Transporter is now working
 

All we now need is a TV show for it.

suppose the transporter was operational and 100% safe. would you go through? if you are completely destroyed and replicated as an exact duplicate? what about your soul? does it destroy and recreate that? would a succesful trip through prove the nonexistence of an actual soul? or is your soul centered in a physical manifestation that could be anihiated and recreated? hurry up! answer me!

There is a very cold very cool cyberpunk narrative floating around about that, I'll see if I can dig it up.

Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a collection of atoms to just be taken apart and reassembled by some godawful machine!

(sorry.. it was too good to pass up.)

The more interesting question is whether, since you're making someone out of a bunch of atoms anyway, could you make two? That could be the new yardstick for ethical quagmire.

Yeah, it sure is! On a more practical level, what's the physiological difference between a body 5 seconds before death, and 5 seconds after? Can whatever is keeping the body alive be preserved during the transporter process?

It would still be cool as hell even if it could only handle inorganic objects, and there may be other applications. (In Scott Westerfeld's "Risen Empire" books, quantum entaglement was used to send messages instantaneously over interstellar distances.)

This is quite cool -- faster-than-light communication might be seen in our lifetimes. A transmitter and receiver could contain two paired particles and change their spin to communicate.

Science has finally solved annoying international phone lag!

...and the implications for communcating with space probes, etc, are fairly large. No more seven minute wait in sending commands to a Mars probe.

That is, if they get this all working beyond the millimeters of distance they're working with, today.

This gives us several hypotheticals.

The soul test.

The duplication issue.

And don't miss out on the duplicate soul possibilities...

The soul test.

What is that? Is it scantron or essay?

The term teleportation is a little misleading. Matter is not being transported but, rather, information. Sort of like dissasembling a house brick by brick, and simultaneously destroying the original brick and making a duplicate brick at a location down the street. If you do it really fast, it looks like a house disappears and reappears when that's not exactly the way it went down. The new house is an exact replica of the original but the original is no longer in its original state. The atoms are still there but they aren't a house anymore.


Teleporting actual matter remains out of the question (so far).

Transporters could, in theory, positing that a soul exists, test to see if the soul is tied to the body.

If a soul actually exists, and is tied to the body, what happens to first luckless bastard sent through?

The term teleportation is a little misleading. Matter is not being transported but, rather, information. Sort of like dissasembling a house brick by brick, and simultaneously destroying the original brick and making a duplicate brick at a location down the street.

My understanding is that it really isn't even that -- they're simply applying a magnetic field to change the spin on a particle and its paired particle automatically spins in the opposite direction. This should happen instantly regardless of the distance they are seperated, which is cool because you should be able to place them millions of miles apart and the change will always be immediate. Interpret spin direction as 1's and 0's and you have a really amazing way to digitally communicate without delays based on the speed of light and it affects a lot more in your life than you think. (Example: the greatest distance you can use a cellphone from a tower is only so many miles. If you are on a boat offshore or in a remote location it can be a big issue. The protocol used has a timeout and that timeout limit is exceeded once you go go too far out because of the time it takes the radio wave to reach the tower and return. Lots of issues in satellite communication, long distance computer communication, etc, could be removed through this.)

Changing the spin on a particle doesn't exactly translate into teleporting a person, or even an object. You'd have to have all of the matter there and arranged properly. Changing the spin on particles in that matter wouldn't do much.

When we can replicate people perfectly this shit really will hit the fan. Man I'm doomed to live in interesting times. I'm sure before I'm 50 we'll see at least rudimentry neural interfaces, some kind of real AI, real nanotech.....so much potential, so much danger.

I've already seen prototypes of a device that can overlay thermal vision onto your own, projected straight into your retina. Imagine walking down the street with a full on HUD, beinh able to turn on and off thermal, NV, slective zooming, facial recognition combined with DB access, all in your sunnies....

Dance.

All things considered I've taken enough Aus-Europe flights (~20 hours) to be delighted with any speed increase.

The correct answer is that they are not transporting matter. Its all about how they put a spin on it.

And long distance relationships wouldn't be so ... long distance.

I imagine the actual fruition of this type of technology wouldn't be far off from what happened in The Sixth Day, that awful Schwarzenegger movie. Not so much that they were going through the physical act of cloning people in the movie, but rather that the bad guys were all cloned and not real people.

When Arnold runs into his clone, there seems to be a bit of mental angst and then acceptance when Arnold 2 figures out that he isn't actually the real Arnold (clone copies are identified by little dots under eyelid).

I'm babbling, but brought that up in response to the idea that what comes out the other end of the transporter isn't actually the "real" thing, but a replicated version. That would be a really weird thing, but if there weren't any side effects, I would totally do it.

Wouldn't you be a tad worried about say, the cable getting cut, data corrution, power cut....TCP/humanity.

I'd be more worried that I was being utterly destroyed, atom by atom. Whether a copy was constructed somewhere else would be beside the point. That's not a side effect, it's a feature!

I believe that the no cloning theorem may prevent us from using quantum entanglement as communication.

but, uh, I only know of this because I stumbled upon it on Wikipedia, and I'm uncharacteristically scared by the big words that I used in that sentence and the complicated math that they stand for.

[edit: typo hate]

It's all beyond me but I've got a mate that gets to spend some time at CERN for his uni course, he might have a better idea.

I'm in way over my depth. But I believe it would allow communication IF that communication were one-way only, and one-time only.

they used magic?

What if you either didn't have one to begin with, or had sold it off cheaply several years ago?

Does this mean that after using a transporter everyone would be Enron Executives?

Eeeeau.

The first transporter scene in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Oh, and the first baboon in The Fly (1986).

Not to worry, they'll use Microsoft Windows.:)

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Show me a man who'll use a Microsoft teleporter and I'll show you a man who is tired of life.

The "Blue Screen Of Death" lives up to its name.