• ToastGhost [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    at "atomic pattern" is a computer file, named funnily because no one was familiar with computers when the show aired. there is nothing magical about a computer that makes it special or really you. This "atomic pattern" with the right encoding scheme, could be written in plain text by monastery scribes, shipped across the continent by horseback, and fed back to another teleporter machine. The caravan could be stalled in the wilderness and never make it to its destination, it could be tamered with by some drunk guy who thought it funny to add "and absolutely swimming in leprosy", so much can go wrong in the middle.

    Unless star trek intends to ignore the laws of physics, the information has to travel by some medium, and while the medium of electromagnetism holds some fantastical properties in the minds of 1960s TV viewers, it is not fundamentally different than my medieval metaphor, perhaps even shakier, as now the information is at the mercy of random space phenomenon as well as just anyone with a radio dish pointed the right way, or anyone with a a strong transmitter shouting "print thousands of eternally tormented beings 1011100010101101010101010101110"

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Once again it's a thought experiment not am engineering project. The thought experiment assumes it works perfectly. Shrodinger's Cat isn't actually about cats either.

      • ToastGhost [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        But schrodingers cat describes a real phenomenon, just one which the cat is an analogy for, so that laypeople can understand a discovery, the cat is pop science. I dont see any real phenomenon which justifies this strange and unsettling metaphor that involves boiling people for a magic trick.

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Okay, Schrodinger's cat is a scientific thought experiment, this is a philosophical one. About how comciou does or doesn't relate to the physical being. It's not about the teleporter it's just there to make you think about stuff.