like just assume for the instant that its possible to for the machine to identify all the atoms at some location and make them leap instantly to several feet in front you, no matter how far away they initially were, in the exact same configuration as they were, or at least at the speed of light (to make sure this totally plausible scenario doesn't run into any relativistic weirdness). What would happen if you like were knee deep in mud? would it transport full on gallons of mud as well? Just a small covering of mud over your pants and shoes? Would ALL the mud be left and you'd have super clean pants (Fuck doing laundry, just transport somewhere to clean your clothes)? Further, how does it know what's "you" and not? By DNA seem the obvious choice, but even if you found a way to get your skin and hair and toenails and etc to transport along with you, you'd probably be dead before you even realized it because your cell's mitochondria would probably be left behind. Once that's figured out, you'd be stuck starving to death without your gut flora. Although that would be a neat way to cure infection, transport someone and keep all the virons/bacteria behind. If anyone is still reading this inane post, is there a term for this sort of problem? Where in a wide forest view its beyond obvious easy to identify what is part of a person and what isn't, but once you start trying to actually draw the boundary about which specific trees it is, it becomes impossibly hard? That's really why I made this post, I'm trying to figure out a term to use to refer to that sort of thing and google is NOT helping.
They'll train the teleporters with a machine learning algorithm. It'll work 99% of the time, but the other 1% will be people who get turned into stop signs.
spoiler
in Star Trek they don't actually teleport your molecules, they disintegrate you and re-materialize an exact copy of you somewhere else. Every time somebody was beamed anywhere they were dying horribly and being replaced by a clone that didn't remember it happening.
There’s a short story by Harlan Ellison where black folks run the world cuz after scientists developed transporter tech, they kept trying to transport white folks and they came out all zombified. Turns out only POC can use transporter tech cuz they got SOUL.
It was in this collaborative book called “Mind Fields”. This Polish artist Jack Yerka painted pictures, and Ellison vibed on the pictures and wrote stories about them! That specific painting/story is called “Amok Harvest”.
This isn't true cos they have an episode, Daedalus, in ENT where a character says it isn't. He very specifically says he spent years debunking the idea that it did kill the subject. Consciousness is also maintained as we see in the episode Realm of Fear in TNG.
Also transporters work on the same level as the holodeck and replicators. They're matter-energy conversion. The subject is converted into an energy stream which is beamed to the target location. It's then rematerialised at that location.
I get that you're probably doing a bit but I don't care and wanted to flex Star Trek knowledge.
That's neat, I've only seen about a season and a half of TNG (and none of the other series) so I was just going off of a half-remembered forum thread I saw once.
In Star Trek? There are various safety protocols in place for that sort of event. They're an incredibly safe way to travel.
However, assassination isn't impossible during the beaming process as seen in the DS9 episode The Darkness and the Light where a device is planted on someone that scrambles their signal in the pattern buffer and effectively kills them by rematerialised them incorrectly. They're also detectable devices but there are ways to get around it as always.
In one of the TOS movies a scientist beaming onboard the Enterprise is horribly killed in a transporter accident, so it doesn't have to be an assassination.
maybe coastline paradox is applicable?
The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal curve-like properties of coastlines, i.e., the fact that a coastline typically has a fractal dimension (which in fact makes the notion of length inapplicable). The first recorded observation of this phenomenon was by Lewis Fry Richardson[1] and it was expanded upon by Benoit Mandelbrot.[2]
What's wrong with just having it teleport all the matter that's inside the teleporter, seems like way less of an issue to teleport a bunch of additional air and stuff than to try and identify exactly where all of a person is with one hundred percent accuracy
Call me a buzzkill but I don't think teleportation like we see in fiction is possible. There are laws and limits to reality. Science isn't some magic spell.
Only a tiny aspect of your post but I assume any sort of teleportation wouldn't include clothing because figuring out which inorganic (or at least non living) molecules belong to an article of clothing is another layer of complexity
We'll have pods that just teleport their entire contents long before we have star trek's arbitrary targeting
I dunno. I would assume the machine powerful enough to sequence all the DNA in every cell of your body would be smart enough to figure your outer boundaries and understand that teleporting everything inside of you is a good idea.
If you really want to get into nitty gritty of this should describe (the hypothetical) process that actually teleports your particles and puts them back together. Other parts of the discussion can only follow.
Also, there is an "ask science fiction" sub on reddit. Post the question there. It would be cool to see what those nerds come up with.
Very similar, except instead of the ant stay infitessimally close to the coastline, the ant notices that it isn't considered coean and what is considered land, as the beach goes from solid dry sand, to wet sand, to sand with a couple puddles in it, to sand where just the top of the grain is sticking out of the water, to finally open ocean. It can tell the coastline is "somewhere" between the two extremes, but its impossible to draw the line that actually divides it.
No one know's how it works, the whole process is blackboxed. First they developed the transporter ability but couldn't lock on to specific things, just rough areas (say a 10x10x10 cube). So what they did then was teach an AI how they wanted the transporter to function by feeding it mountains of 20th century TV. Then they gave it a super powerful sensor and told it to figure out how to do that. Millions of
bodieshours of machine learning later they got it to lock on more or less how they wanted it to.This sounds to me kind of essentially the same as the Hegelian distinction between quantity and quality. That there is an indefinable moment where when changing the quantity of something, the quality has also changed. Sort of like how if you were in a room and you kept raising the temperature one degree at a time, you'd eventually pass from cool to warm, but it's very difficult to meaningfully tie that to a specific quantity of temperature.
It also transported whatever they were carrying, their tools, and even something next to them on the ground if they wanted it to come with them.
I think some of that can be programmed into the transporter by Miles O'Brien, like the default is to identify objects that are clothes, and keep them. Also, for luggage, program that if someone appears to be holding something, transporter that too.
Or on a metaphysical level, maybe the particles in a person are linked on a quantum level, somehow, or by an extension of the mind outside of our brain. I read something the other day about that.
For the possessions, I would like to think that a persons immediate belongings are also quantumly linked, like clothes, etc.
I dunno
