Real life star trek in the making

[Dracus]

read about the latest in transporter development.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...ort020617.html

[Ed Kolis]

You know the most annoying thing... there was this ad on that site you mentioned that would scoot around the screen as I chased it to close it... finally it gave up after a few seconds... weird!

OK, that had nothing to do with your post, but I had to mention it

[disabled]

The ehtical part of the way thier transporter works is that you must be killed to be transported. IE, your data must be destroyed so the scanners can read it. Then you are rebuilt on the other side.

[AeoN2]

And the philosophical question would be "Will I keep my own consciousness after being transported?"

Since every atom gets identically duplicated, I would expect the person having been transported to say "Sure, I feel exactly the same"

But the question would still be, "Would I still be me? or would I die to let someone identical to me with my experiences live? is there a soul?"

And ofcourse the next and even more interesting possiblity would be the hacked transporter machines that didn't destroy the original, instead duplicating a person (I can see many evil uses of this possibility)

EDIT: or did the original have to be destroyed to transport?

--
AeoN2
--
Inside every small problem is a large problem struggling to get out.

[ June 20, 2002, 12:44: Message edited by: AeoN2 ]

[dogscoff]

And ofcourse the next and even more interesting possiblity would be the hacked transporter machines that didn't destroy the original, instead duplicating a person (I can see many evil uses of this possibility)

Read "Schlock mercenary" for an exploration of this exact(ish) situation. S_J links to it, or you can go to my site and find the bookmarks/ Online comics page. It's a great read.

[Jmenschenfresser]

Sounds to me like this is another case of Chicken Little.

Perhaps the first philosophical book I ever read.