damn. What is so difficult to understand about this? A copy of you is not you. It may be a perfect copy, but it is still not you. This is like trying to explain that identical twins or clones are not the same people. Even "perfect" clones are not the same individuals for fuck's sake. The fact that they are each unique beings means that their experiences will differ and no matter how well they meshed up at the point of creation from that point on they will be different.

Not a one of your points dealt with the fact that the original body in a transport is ANNIHILATED. You're just throwing out some mealy-mouthed shit which sums up as "well if the copy is just as good, who cares?"

By that logic, there's nothing wrong with making transporter copies and killing them for no reason at all, because hey, it's not like you removed a sentient being from the universe, there's still a version of him running around somewhere. No harm, no foul. How is that any different from the standard operation of transporters?

[petesampras]

The key word is duplicate. That is, a knockoff. A really fucking good knockoff is still a knockoff and not the Real McCoy.

I disagree. The story 'Moby Dick' can appear in more than one book simultaneously. The exact matter used is different, but the story is the same. It is meaningless to refer to one of the books as being 'the real mckoy' and one being a 'knock off'.

If you believe that the same conciousness cannot exist in more than one body at the same time, give your reasoning. I'm not claiming that the copy of Riker is Riker, but I would make the claim that the conciousness is the same - since conciousness, like stories, is dependant on information processing and patterns of matter - it is not a property of the matter itself.

[General Zod]

If you read what I wrote, you will see that this is exactly what I am talking about. There are two identical Rikers. Do they have the same or different conciousness? Well that's the big question. There are many arguments on both sides. I presented one above. If you can answer my above points, then please do....

For a fraction of a second they would have been completely identical until the point when they started going about their own lives. Their consciousness likewise would have an identical set of memories to that point.

'Seems rather strange to me' is not a solid argument though. Our concepts of death and killed derive from a reality where you can't rebuild someone if they are destroyed. In a universe where that is possible we need to think about what exactly 'death' means compared to what it means to us.

Since duplications like the Riker incident don't happen very often, it's safe to assume that once someone's consciousness stops, they're dead, end of story, do not pass go. Frankly, just because the possibiliity of resurrection is there does not change the concept of what death actually is. It just makes it slightly less permanent in some instances.