Many years ago I was inadvertently involved in teleportation experiments. They involved copious amounts of alcohol to achieve the desired, or sometimes undesired, effects when I would wake up and wonder how the hell I got wherever the hell I was. Oddly enough the experiments stopped when I quit drinking. 🤔
There was a sci-fi pilot a while back that never made it but they made it a point to address this. They were getting ready to teleport to a planet's surface and hopped into the teleporter, which just moved the space they were in through hyperspace and deposited them on the planet. Before they teleported, they talked about how they couldn't believe the dark days of teleportation when people actually disintegrated themselves and made copies at the other end and how glad they were they stopped such nonsense with the dimensional transport.
The movie "The Prestige" illustrated this idea pretty well. "It took courage to climb into that machine every night, not knowing if I'd be the man in the box, or in the Prestige." -Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman)
Never read the book, but I never understood what the aversion to having a copy was. The first time Angier tests it and he's face to face with his duplicate, he shoots him. Personally, I think it'd be kinda cool. Two of me! One for the week and one for Sunday dress!
In the Star Trek TNG episode "Realm of Fear", Lt. Barclay is transported and the audience gets to see how it is inside the transporter beam. As it is presented, it seems the person is never disassembled but remains intact and conscious as the scenery around changes from the origin to the arriving points. It is as if there is a "tunnel" that the person goes through. This is more consistent with the concept of a wormwhole. Maybe Simon could explore this in a future episode.
I'm starting to think transporters simply create a subspace tunnel between the transporter pad and the destination. Maybe that's why they call it "sub" space since it would be like a lower dimension of space that operates on completely different laws of physics. Maybe people aren't being broken apart, but rather phased out, atom by atom into subspace. My guess is that it goes like this unless lore I've missed contradicts me: Step 1: Matter on the transporter pad is phased out into subspace, atom by atom. Step 2: The matter being transported gets stored in the pattern buffer also using "subspace" technology. Step 3: Annular confinement beam is shot to the target destination and creates a subspace tunnel between the transporter beam emitter and the destination. Step 4: Subspace tunnel is used to phase the atoms into a new point in real space based on where the annular confinement beam is focused on.
Regarding the initial question about the ship, the same thing happens to us humans already. Our cells keep replacing themselves until none of the original cells that you were born with exist. So when someone that knew you in your childhood meets you later in life and says "gee, I didn't recognize you, you look like a different person"... they a right, you really are a different person. You yourself might remember the person you used to be but you simply aren't that person anymore.
^this. Yes most cells get replaced with new one (takes about 10 years for bones), but the brain doesn’t get replaced. There’s evidence that about 1-2% of *some* cells in the brain are renewed annually, but even those aren’t replaced entirely.
Loved the scene where the crew beam up Archer (Enterprise), who was about to be murdered, and fall over themselves to apologize to him for using the teleporter on him, as everyone was terrified of it.
The transporter scene in Star Trek: The Motion Picture where the people suffer an agonizing death is easily the most realistic one in the canon. Also the one in Star Trek: The Next Generation where they're testing it with fluid containers that come back broken.
I remember watching the original Star Trek on tv with my father and when they were teleporting my father said to me "that would HURT". That CREEPED ME OUT as a child. I was old enough to know that it was actors and special effects BUT the IDEA of it "hurting" creeped me out big time.
dads f**k you up casual... I asked mine if Gremlins could really fit through an air duct following the scene in the school (I had previously assumed they were bigger), he casually dismissed it with "I guess so". I reasoned that meant they could also fit through the toilet pipe so for the next year I hovered standing with one eye on the bowl every time I went for a poo.
Funny thing about perfect/flawless teleportation, once you have gotten teleported, you are absolutely convinced it is safe. Despite you, actually dying and a clone being in the new location thinking it is the original. Since the clone remembers being teleported (but not the dying part) he thinks it is safe and will actually transfer the whole conciousness.... And everybody except the most paranoid ppl would constanlty die and be replaced by clones. All while being 100% sure they are still the person that they were when they got first teleported. Now, to creep you out. When you follow that logic. Who can guarantee, that the same thing doesnt happen to you while you sleep. Your Monday you goes to bed, dies in the night and your Tuesdays you wakes up.
When you're sleeping you're still in tact and your body and mind are still fully functioning. However... as an astral projection enthusiast, you peaks my interest. It would work with the theory that you are the only one who actually exists... every time you go to sleep, your astral form steps out to work on the simulation you've created for yourself to exist in while your physical form remains suspended in a distracting dreamstate. Edit: so basically it would be the death and rebirth of the simulation around you during each sleep cycle, rather than the death and rebirth of you yourself.
There was a sci-fi series I once read where the main character was an assassin, and had to simultaneously eliminate four targets on four separate worlds in another star system... so he used a tachyon transporter to instantly go from Earth to each of these worlds. Except he stayed on Earth, and the transporter just made four photocopies of him on each world, with varying degrees of accuracy (memory issues, breakdowns of the nervous system, physical mutations, etc -- it was a handy plot hook to give the copies a challenge to overcome to complete their missions). Meanwhile, the original just took a conventional starship to leisurely fly from Earth to this other solar system to check on his photocopies progress -- and to eliminate his flawed copies, of course, who had no idea they were just copies :P
There was an anthology show where the alien teleporter needed a human employee. His job was to kill the passenger if the original copy did not get disintegrated. The woman does not vanish, so he saves her and falls in love with her. Later, the transported woman comes home all changed with tattoos and stuff, now there are two of her.
@@gravewalkers that's also similar to one of the plot points of The Prestige, where Hugh Jackman's character uses an actual teleporter to perform the teleporting man illusion and his original is killed by the water tank he uses in it.
Scotty often operated the teleporter. In fact most of the main cast performed jobs that were beneath their station because it was a TV show, and the actors needed screen time. And the oft alluded to fact that Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty" on the show only means he never said those four words in that exact order. He said words to that effect many times.
Does no one remember the movie "The Fly"? It's a really good example of how bad things can go even if a Teleporter were possible and worked ( mostly ) correctly.
Not to mention "The Curse of the Fly" wherein the lead scientist gets disassembled and transmitted without knowing that the receiver on the other end had been destroyed.
But that's actually closer to how a real teleporter would work. Star Trek makes it seem like you can teleport to wherever the hell you want. But that's not at all how teleporters would work. To make a viable teleporter, you would not only need a transmission station (like the teleport pads) but also a _receiving_ station.
We already ignore the negatives of traffic because it's much more efficient. I'm sure we can do the same and ignore the couple of people every in month getting vaporized and cast aside because we can increase our efficiency beyond our imagination.
"Bones" McCoy used the transporter all the time - he just grumbled about it, a lot in the beginning, but less as time passed. In the movie, "The Undiscovered Country," Kirk and McCoy are rescued - via trasnporter - from the Klingon prison planet, Rura Penthe by Spock. He probably bitched about it less after that. It was the TNG, Season 2 character Katherine Pulaski who steadfastly refused to travel using the device. They saved her life by using it to cure a mysterious aging disease in one episode; if she had remained in the crew, we might have learned that it also cured her "transporter phobia."
I have seen youtube videos that are awefully close to this script just a few weeks ago on startrek channels. But it‘s been talked about for ages by trekkies. It‘s really low hanging fruit.
Even if the teleported you have the same memories as the original you, the original you essentially die and cease to exist. So, even though the teleported you are an exact copy, the original you walk into the teleporter to your death. The new you has the memories of your whole life, but is another wholly different person. The original you never wake up from your disassembly (death). I wouldn't get teleported because I don't want to die, even if the teleported me goes on living as me.
One of the very first Star Trek books I read was "Spock Must Die!" (James Blish, 1970). There was an extended passage in the book where Dr. McCoy (famously fearful of the transporter) posited to Mr. Scott that the transporter "kills you" upon dematerialization, although Scotty disagrees and lays out some technobabble about how your particles are actually transferred. So yeah, this discussion has been going on a VERY. LONG. TIME. LOL!
Btw... I remember to have heard something about the line that every cell in the body has been replaced after 7 years. Beaming is a very drastic example, but I guess everything is fluid. The natural body regeneration matches the ship example well. There is the open question, if you "are the same" even after puberty, a few years, or even after going to sleep and waking up again - if you are lucky.
All the different organs have different rates of cell replenishment. It is the bones that are on the 7 year cycle, so we all have new skeletons roughly every 7 years, your intestines replenish in about a week and your stomach is every few days. And while most people will claim the brain doesn't undergo this same process, some areas like the hippocampus do as well.
apparently not all, thinking of it, if that was the case we should be able to heal most stuff easily but apparently all cells do change the molecules they are made of. Even then, most cells do get replaced and I just read in only 90 days half your cells will have been replaced. Makes me always cringe at the ship of Theseus, we might change but we are not entirely different human beings every 90 days or 7 years.
I have wrestled with the question of redemption from past deeds for many decades. For me, you cannot receive internal redemption if the people you wronged forgive you, or even if a god were to forgive you... if you cannot forgive yourself. The only peace I have found is to never ever commit those wrongs again, and then, after a decade or so, you can honestly say... "I am no longer the same person that committed those wrongs". Your own conscious is the harshest judge you will ever encounter.
Damned right about t your cells constantly replacing themselves. The AWFUL 1994 Van Dam movie TIME COP had a man self destruct by touching his 10 years younger self because one of the rules in that story was that the same object must never touch itself. But the goddamn idiots who wrote the plot for the movie did not understand that it would NOT be the same matter anymore and nothing bad would have happened.
I recently heard a story about a card board box being teleported as a test, it mal functioned and endlessly created copies until the entire universe was filled with card board boxes. Super campy but good lol
I remember reading a book that really made me think about teleportation being horrifying. It was written by Dean Koontz I believe, and in it people started experiencing "transcription errors" such as arriving with something like the zipper from their pants being now a part of their body, or exhibiting health problems because small blood vessels were re-created slightly off and no longer met up and circulated correctly. It was described as being similar to how if you photocopy something the copy is never as crisp and accurate as the original, and was further complicated by repeated use, because you are then making a "copy of a copy of a copy". While it never even got into the issue of consciousness at all, it was still quite scary in the way they presented the problems they did have with it.
I don't know about the copy analogy. If I scan something into my computer and store it on my hard drive I can print thousands of crisp copies that look just like the original.
@@kingsfire2142 It is probably one of those things that just hasn't aged well. Technology is a lot different now than it was at the time that book was printed and when I read it, which was years ago. Back in the day you could easily tell if a document was an original or was a copy. At the time it seemed like a believable issue.
There are two types of teleportation in SciFi. The type your video is matter energy teleportation. The other is hyperspace or wormhole teleportation. The latter doesn't tear you down. But, it will probably irradiate you to death.
It is a bit tiresome that people pointing out flaws in teleportation have assumed there is only one way to do teleportation. But this is scifi, there are other ways it can work that don't have this problem.
There is another one which makes honestly the most sense if you want to not die and get replaced by a clone but it's more difficult as it requires to physically move up to a high enough dimension where all space becomes one and you then exit again into the 3rd dimension at your place of choice. Q does it all the time, being a higher dimensional being but for humans it'll take some much more advanced technology. Or well, some anime special ability.
The first transporter story I know of: "The Man Without a Body" by Edward Page Mitchell, 1877. Yes, 1877. It's also the first transporter-accident story.
I like the Warhammer 40k version of teleportation, where they make short trips through an additional Dimension, which is literally hell, to come out at the destination nearly instantaneous.
They can arrive a) on time b) later c) truly later like a century d) earlier than their departure e) truly earlier like a millenium earlier. That's the ✨🌈warp🌈✨ :')
The teleporter paradox reminds me of when I type the letter A on the screen, delete it and type it again. It appears to be the same letter A but it’s not. It’s made of different electrons.
If it makes you feel any better, the A on your screen isn't constant anyway. It's being redrawn by the rastering of the screen 30/60/75/120 times per second, whatever your monitor's refresh rate is. Even if it wasn't a rastering/scanning system and the display was constant, the electrons would be constantly changing regardless. Still, sometimes when I intend to delete a letter and replace it with the same letter, I feel like I'm killing the original one for no reason.
There's an outer limits episode "Think like a dinosaur" that deals with inter-galactic teleportation. It deals with the ethical problems with teleporters with the idea that it makes a copy of the person's body at the teleport location, transfers the person's mind to that body, and destroys the original body. But there's a twist. The main character learns the teleporter doesn't transfer the mind but makes a copy of it as well leaving the original mind to be destroyed with the original body.
Makes sense. You can't truly "transfer" information. That's just misleading way of talking. We can only copy information. When you transfer a file from one computer to anther, or when you upload something to the Internet. You're always copy that information, never really transferring it. If there's a way to transfer information, we humans don't know about it yet.
Thanks for making this video. My brother and I used to talk about teleporters a lot when we were kids in the 1960s. I always figured that it killed you and made a perfect copy of you on the other end. It may be like you in every way, but it isn't you. While watching this video something occurred to me. I remember warnings about being beamed inside a wall or solid rock. But what about the atmosphere? The spot the engineer wants to beam you already is filled with atoms of air. Oxygen, nitrogen, and the other elements would occupy the space the engineer wants to beam you. Either the air would become incorporated into you, or get out of the way somehow. Maybe make a perfect vacuum shaped like the person being teleported so they could be beamed inside that created empty space. I haven't a clue as to how that would be done. Maybe teleport the air to another place before teleporting the person? Now the complexity has just doubled. An interesting thought experiment.
Chief Miles O'Brien, from lowly transporter operator on the Enterprise-D to Chief of Engineering at Deep Space 9. Always liked his character since he was an enlisted man through and through. There was definitely shenanigans involved with Cmdr William Riker and his transporter clone Thomas Riker (whom I believed joined the Maquis and then was captured and imprisoned, probably serving a long sentence; sad).
The Marquis did nothing wrong. Earth's Federation affiliated government is collectivist, managerial despotism. The Marquis are militant Libertarians. My kind of people.
A portal is a fictional transportation mechanism that one simply steps through to be somewhere distantly elsewhere. These have occurred in all types of stories going back to fairy tales. They avoid conflicts with real physics by providing no details beyond "You step through it and you're there." The story's puzzle/problem was usually framed as "How do you find and open it?" "The Big Front Yard" by Clifford D Simak in 1959 is a science fiction story that uses this device.
I've thought quite a bit about this. Something that I don't normally see mentioned is that the human body is not "static". We have lungs breathing in and out, blood cells flowing, heart beating, and various other parts in some sort of motion. So, in addition to considering the incredible amount of sub-atomic particles that would have to be noted, mapped, and transmitted -- you also have to consider that this unbelievable amount of information would have to be recorded INSTANTLY, otherwise parts of the body would be out of place compared to the rest of the body as the scan took place. Kind of like taking a digital photo of something in motion, where the result is parts of the photo not lining up with other parts because the subject was moving while the camera scanned the image. You'd have cells in the body broken up, parts of organs not lined up properly, and who knows what else. As has been suggested elsewhere, maybe a teleporter could be done through an artificially made wormhole in the future, or if time could somehow be temporarily frozen for the subject -- and I don't think we're close to either of those possibilities, either. I realize that technology can advance in unexpected ways, and that 150 years ago people would think something as common today as a television set was magic, but teleportation looks like a very, very tall order.
Reminds me of the character pinky played by Dexter Fletcher in 2005's Doom movie who was wheelchair-bound because a form of teleportation sent the upper part of his body to where it was supposed to go and the lower part someplace else.
I remember when I was younger having the realization that Star Trek transporters are basically large replicators and replicators make complex objects out of stored basic elements. All my friends at the time were adamant that I was completely misunderstanding the tech and that the same person is always being put back together again and there's no chance it's a cloning death machine. I'm so glad to see people understanding this theory now that it's very possible the original person is actually dying and a perfect clone is being created and there's no way anyone can actually know the difference.
The film, The Prestige, has an interesting take. Given that the movie is full of twists, which is kind of the point of the whole movie, it's impossible to say anymore without ruining it. It's the sort of movie where your surprised the first time and start looking for all the things you missed on subsequent viewings.
Aside from all those things, back to the Ship of Theseus problem. A lot of people seem to think they'd experience themselves being teleported, and/or existing afterwards. Assuming everything else worked perfectly, it's very reasonable to believe that your concious experience of reality would cease as if you had died. Yes, a consciousness identical to yours would appear at the destination, and to that consciousness, they will remember having just transported, and they will be glad everything worked just fine, and carry on living your life, but for you, as you exist in reality, it would be as if you ceased to exist (or died).
Thanks Kevin and Simon for confirming my suspicion about teleportation, and for an entertaining script, as usual!! Ask for more rations Kevin, he has you slaving overtime, lol!!!!.The movie Timeline combines timetravel and teleportation...likened it to a fax machine, and when it inevitably makes a mistake, just continues in a cascading pile of messed up "copies". So hell to the naw on teleportation!!!
In Dark matter, their "teleporters" were more like 3d printing pods/cloning. You'd enter your pod then be 3d printed/cloned in the other pod. You'd then leave that pod do whatever you had to,do then returned to that pod to send what you learned back to your original body. And if your 3d printed/cloned body died before it returned to the pod then you didn't gain any of the experience and just woke up in your pod.
And the Transfer Transit clone only lives for a short time, a few days only, so there are no worries about having another "you" roaming around the galaxy posing as you. If the clone lived out the rest of your normal lifespan it would have life experiences which would be different from yours during the same span of time and therefore become a distinct person no longer the same as you. What if the clone became a criminal, if he accumulated debts (assuming currency still exists in such an advanced society), and would he have access to your savings or real assets?
I think you glossed over a few steps especially in the Trek style transporters. It not only disassembled the human body but digitized and compressed that information. A component called the Hiesenburg compensator solved the Hiesenburg uncertainty principle of not knowing where any particular atom was at any particular time (I'm suprised you didn't cover that issue). The compressed information was transmitted to another location and reassembled. To prevent ambient atoms from interacting with the new atoms a confinment beam is created, this is a section of space where the ambient atoms are pushed aside so the person can be reassembled at the location without interacting with ambient atoms.
Wasn’t that in the Hyperion universe where the AIs lied to everyone on Earth, so they could save the planet? Then the AIs refused to let anyone to return to our solar system.
I like the teleportation machine from the movie *The Prestige* which was really just a cloning machine and I'm pretty sure used quantum entanglement of some kind
I never thought of the transporter that way. 🤔 I thought a pattern was generated based on the original 'entangled' set and the 'Heisenberg Compensator' played a part in the process.
This was a TNG episode. There was a character called Barcley. He did not want to use transporters because of this. So they kind of acknowledge it in the show.
Brings back memories of STTNG episode 'Relics' where they found Scotty in the transporter buffer after 75 years. It's pretty well established in the Trek universe that a person remains conscious when transported. Yikes!
Same for the stargates in Stargate, which were actually Transmat devices. If your body/ mind is intact during teleportation, then you would be conscious.
Basically, with our current technology and current understanding of physics, teleportation is impossible. Yet, there are parts of physics that we still don't understand that could allow for this capability in the future.
I once attended a lecture from a physicist who compared our present knowledge of the universe, to reading the preface of the Encyclopedia Britannica (the print version was ceased in 2012, but this was a few years prior to that). Just like people from two hundred years ago couldn't conceive of OUR modern world, what we conceive of the future now, may only be a shadow of the future reality!
@@filthycasual8187 You can't go faster than light. The only possible way would be a something like the Alcubierre Warp Drive, but, again, who knows what the future might produce?
Transporter technology was also a pain for writers of Star Trek. Not only did it make getting into and out of things way too easy, making it hard to tell exciting stories (they got around this one partly by making the rule that you can't transport through shields, which also explains why you can't defeat an enemy ship by beaming a nuke inside it), but fans quickly figured out that if you could scan and rebuild people and objects this way, why couldn't you scan things and then make copies of them from ambient atoms or stored mass (e.g. lead)? This is where replicators come from. But replicators create their own problems, story-wise. If you have replication technology that is so cheap you can use it make tea, that means that you've just created a post-scarcity society. The Federation IS presented as post-scarcity, at least by the STNG era, but replication technology ought to rule out stories involving mining or trading raw materials. Their solution--some materials like dilithium crystals can't be replication for some (meaning NO) reason--is pretty inelegant. A better solution would be to say that when subatomic particles are dematerialized by transporters, they sort of "remember" their previous state and will tend to return to it. This would be analogous to the potential energy (real term) that you put into a rock by rolling it uphill. You get that energy back when the rock rolls downhill. If this is how it works (and there are bits of dialogue here and there that suggest it is), then transporting something from point a to point b consumes relatively little energy. But replicating stuff, even if you do it by dematerializing matter of equivalent mass, would consume HUGE amounts of energy. This means that instead of making things like dilithium inexplicably irreplicable (even though transporters still work on them), they could say that it takes too much energy to replicate it, so it's not cost-efficient.
the transfer transit in dark matter is interesting because they make a clone that goes to the new location and then the clone has to basically plug itself back in to transfer the memories it makes back to the actual person, and if the clone dies before then then the person won’t remember anything the clone did
Honestly this only makes me appreciate Nature more than I already do... I find it facinating that Nature seems to find the ways to achieve all that we've known, in the most efficient, Simplist manner. It functions off of base core properties and it's amazing such complex systems stem off of those basic base factors. Nature and the Cosmo's are the most facinating things and lately in my life I have been noticing, that I'm taking more time to notice it and appreciate it. It's beauty, it's messiness, it's abstraction, it's imperfections, it's perfect.
But, did you ever consider the fact that, nature is the only example we have? It's like saying the most efficient car I own happens to be the only car I own.
Does it really though? Like don't get me wrong, nature is truly a marvellous thing and I don't mean to diminish it, but at least looking at biological beings it's more needlessly complex than simplistic.
The many and varied applications of the transporter in the various Star Trek incarnations have always made me wonder why disease and aging actually occur in the series. They went back to "patterns stored in the buffer" many times to cure many maladies; it seems to follow that a rejuvenation cure would be to save a pattern every once in a while.
They have inconsistency in technology but that's normal for a sci-fi show, because the authors can't really know how the technology will advance. So they make "the technology" convenient for the plot and not what would be possible if such technology exists. It's like using a mechanical calculator today, to solve complex equations instead of computer. But in the beginning of 20th century there were not any computers.... to make calculations. So the author uses what's available at the time without knowing the implications, like for example Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon uses "a giant cannon" to send people to the moon instead of a rocket. So all the implications of rocket technology are lost. The funny thing is... very primitive rockets existed in 19th century, but were too primitive compared to cannons, so he used a cannon. That's just how sci-fi works. The funny thing is sci-fi is actually a recent concept, there is no sci-fi in old times, not even one. It seems the human brain could brake itself "out of the box" just about 2 centuries ago. Now we're in a "bigger box" but we're still "in a box" just the box is new and shiny.... and seems limitless.... but we can't or don't want to move anywhere.
@@Slav4o911 There was "A True Story" by Lucian of Samosata in 200 AD, which maybe kinda-sorta counts as sci-fi. They go to the Moon, meet aliens, and fight a war in space. Now the actual details of these events are extremely weird and ridiculous, and the whole thing was intended as satire, but it's... something.
I like the method that Orson Scott Card implemented in the book Xenocide from the Ender series, utilizing the absurdly powerful lifeform of Jane and the Matrix-like residual self image to hold yourself together along with your memories (I'll point out that Xenocide came out 8 years before the first Matrix movie). This solves the problem of a machine transferring your consciousness, but it can result in the minor snag of your mind creating other things while you're Outside.
I'll never forget the episode where Scotty is found to have stored his 'data' in a teleporter. That closing scene where he's on the holodeck and sits on the OG Enterprise deck. Tears man; tears.
It's just a shame that the Dyson Sphere, the most interesting thing in the episode, was glossed over in order to have an 'old people need to feel useful' thing happen.
I seem to remember reading an article a year or so ago. That a lab had successfully "transported" a single molecule or atom across a room.. That was cool
Pretty sure it was a photon and not an atom. Breaking down and or building an atom produces a nuclear reaction and releases large amounts of em radiation.
Stargate type "teleportation" sounds like the safest forms of teleporters, are just minor wormholes though which is honestly I prefer then being ripped apart by teleportation.
They are called "transporters" not "teleporters". Teleportation is different in my understanding. Transporters disassemble the object/person, send a beam of energy to a desired location, and reassemble the object/person. Teleporters are basically magic lol. You pop instantly from one location to another. I think its a quantum-space bending thing. ....yes I'm a trekky, sorry.
I preferred Iain M Banks approach to transporters in 'The Player of Games'. Only used in emergencies, and they don't disassemble the target, it was called 'displacement'. A target area was displaced from one place to another using a hyperspace bubble.
You didn’t mention “The Fly”. What would happen if there were two or more different organic items in the same transportation beam? Would they become fused together or remain as separate things?
Star Trek handwaved that by saying it could "tell" what was really you and what was not. It also worked for diseases so if you got a virus or bacteria on a planet the transporter would remove it when you were reassembled on the ship.
You're full of things that aren't you. Intestinal bacteria, eyelash mites, even your own mitochondria have different DNA than what made you. You don't need the actual fly, if your teleporter is crude enough to mix DNA between species.
Since apparently clothes and other items don't get fused with the person, we can assume that a second organism wouldn't either. No, what I'm more worried about is that a minuscule amount of data is bound to be lost in transit. Which would definitely kill whoever was teleported.
Interesting point about base station to base station transmat would be the fact that users would have their transmat info recorded before transmission. This means if some time in the future that body was destroyed or a second (or more) bodies were required they could ve reproduced in a transmat machine in the same state as when recorded. A sort of self-save checkpoint of your life could be done everyday.
In the John Varley short story _The Phantom of Kansas_ people routinely have their memories and personalities backed up so that they can be restored in a clone if the original dies. The story starts with the main character going to her bank for this process. Right after the recording is finished, she is told that she has been murdered and restored three times in the past 2 1/2 years, and is likely to be murdered again.
"Timeline" by Michael Crichton goes into this, they destroy the original but the person transported is as far as they could tell, identical. However after too many trips they would start to get "Transcription errors" i. e. Copied too many times
I think this can only work if the machine creates a wormhole to the destination, you can safely walk through, rather than turning you into energy and reconstructing you at the target location. That way you were always you and there were no copies created.
What really scare me about teleporter, is that I might get fused with another lifeform at the molecular-genetic level. Just like Jeff Goldblum character in the 1986 film, The Fly.
That movie really made no sense. The majority of cells in any given person's body are bacteria. Merging his DNA with the insect DNA while ignoring the countless other organisms is nonsensical.
There are two things that Star Trek mentions in that are essential for The transporter to function as it is intended transporter Trace and Heisenberg compensators which compensate for the uncertainty principle and allows the transporter to function as intended the transporter Trace is matter held in reserve used if needed
In StarTrek, the particles used to reassemble that which is transported is actually poop. That is also the raw material used for the food replicator. The transported persons particles are mapped and stored in a buffer, than reassembled in the new location from the raw sewage.
This is kind of like going to sleep and waking up the next day. The being that wakes up has all your memories and sure thinks it's you, but is it _you_ ? How would you even know the difference?
each of us could be brought into being as an adult fully equipped with fabricated memories of childhood and fabricated beings with a fabricated past to support the fabrication each time another person is introduced into the system, that new persons fabricated past is incorporated into the fabricated past of everyone else who is already in the system we are sharing a collective dream that we must wake up within if we want a future
There's another reply that YT won't show me. Hate that and happens all the time. Anyway, one really must define what "you" actually is. So far science cannot.
If they use ambient particles than they could build massive armies of clones from the main characters... I think they have to transmit the particles, namely to preserve the "Self"...
I often wondered if teleportation could cure cancer, if you could teleport someone across the room and leave all the cancer cells behind. Or heal wounds by just resetting the code to a previous version of you, or you know live forever by pressing that reset button. SciFi hasn’t really explored all the things teleportation could be used to solve.
In Star Trek the teleporters are supposedly programmed to not transport any viruses or any other identifiable infectious agent that are in the body at the time of teleportation. Presumably the same would apply to cancer cells , though I don't remember if it was ever mentioned in any episode.
There is an episode in one of the series where they basically have a crew member possessed by an alien life form and they save him by beaming the alien out of him. Viruses and bacteria would have to work the same way. Maybe it’s too hard to pick specific bits out?
There was an episode of Star Trek Next. Gen where a teleporter malfunction turned all of them into children and all but one of them were "cured" at the end and turned back into their old selves again but one of them decided to start life over as a child. If that could happen once as an "accident" then people could effectively make themselves immortal by just having the teleporter turn them into children again when they get older.
In Star Trek next gen , Deanna Troi gives birth to a baby along with the usual serving of pain. After watching this episode it occurred to me that simply beaming the baby out of the uterus would avoid all of nasty birthing pain.
I think there are multiple types of teleporters if I remember my sci-fi correctly. The biggest one being the type mentioned at the start (Star Trek). The one I’m most interested in is the Call of Duty one invented by scientists Maxis and Richtoffen...depending on which canon you trust. The machine starts out in seemingly the same way a Star Trek one does, a beam emitter over a pad; but by the time you reach Black Ops: Cold War (a reboot of the franchise) the teleporter acts as sort of a “Star Gate” type portal.
@@marvinmallette6795 Interesting take (even if I don’t understand Q.E.T. However, I don’t get how the MDT (teleporter) was changed from a matter transference device; to what amounts to wormhole technology in the newer Call of Duties...minus Vanguard’s oddness. I think the traditional MDT would’ve suffered from the defects mentioned in the video, while the “stargate” wouldn’t.
@@marvinmallette6795 so essentially: a person or object is being continually surrounded by warped particles of light/energy; thereby allowing the object’s individual “stuff” to be duplicated?
@@marvinmallette6795 what would the consequences of those time travel hijinks be though? Would there be some kind of advanced aging? Or would it be like, Interstellar for example, where our main protagonists either didn’t age, or aged so slowly that by the time McConaughey’s character found; it would *seem* as if he didn’t age? Further, while it more the 99% is impossible that any of this should come to pass, do you think it could actually be something discoverable?
@@marvinmallette6795 interesting albeit a bit disappointing (if I understand correctly). Since it seems that slowing aging would likely be non-feasible, I guess if one were to warp forward a significant distance into the future; they’d end up as essentially a frail version of their pre-warp counterpart?
In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series there's a cultural pop song that is recounted in the Guide. Basically, the whole premise of the song revolved around "If you have to take me apart to get me there, I don't want to go."
First like :) and I agree with the title. Now if we are pure 3D beings then yes teleportation if possible is death. If we are more say just a shadow of a fifth or higher existence that could be called ‘soul’ then it could, if possible to create it, work as wanted. Thanks for making this :) I love Star Trek but that is something more fantasy than science fiction
In regards to the Star Trek the original show and the teleporter’s origins on it, it’s funny how what is basically a “necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention” situation gave birth to one of the most iconic (hate throwing that word around lol) pieces equipment in the history of Science Fiction. I never knew that’s how it came to be used on the show. As for teleportation itself as a concept, after hearing how it works since I first began to seriously understand it, I won’t lie, it was cool at first. But the philosophical and as well as the physical complications that could result from it do concern me lol.
The other reason for the transporters, is that they actually originally planned for the Enterprise to land on alien worlds (a concept only realized 30 years later with Star Trek Voyager).
And so, if there is an afterlife, then each time a transporter is used, you are killed and re-born with all your memories and a new soul, leaving an endless number of spirits in the afterlife, all thinking they are you. Sounds like a perfect definition of Hell. No thanks.
I think Dr McCoy (aka "Bones") from Star Trek had a justified fear of teleporters 😂 Also Captain Archer from the "Enterprise" series was afraid of them in episode one, where the machines were still not cleared for human use and he witnessed one reassemble an inanimate object incorrectly... which made his fear justified until he was in a life or death situation later in the same episode (he would have been killed if not teleported, and there was still a possibility that the teleporter didn't work correctly for humans. fortunately it worked and he lived LOL). The idea of teleporters is still freaky, its supposed to tear you apart on the atomic level and reassemble you at a distance...
I remember being a kid and realizing that transporters just make a clone of you somewhere, right after it kills you.
They make the clone first and if the clone is okay, then it kills you.
@@pforce9 Whew! That's a relief, I feel better about it now!
@@JonHuhnMedical Want to see a real movie on this subject? Check out "Think like a dinosaur". It is all about transporters.
@@pforce9 Just googled it. Would that be an "Outer Limits" episode, or an actual movie?
@@JonHuhnMedical Wikipedia tells all about it.
Many years ago I was inadvertently involved in teleportation experiments. They involved copious amounts of alcohol to achieve the desired, or sometimes undesired, effects when I would wake up and wonder how the hell I got wherever the hell I was. Oddly enough the experiments stopped when I quit drinking. 🤔
Can confirm, sometimes hurts.
Same! The side effects of said teleportation usually wore off around noon the following day, but now I'm 31 and they seem to last the whole day
Can confirm statements here are true.
I once got teleported bare ass naked into the branches of an oak tree and can confirm, it was decidedly unpleasant
Hahaha 👍
There was a sci-fi pilot a while back that never made it but they made it a point to address this. They were getting ready to teleport to a planet's surface and hopped into the teleporter, which just moved the space they were in through hyperspace and deposited them on the planet. Before they teleported, they talked about how they couldn't believe the dark days of teleportation when people actually disintegrated themselves and made copies at the other end and how glad they were they stopped such nonsense with the dimensional transport.
The movie "The Prestige" illustrated this idea pretty well.
"It took courage to climb into that machine every night, not knowing if I'd be the man in the box, or in the Prestige." -Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman)
Never read the book, but I never understood what the aversion to having a copy was. The first time Angier tests it and he's face to face with his duplicate, he shoots him. Personally, I think it'd be kinda cool. Two of me! One for the week and one for Sunday dress!
In the Star Trek TNG episode "Realm of Fear", Lt. Barclay is transported and the audience gets to see how it is inside the transporter beam. As it is presented, it seems the person is never disassembled but remains intact and conscious as the scenery around changes from the origin to the arriving points. It is as if there is a "tunnel" that the person goes through. This is more consistent with the concept of a wormwhole. Maybe Simon could explore this in a future episode.
That was a great episode
I'm starting to think transporters simply create a subspace tunnel between the transporter pad and the destination. Maybe that's why they call it "sub" space since it would be like a lower dimension of space that operates on completely different laws of physics. Maybe people aren't being broken apart, but rather phased out, atom by atom into subspace. My guess is that it goes like this unless lore I've missed contradicts me:
Step 1: Matter on the transporter pad is phased out into subspace, atom by atom.
Step 2: The matter being transported gets stored in the pattern buffer also using "subspace" technology.
Step 3: Annular confinement beam is shot to the target destination and creates a subspace tunnel between the transporter beam emitter and the destination.
Step 4: Subspace tunnel is used to phase the atoms into a new point in real space based on where the annular confinement beam is focused on.
@@archentity well, if there is “sub” space, there must be “dom” space.
@@anthonymonge7815 😆
I've always told anybody who'd listen that I would never go in one as it kills you while making a clone. Thanks Simon!
Regarding the initial question about the ship, the same thing happens to us humans already. Our cells keep replacing themselves until none of the original cells that you were born with exist. So when someone that knew you in your childhood meets you later in life and says "gee, I didn't recognize you, you look like a different person"... they a right, you really are a different person. You yourself might remember the person you used to be but you simply aren't that person anymore.
Not only that, the total replacement time is around 10 years.
I wondered when someone would bring this up!
Wouldn't it be nice, then, if each subsequent total replacement didn't end up looking more worn out than the last. 🤨
@@mekkler but the Brian cells don't change.....so you still has the same nerfes core
^this. Yes most cells get replaced with new one (takes about 10 years for bones), but the brain doesn’t get replaced. There’s evidence that about 1-2% of *some* cells in the brain are renewed annually, but even those aren’t replaced entirely.
Loved the scene where the crew beam up Archer (Enterprise), who was about to be murdered, and fall over themselves to apologize to him for using the teleporter on him, as everyone was terrified of it.
😂I remember that 😂
The transporter scene in Star Trek: The Motion Picture where the people suffer an agonizing death is easily the most realistic one in the canon. Also the one in Star Trek: The Next Generation where they're testing it with fluid containers that come back broken.
I remember watching the original Star Trek on tv with my father and when they were teleporting my father said to me "that would HURT". That CREEPED ME OUT as a child. I was old enough to know that it was actors and special effects BUT the IDEA of it "hurting" creeped me out big time.
dads f**k you up casual... I asked mine if Gremlins could really fit through an air duct following the scene in the school (I had previously assumed they were bigger), he casually dismissed it with "I guess so". I reasoned that meant they could also fit through the toilet pipe so for the next year I hovered standing with one eye on the bowl every time I went for a poo.
Your dad sounds like a funny and smart guy. That would hurt. Lol it probably would.
Teleporters. How Simon is able to host different channels on the same viewing day.
He has a team
@@katyungodly Ya don't say! 🙄
well played
He is the Über mensch. UBER is gonna own everything sooner or later...
Maybe it was a transporter accident that created an army of Simon clones, to which we now benefit?
Best teleporter has got to be from Galaxy Quest, the most believable version in my opinion.
Funny thing about perfect/flawless teleportation, once you have gotten teleported, you are absolutely convinced it is safe.
Despite you, actually dying and a clone being in the new location thinking it is the original.
Since the clone remembers being teleported (but not the dying part) he thinks it is safe and will actually transfer the whole conciousness.... And everybody except the most paranoid ppl would constanlty die and be replaced by clones. All while being 100% sure they are still the person that they were when they got first teleported.
Now, to creep you out. When you follow that logic. Who can guarantee, that the same thing doesnt happen to you while you sleep. Your Monday you goes to bed, dies in the night and your Tuesdays you wakes up.
When you're sleeping you're still in tact and your body and mind are still fully functioning. However... as an astral projection enthusiast, you peaks my interest. It would work with the theory that you are the only one who actually exists... every time you go to sleep, your astral form steps out to work on the simulation you've created for yourself to exist in while your physical form remains suspended in a distracting dreamstate.
Edit: so basically it would be the death and rebirth of the simulation around you during each sleep cycle, rather than the death and rebirth of you yourself.
There was a sci-fi series I once read where the main character was an assassin, and had to simultaneously eliminate four targets on four separate worlds in another star system... so he used a tachyon transporter to instantly go from Earth to each of these worlds. Except he stayed on Earth, and the transporter just made four photocopies of him on each world, with varying degrees of accuracy (memory issues, breakdowns of the nervous system, physical mutations, etc -- it was a handy plot hook to give the copies a challenge to overcome to complete their missions). Meanwhile, the original just took a conventional starship to leisurely fly from Earth to this other solar system to check on his photocopies progress -- and to eliminate his flawed copies, of course, who had no idea they were just copies :P
There was an anthology show where the alien teleporter needed a human employee. His job was to kill the passenger if the original copy did not get disintegrated. The woman does not vanish, so he saves her and falls in love with her. Later, the transported woman comes home all changed with tattoos and stuff, now there are two of her.
The Outer Limits 1995 S 7 E 8 Think Like A Dinosaur
What show was this?
How would they have no idea they were just copies... wouldn't they remember coming up with the plan?
@@gravewalkers that's also similar to one of the plot points of The Prestige, where Hugh Jackman's character uses an actual teleporter to perform the teleporting man illusion and his original is killed by the water tank he uses in it.
Just when you think Simon couldn't possibly have another channel on RUclips, you'd be wrong. Thankfully they are all worth watching.
Yup. I like all 14 of them
Does this dude ever sleep?
At this point he is just doing what he feels like...
@@sandybarnes887 15 if you count the Spanish version of xplord
@@xBruceLee88x I no longer count Xplrd. Hasn't posted a vid there in months
Scotty often operated the teleporter. In fact most of the main cast performed jobs that were beneath their station because it was a TV show, and the actors needed screen time.
And the oft alluded to fact that Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty" on the show only means he never said those four words in that exact order. He said words to that effect many times.
No one cares my dude
Does no one remember the movie "The Fly"?
It's a really good example of how bad things can go even if a Teleporter were possible and worked ( mostly ) correctly.
I feel you man. There shouldnt be any room for error. The output may be catostrophic even at 99.999% success
"Be afraid. Be very afraid!"
Not to mention "The Curse of the Fly" wherein the lead scientist gets disassembled and transmitted without knowing that the receiver on the other end had been destroyed.
But that's actually closer to how a real teleporter would work.
Star Trek makes it seem like you can teleport to wherever the hell you want. But that's not at all how teleporters would work.
To make a viable teleporter, you would not only need a transmission station (like the teleport pads) but also a _receiving_ station.
We already ignore the negatives of traffic because it's much more efficient. I'm sure we can do the same and ignore the couple of people every in month getting vaporized and cast aside because we can increase our efficiency beyond our imagination.
This is explicitly the reason Bones refuses to use the teleporter
"Bones" McCoy used the transporter all the time - he just grumbled about it, a lot in the beginning, but less as time passed. In the movie, "The Undiscovered Country," Kirk and McCoy are rescued - via trasnporter - from the Klingon prison planet, Rura Penthe by Spock. He probably bitched about it less after that.
It was the TNG, Season 2 character Katherine Pulaski who steadfastly refused to travel using the device. They saved her life by using it to cure a mysterious aging disease in one episode; if she had remained in the crew, we might have learned that it also cured her "transporter phobia."
I have been waiting for big brain to talk about McCoy's freak out over transporters
exurb1a 6 years ago, CGP Grey and Jake Roper 4 years ago. It seems to be low hanging scifi fruit these days.
I have seen youtube videos that are awefully close to this script just a few weeks ago on startrek channels. But it‘s been talked about for ages by trekkies. It‘s really low hanging fruit.
@@innisneill7510 "Is the Transporter Actually a Murder Machine?" by Steve Shives comes to mind.
He was right!
Even if the teleported you have the same memories as the original you, the original you essentially die and cease to exist. So, even though the teleported you are an exact copy, the original you walk into the teleporter to your death. The new you has the memories of your whole life, but is another wholly different person. The original you never wake up from your disassembly (death). I wouldn't get teleported because I don't want to die, even if the teleported me goes on living as me.
One of the very first Star Trek books I read was "Spock Must Die!" (James Blish, 1970). There was an extended passage in the book where Dr. McCoy (famously fearful of the transporter) posited to Mr. Scott that the transporter "kills you" upon dematerialization, although Scotty disagrees and lays out some technobabble about how your particles are actually transferred. So yeah, this discussion has been going on a VERY. LONG. TIME. LOL!
Btw... I remember to have heard something about the line that every cell in the body has been replaced after 7 years. Beaming is a very drastic example, but I guess everything is fluid. The natural body regeneration matches the ship example well. There is the open question, if you "are the same" even after puberty, a few years, or even after going to sleep and waking up again - if you are lucky.
Now think back to how you where some ten years ago... are you really the same person?
All the different organs have different rates of cell replenishment. It is the bones that are on the 7 year cycle, so we all have new skeletons roughly every 7 years, your intestines replenish in about a week and your stomach is every few days. And while most people will claim the brain doesn't undergo this same process, some areas like the hippocampus do as well.
apparently not all, thinking of it, if that was the case we should be able to heal most stuff easily but apparently all cells do change the molecules they are made of. Even then, most cells do get replaced and I just read in only 90 days half your cells will have been replaced.
Makes me always cringe at the ship of Theseus, we might change but we are not entirely different human beings every 90 days or 7 years.
I have wrestled with the question of redemption from past deeds for many decades. For me, you cannot receive internal redemption if the people you wronged forgive you, or even if a god were to forgive you... if you cannot forgive yourself. The only peace I have found is to never ever commit those wrongs again, and then, after a decade or so, you can honestly say... "I am no longer the same person that committed those wrongs".
Your own conscious is the harshest judge you will ever encounter.
Damned right about t your cells constantly replacing themselves. The AWFUL 1994 Van Dam movie TIME COP had a man self destruct by touching his 10 years younger self because one of the rules in that story was that the same object must never touch itself. But the goddamn idiots who wrote the plot for the movie did not understand that it would NOT be the same matter anymore and nothing bad would have happened.
This channel is freaking awesome. Great work Simon and team of basement slaves
"basement slaves" 🤣
Ramming speed!
Thanks!
They are all Simon Whistler clones.
I recently heard a story about a card board box being teleported as a test, it mal functioned and endlessly created copies until the entire universe was filled with card board boxes. Super campy but good lol
I remember reading a book that really made me think about teleportation being horrifying. It was written by Dean Koontz I believe, and in it people started experiencing "transcription errors" such as arriving with something like the zipper from their pants being now a part of their body, or exhibiting health problems because small blood vessels were re-created slightly off and no longer met up and circulated correctly. It was described as being similar to how if you photocopy something the copy is never as crisp and accurate as the original, and was further complicated by repeated use, because you are then making a "copy of a copy of a copy". While it never even got into the issue of consciousness at all, it was still quite scary in the way they presented the problems they did have with it.
Zippers being part of your body gives me JoJo's Bizarre Adventures: Golden Wind vibes xD
I don't know about the copy analogy. If I scan something into my computer and store it on my hard drive I can print thousands of crisp copies that look just like the original.
@@kingsfire2142 So can transporters in the Star Trek Universe although they shouldn't😆
That's why there is 2 Rikers...
Transporter malfunction 😅
@@kingsfire2142 It is probably one of those things that just hasn't aged well. Technology is a lot different now than it was at the time that book was printed and when I read it, which was years ago. Back in the day you could easily tell if a document was an original or was a copy. At the time it seemed like a believable issue.
That was "the bad place" where two brothers could teleport, one doing it easy and one who had......problems.
There are two types of teleportation in SciFi. The type your video is matter energy teleportation. The other is hyperspace or wormhole teleportation. The latter doesn't tear you down. But, it will probably irradiate you to death.
What's a little spaghettification among friends.
It is a bit tiresome that people pointing out flaws in teleportation have assumed there is only one way to do teleportation. But this is scifi, there are other ways it can work that don't have this problem.
Stargate actually had both first discombobulate then go through wormhole then recombobulate at the other end.
@@southcoastinventors6583, true. But, it isn't a necessary component.
There is another one which makes honestly the most sense if you want to not die and get replaced by a clone but it's more difficult as it requires to physically move up to a high enough dimension where all space becomes one and you then exit again into the 3rd dimension at your place of choice.
Q does it all the time, being a higher dimensional being but for humans it'll take some much more advanced technology.
Or well, some anime special ability.
The first transporter story I know of: "The Man Without a Body" by Edward Page Mitchell, 1877.
Yes, 1877. It's also the first transporter-accident story.
I like the Warhammer 40k version of teleportation, where they make short trips through an additional Dimension, which is literally hell, to come out at the destination nearly instantaneous.
Sounds like travelling through the Nether in Minecraft lmao
They can arrive a) on time b) later c) truly later like a century d) earlier than their departure e) truly earlier like a millenium earlier.
That's the ✨🌈warp🌈✨
:')
The teleporter paradox reminds me of when I type the letter A on the screen, delete it and type it again. It appears to be the same letter A but it’s not. It’s made of different electrons.
If it makes you feel any better, the A on your screen isn't constant anyway. It's being redrawn by the rastering of the screen 30/60/75/120 times per second, whatever your monitor's refresh rate is. Even if it wasn't a rastering/scanning system and the display was constant, the electrons would be constantly changing regardless. Still, sometimes when I intend to delete a letter and replace it with the same letter, I feel like I'm killing the original one for no reason.
Dude, you are not even your own atoms after a while.
@@DoctorNemmo
I know. I’m just trying to give an analogy. Things get more complicated from the conscious level.
@@Bassotronics how could you?! if there were friends or loved ones.
you’d best hope they don’t seek revenge. the letters could be Anywhere.
There's an outer limits episode "Think like a dinosaur" that deals with inter-galactic teleportation. It deals with the ethical problems with teleporters with the idea that it makes a copy of the person's body at the teleport location, transfers the person's mind to that body, and destroys the original body. But there's a twist. The main character learns the teleporter doesn't transfer the mind but makes a copy of it as well leaving the original mind to be destroyed with the original body.
Makes sense. You can't truly "transfer" information. That's just misleading way of talking. We can only copy information. When you transfer a file from one computer to anther, or when you upload something to the Internet. You're always copy that information, never really transferring it. If there's a way to transfer information, we humans don't know about it yet.
@@1idd0kun You can take the physical object in which the information is inscribed and transfer that. That is a way to transfer information.
@@1idd0kun Except perhaps with quantum computers. The quantum bits or "Q-bit"s are destroyed when read.
@@frantisekvrana3902 exactly... just walk there. The matter is in you, take yourself there instead of being copied and atomized.
@@ravissary79 coding script game by accident inserted into device teleportation
I just kept chuckling every time you made the conversions based on current tech 🤣 4. Quadrillion years? I can wait…
Thanks for making this video. My brother and I used to talk about teleporters a lot when we were kids in the 1960s. I always figured that it killed you and made a perfect copy of you on the other end. It may be like you in every way, but it isn't you. While watching this video something occurred to me. I remember warnings about being beamed inside a wall or solid rock. But what about the atmosphere? The spot the engineer wants to beam you already is filled with atoms of air. Oxygen, nitrogen, and the other elements would occupy the space the engineer wants to beam you. Either the air would become incorporated into you, or get out of the way somehow. Maybe make a perfect vacuum shaped like the person being teleported so they could be beamed inside that created empty space. I haven't a clue as to how that would be done. Maybe teleport the air to another place before teleporting the person? Now the complexity has just doubled. An interesting thought experiment.
Chief Miles O'Brien, from lowly transporter operator on the Enterprise-D to Chief of Engineering at Deep Space 9. Always liked his character since he was an enlisted man through and through.
There was definitely shenanigans involved with Cmdr William Riker and his transporter clone Thomas Riker (whom I believed joined the Maquis and then was captured and imprisoned, probably serving a long sentence; sad).
You forgot low key member of the Orion syndicate and VR prisoner.
Oh you know Dukat had Thomas executed in the first couple days of the Dominion War.
The Marquis did nothing wrong. Earth's Federation affiliated government is collectivist, managerial despotism.
The Marquis are militant Libertarians. My kind of people.
I've got the tricorder(IPad) and a communicator(smart phone), but, damn, where's my hand phaser? Dr. McCoy has it right, take the shuttle. Cheers.
IPad is no tricorder!
its a notepad!, there are no sensors on it, really!
@@mho... Camera
Ambient light sensor
Accelerometer
Gyroscope
Compass
Barometer
Touch ID fingerprint scanner
@@AltonV aaaand that helps you, HOW exactly?! standing infront of a mysterious object/person?!
@@mho... Never said it would.
You said it didn't have any sensors and I replied with sensors it had
Tazer?
A portal is a fictional transportation mechanism that one simply steps through to be somewhere distantly elsewhere. These have occurred in all types of stories going back to fairy tales. They avoid conflicts with real physics by providing no details beyond "You step through it and you're there." The story's puzzle/problem was usually framed as "How do you find and open it?"
"The Big Front Yard" by Clifford D Simak in 1959 is a science fiction story that uses this device.
I've thought quite a bit about this. Something that I don't normally see mentioned is that the human body is not "static". We have lungs breathing in and out, blood cells flowing, heart beating, and various other parts in some sort of motion. So, in addition to considering the incredible amount of sub-atomic particles that would have to be noted, mapped, and transmitted -- you also have to consider that this unbelievable amount of information would have to be recorded INSTANTLY, otherwise parts of the body would be out of place compared to the rest of the body as the scan took place. Kind of like taking a digital photo of something in motion, where the result is parts of the photo not lining up with other parts because the subject was moving while the camera scanned the image. You'd have cells in the body broken up, parts of organs not lined up properly, and who knows what else.
As has been suggested elsewhere, maybe a teleporter could be done through an artificially made wormhole in the future, or if time could somehow be temporarily frozen for the subject -- and I don't think we're close to either of those possibilities, either. I realize that technology can advance in unexpected ways, and that 150 years ago people would think something as common today as a television set was magic, but teleportation looks like a very, very tall order.
Reminds me of the character pinky played by Dexter Fletcher in 2005's Doom movie who was wheelchair-bound because a form of teleportation sent the upper part of his body to where it was supposed to go and the lower part someplace else.
Same thing happened to Darth maul. True story.
Thanks Simon. That was actually fkn hilarious, I absolutely loved it. By the way, Live long and prosper 🖖
I remember when I was younger having the realization that Star Trek transporters are basically large replicators and replicators make complex objects out of stored basic elements. All my friends at the time were adamant that I was completely misunderstanding the tech and that the same person is always being put back together again and there's no chance it's a cloning death machine. I'm so glad to see people understanding this theory now that it's very possible the original person is actually dying and a perfect clone is being created and there's no way anyone can actually know the difference.
The film, The Prestige, has an interesting take. Given that the movie is full of twists, which is kind of the point of the whole movie, it's impossible to say anymore without ruining it. It's the sort of movie where your surprised the first time and start looking for all the things you missed on subsequent viewings.
Aside from all those things, back to the Ship of Theseus problem. A lot of people seem to think they'd experience themselves being teleported, and/or existing afterwards. Assuming everything else worked perfectly, it's very reasonable to believe that your concious experience of reality would cease as if you had died. Yes, a consciousness identical to yours would appear at the destination, and to that consciousness, they will remember having just transported, and they will be glad everything worked just fine, and carry on living your life, but for you, as you exist in reality, it would be as if you ceased to exist (or died).
Yep. Can't copy the gestalt. Just doesn't happen.
Thanks Kevin and Simon for confirming my suspicion about teleportation, and for an entertaining script, as usual!! Ask for more rations Kevin, he has you slaving overtime, lol!!!!.The movie Timeline combines timetravel and teleportation...likened it to a fax machine, and when it inevitably makes a mistake, just continues in a cascading pile of messed up "copies". So hell to the naw on teleportation!!!
Confirming your suspicion i.e. Confirmation bias
@@generaldilvry69 🙄
In Dark matter, their "teleporters" were more like 3d printing pods/cloning. You'd enter your pod then be 3d printed/cloned in the other pod. You'd then leave that pod do whatever you had to,do then returned to that pod to send what you learned back to your original body. And if your 3d printed/cloned body died before it returned to the pod then you didn't gain any of the experience and just woke up in your pod.
And the Transfer Transit clone only lives for a short time, a few days only, so there are no worries about having another "you" roaming around the galaxy posing as you. If the clone lived out the rest of your normal lifespan it would have life experiences which would be different from yours during the same span of time and therefore become a distinct person no longer the same as you. What if the clone became a criminal, if he accumulated debts (assuming currency still exists in such an advanced society), and would he have access to your savings or real assets?
I think you glossed over a few steps especially in the Trek style transporters. It not only disassembled the human body but digitized and compressed that information. A component called the Hiesenburg compensator solved the Hiesenburg uncertainty principle of not knowing where any particular atom was at any particular time (I'm suprised you didn't cover that issue). The compressed information was transmitted to another location and reassembled. To prevent ambient atoms from interacting with the new atoms a confinment beam is created, this is a section of space where the ambient atoms are pushed aside so the person can be reassembled at the location without interacting with ambient atoms.
The only way I willingly step into a transporter is if the sun is about to engulf the Earth so I am gonna be annihilated anyway 🤷🏻♂️
Wasn’t that in the Hyperion universe where the AIs lied to everyone on Earth, so they could save the planet?
Then the AIs refused to let anyone to return to our solar system.
@@jsbrads1 I dunno, never read the series. I just know teleporters are suicide machines and I like life.
I like the teleportation machine from the movie *The Prestige* which was really just a cloning machine and I'm pretty sure used quantum entanglement of some kind
Did you mean The Prestige with Hugh Jackman? I don't remember a cloning machine in The Majestic with Jim Carrey.
@@I.am.Sarah. Yes, I meant The Prestige with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Thank you.
@@I.am.Sarah. It was a machine made by Nikola Tesla. Electricity made perfect replicas.
I never thought of the transporter that way. 🤔 I thought a pattern was generated based on the original 'entangled' set and the 'Heisenberg Compensator' played a part in the process.
the "Heisenberg Compensator" was added to deliver the solution for scanning quantum states because they are not deterministic😉
So basically with a teleporter, I could replicate the scene from Bajur's video on Enlisted. "You killed one of me...but did you kill ALL of me?!"😂
I’ve always said that Scotty was the most prolific serial killer ever. And he got to kill his victims over and over again
Wow brilliant thanks, I’ve been looking forward to your take on teleporters for ages!
👍 Good Video. I've been trying to explain this to people for years. Basically, what comes out on the other side is not you. Daah...🤣
This was a TNG episode. There was a character called Barcley. He did not want to use transporters because of this. So they kind of acknowledge it in the show.
Was transporter psychosis a real condition or was Barclay just a hypochondriac? I don't remember.
Brings back memories of STTNG episode 'Relics' where they found Scotty in the transporter buffer after 75 years. It's pretty well established in the Trek universe that a person remains conscious when transported. Yikes!
Actually Wrath of Khan showed that. Saavik was speaking the Kirk while being transported.
Same for the stargates in Stargate, which were actually Transmat devices.
If your body/ mind is intact during teleportation, then you would be conscious.
which makes no sense with the typical description of how transporters function.
Basically, with our current technology and current understanding of physics, teleportation is impossible. Yet, there are parts of physics that we still don't understand that could allow for this capability in the future.
Nah, waste of time better to improve or ability to regrow ourselves and some form of FTL travel that we can survive.
@@southcoastinventors6583 Antigravity would be the key to survivable FTL.
I once attended a lecture from a physicist who compared our present knowledge of the universe, to reading the preface of the Encyclopedia Britannica (the print version was ceased in 2012, but this was a few years prior to that).
Just like people from two hundred years ago couldn't conceive of OUR modern world, what we conceive of the future now, may only be a shadow of the future reality!
@@filthycasual8187
You can't go faster than light.
The only possible way would be a something like the Alcubierre Warp Drive, but, again, who knows what the future might produce?
Transporter technology was also a pain for writers of Star Trek. Not only did it make getting into and out of things way too easy, making it hard to tell exciting stories (they got around this one partly by making the rule that you can't transport through shields, which also explains why you can't defeat an enemy ship by beaming a nuke inside it), but fans quickly figured out that if you could scan and rebuild people and objects this way, why couldn't you scan things and then make copies of them from ambient atoms or stored mass (e.g. lead)? This is where replicators come from. But replicators create their own problems, story-wise. If you have replication technology that is so cheap you can use it make tea, that means that you've just created a post-scarcity society. The Federation IS presented as post-scarcity, at least by the STNG era, but replication technology ought to rule out stories involving mining or trading raw materials. Their solution--some materials like dilithium crystals can't be replication for some (meaning NO) reason--is pretty inelegant.
A better solution would be to say that when subatomic particles are dematerialized by transporters, they sort of "remember" their previous state and will tend to return to it. This would be analogous to the potential energy (real term) that you put into a rock by rolling it uphill. You get that energy back when the rock rolls downhill. If this is how it works (and there are bits of dialogue here and there that suggest it is), then transporting something from point a to point b consumes relatively little energy. But replicating stuff, even if you do it by dematerializing matter of equivalent mass, would consume HUGE amounts of energy. This means that instead of making things like dilithium inexplicably irreplicable (even though transporters still work on them), they could say that it takes too much energy to replicate it, so it's not cost-efficient.
Why fire torpedos at all, just beam them on an enemy ship! Stargate Atlantis did play with this tactic logically.
@@PavewayJDAM Well, because canonically you can't transport through shields.
I must say, your sarcasm warms my heart.
Am loving this channel! Another excellent and interesting video Simon and team 😊👏🏻💯🙌🏻
the transfer transit in dark matter is interesting because they make a clone that goes to the new location and then the clone has to basically plug itself back in to transfer the memories it makes back to the actual person, and if the clone dies before then then the person won’t remember anything the clone did
Badger & Skinny Petes conversation about Captain Kirk comes to mind!😂😂
We do teleport already. We currently teleport a Planck length at a time until we get to the destination.
Honestly this only makes me appreciate Nature more than I already do...
I find it facinating that Nature seems to find the ways to achieve all that we've known, in the most efficient, Simplist manner. It functions off of base core properties and it's amazing such complex systems stem off of those basic base factors. Nature and the Cosmo's are the most facinating things and lately in my life I have been noticing, that I'm taking more time to notice it and appreciate it. It's beauty, it's messiness, it's abstraction, it's imperfections, it's perfect.
But, did you ever consider the fact that, nature is the only example we have? It's like saying the most efficient car I own happens to be the only car I own.
Does it really though? Like don't get me wrong, nature is truly a marvellous thing and I don't mean to diminish it, but at least looking at biological beings it's more needlessly complex than simplistic.
Years ago I read that they've managed to teleport a single photon.
If we considered matter as dense energy, they could be sending you to a battery then spawn you with energy
Nice to see another Simon channel steadily growing
But it's still gonna take a while before RUclips will be assimilated. Resistance is as of yet not even needed.
The many and varied applications of the transporter in the various Star Trek incarnations have always made me wonder why disease and aging actually occur in the series. They went back to "patterns stored in the buffer" many times to cure many maladies; it seems to follow that a rejuvenation cure would be to save a pattern every once in a while.
They have inconsistency in technology but that's normal for a sci-fi show, because the authors can't really know how the technology will advance. So they make "the technology" convenient for the plot and not what would be possible if such technology exists. It's like using a mechanical calculator today, to solve complex equations instead of computer. But in the beginning of 20th century there were not any computers.... to make calculations. So the author uses what's available at the time without knowing the implications, like for example Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon uses "a giant cannon" to send people to the moon instead of a rocket. So all the implications of rocket technology are lost. The funny thing is... very primitive rockets existed in 19th century, but were too primitive compared to cannons, so he used a cannon. That's just how sci-fi works. The funny thing is sci-fi is actually a recent concept, there is no sci-fi in old times, not even one. It seems the human brain could brake itself "out of the box" just about 2 centuries ago. Now we're in a "bigger box" but we're still "in a box" just the box is new and shiny.... and seems limitless.... but we can't or don't want to move anywhere.
@@Slav4o911 There was "A True Story" by Lucian of Samosata in 200 AD, which maybe kinda-sorta counts as sci-fi. They go to the Moon, meet aliens, and fight a war in space. Now the actual details of these events are extremely weird and ridiculous, and the whole thing was intended as satire, but it's... something.
I like the method that Orson Scott Card implemented in the book Xenocide from the Ender series, utilizing the absurdly powerful lifeform of Jane and the Matrix-like residual self image to hold yourself together along with your memories (I'll point out that Xenocide came out 8 years before the first Matrix movie). This solves the problem of a machine transferring your consciousness, but it can result in the minor snag of your mind creating other things while you're Outside.
I'll never forget the episode where Scotty is found to have stored his 'data' in a teleporter. That closing scene where he's on the holodeck and sits on the OG Enterprise deck. Tears man; tears.
It's just a shame that the Dyson Sphere, the most interesting thing in the episode, was glossed over in order to have an 'old people need to feel useful' thing happen.
Bones McCoy never liked teleporters. He hated the idea of his molecules flying all over the universe.
I seem to remember reading an article a year or so ago. That a lab had successfully "transported" a single molecule or atom across a room.. That was cool
Pretty sure it was a photon and not an atom. Breaking down and or building an atom produces a nuclear reaction and releases large amounts of em radiation.
I believe it was a single particle of light.
@@JaredLS10 could be that one i suppose. Still impressive regardless.
Stargate type "teleportation" sounds like the safest forms of teleporters, are just minor wormholes though which is honestly I prefer then being ripped apart by teleportation.
Even Stargate you are disintegrated. Many episodes where someone is "caught" in a "buffer" the Stargate can regenerate months or years later.
Read "The Jaunt" it shook me to the core when I was a child.
They are called "transporters" not "teleporters". Teleportation is different in my understanding. Transporters disassemble the object/person, send a beam of energy to a desired location, and reassemble the object/person. Teleporters are basically magic lol. You pop instantly from one location to another. I think its a quantum-space bending thing. ....yes I'm a trekky, sorry.
150 years from now internet archeologists will find this video and laugh at us not thinking it was possible 😂
Of all your channels Simon, this one’s a keeper.
I preferred Iain M Banks approach to transporters in 'The Player of Games'. Only used in emergencies, and they don't disassemble the target, it was called 'displacement'. A target area was displaced from one place to another using a hyperspace bubble.
You didn’t mention “The Fly”. What would happen if there were two or more different organic items in the same transportation beam? Would they become fused together or remain as separate things?
Came here to say this. _The Fly_ is more a horror movie than a sci-fi one, tho.
Star Trek handwaved that by saying it could "tell" what was really you and what was not. It also worked for diseases so if you got a virus or bacteria on a planet the transporter would remove it when you were reassembled on the ship.
You're full of things that aren't you. Intestinal bacteria, eyelash mites, even your own mitochondria have different DNA than what made you. You don't need the actual fly, if your teleporter is crude enough to mix DNA between species.
There's also the intro to a Family Guy episode where Stewie and Rupert get fused in a take off of The Fly. *_AHHHH, I'M A MONSTER!_* 🤣🤣
Since apparently clothes and other items don't get fused with the person, we can assume that a second organism wouldn't either.
No, what I'm more worried about is that a minuscule amount of data is bound to be lost in transit. Which would definitely kill whoever was teleported.
Interesting point about base station to base station transmat would be the fact that users would have their transmat info recorded before transmission.
This means if some time in the future that body was destroyed or a second (or more) bodies were required they could ve reproduced in a transmat machine in the same state as when recorded.
A sort of self-save checkpoint of your life could be done everyday.
In the John Varley short story _The Phantom of Kansas_ people routinely have their memories and personalities backed up so that they can be restored in a clone if the original dies. The story starts with the main character going to her bank for this process. Right after the recording is finished, she is told that she has been murdered and restored three times in the past 2 1/2 years, and is likely to be murdered again.
"Forget it! Forget it! No more beaming! This time I'm going to walk."
"Timeline" by Michael Crichton goes into this, they destroy the original but the person transported is as far as they could tell, identical. However after too many trips they would start to get "Transcription errors" i. e. Copied too many times
I think this can only work if the machine creates a wormhole to the destination, you can safely walk through, rather than turning you into energy and reconstructing you at the target location. That way you were always you and there were no copies created.
So Stargate?
What really scare me about teleporter, is that I might get fused with another lifeform at the molecular-genetic level. Just like Jeff Goldblum character in the 1986 film, The Fly.
That movie really made no sense. The majority of cells in any given person's body are bacteria. Merging his DNA with the insect DNA while ignoring the countless other organisms is nonsensical.
There are two things that Star Trek mentions in that are essential for The transporter to function as it is intended transporter Trace and Heisenberg compensators which compensate for the uncertainty principle and allows the transporter to function as intended the transporter Trace is matter held in reserve used if needed
"Honestly, I'd rather walk thank you very much" sums it all up in a nutshell
In StarTrek, the particles used to reassemble that which is transported is actually poop. That is also the raw material used for the food replicator. The transported persons particles are mapped and stored in a buffer, than reassembled in the new location from the raw sewage.
0:55 - Chapter 1 - The beginnings
2:30 - Chapter 2 - Teleporter design
4:10 - Chapter 3 - Why this will never happen
8:40 - Chapter 4 - Quantum teleportation
10:15 - Wrap up
This is kind of like going to sleep and waking up the next day. The being that wakes up has all your memories and sure thinks it's you, but is it _you_ ? How would you even know the difference?
each of us could be brought into being as an adult fully equipped with fabricated memories of childhood and fabricated beings with a fabricated past to support the fabrication
each time another person is introduced into the system, that new persons fabricated past is incorporated into the fabricated past of everyone else who is already in the system
we are sharing a collective dream that we must wake up within if we want a future
There's another reply that YT won't show me. Hate that and happens all the time. Anyway, one really must define what "you" actually is. So far science cannot.
@@The1stDukeDroklar Science never will. Its not a SCIENTIFIC question at all its a PHILOSOPHICAL one.
@@Zurround Eventually science will figure out how consciousness comes to be, so yes, it is a scientific question as well.
@@The1stDukeDroklar NO. Certain questions are PHILOSOPHICAL in nature and philosophy is a different discipline than science is.
If they use ambient particles than they could build massive armies of clones from the main characters... I think they have to transmit the particles, namely to preserve the "Self"...
Steve Jobs would be like: "All I hear is problems, I want to hear solutions. Have a working prototype for me by Wednesday"
I often wondered if teleportation could cure cancer, if you could teleport someone across the room and leave all the cancer cells behind. Or heal wounds by just resetting the code to a previous version of you, or you know live forever by pressing that reset button. SciFi hasn’t really explored all the things teleportation could be used to solve.
In Star Trek the teleporters are supposedly programmed to not transport any viruses or any other identifiable infectious agent that are in the body at the time of teleportation. Presumably the same would apply to cancer cells , though I don't remember if it was ever mentioned in any episode.
There is an episode in one of the series where they basically have a crew member possessed by an alien life form and they save him by beaming the alien out of him. Viruses and bacteria would have to work the same way. Maybe it’s too hard to pick specific bits out?
why would you make the far bigger effort of teleporting the entire person and leaving the cancer behind if you could just teleport the cancer out?
There was an episode of Star Trek Next. Gen where a teleporter malfunction turned all of them into children and all but one of them were "cured" at the end and turned back into their old selves again but one of them decided to start life over as a child.
If that could happen once as an "accident" then people could effectively make themselves immortal by just having the teleporter turn them into children again when they get older.
In Star Trek next gen , Deanna Troi gives birth to a baby along with the usual serving of pain. After watching this episode it occurred to me that simply beaming the baby out of the uterus would avoid all of nasty birthing pain.
I think there are multiple types of teleporters if I remember my sci-fi correctly. The biggest one being the type mentioned at the start (Star Trek). The one I’m most interested in is the Call of Duty one invented by scientists Maxis and Richtoffen...depending on which canon you trust.
The machine starts out in seemingly the same way a Star Trek one does, a beam emitter over a pad; but by the time you reach Black Ops: Cold War (a reboot of the franchise) the teleporter acts as sort of a “Star Gate” type portal.
@@marvinmallette6795 Interesting take (even if I don’t understand Q.E.T. However, I don’t get how the MDT (teleporter) was changed from a matter transference device; to what amounts to wormhole technology in the newer Call of Duties...minus Vanguard’s oddness. I think the traditional MDT would’ve suffered from the defects mentioned in the video, while the “stargate” wouldn’t.
@@marvinmallette6795 so essentially: a person or object is being continually surrounded by warped particles of light/energy; thereby allowing the object’s individual “stuff” to be duplicated?
@@marvinmallette6795 OHHH okay. This is fascinating to think about!
@@marvinmallette6795 what would the consequences of those time travel hijinks be though? Would there be some kind of advanced aging? Or would it be like, Interstellar for example, where our main protagonists either didn’t age, or aged so slowly that by the time McConaughey’s character found; it would *seem* as if he didn’t age?
Further, while it more the 99% is impossible that any of this should come to pass, do you think it could actually be something discoverable?
@@marvinmallette6795 interesting albeit a bit disappointing (if I understand correctly). Since it seems that slowing aging would likely be non-feasible, I guess if one were to warp forward a significant distance into the future; they’d end up as essentially a frail version of their pre-warp counterpart?
In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series there's a cultural pop song that is recounted in the Guide. Basically, the whole premise of the song revolved around "If you have to take me apart to get me there, I don't want to go."
The movie The Fly shows what happens when matter ineracts with other matter whilst being teleported.
I liked the Simpson’s version better.
That was the computer’s fault, not the teleporter. It saw two objects where it expected to see one, so it mixed them together.
First like :) and I agree with the title. Now if we are pure 3D beings then yes teleportation if possible is death. If we are more say just a shadow of a fifth or higher existence that could be called ‘soul’ then it could, if possible to create it, work as wanted. Thanks for making this :) I love Star Trek but that is something more fantasy than science fiction
In regards to the Star Trek the original show and the teleporter’s origins on it, it’s funny how what is basically a “necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention” situation gave birth to one of the most iconic (hate throwing that word around lol) pieces equipment in the history of Science Fiction. I never knew that’s how it came to be used on the show.
As for teleportation itself as a concept, after hearing how it works since I first began to seriously understand it, I won’t lie, it was cool at first. But the philosophical and as well as the physical complications that could result from it do concern me lol.
This is so fascinating. Thank you.
Every channel Simon makes is like a different menu of brain food.
The other reason for the transporters, is that they actually originally planned for the Enterprise to land on alien worlds (a concept only realized 30 years later with Star Trek Voyager).
He kinda led with that little tidbit, hoss...
And so, if there is an afterlife, then each time a transporter is used, you are killed and re-born with all your memories and a new soul, leaving an endless number of spirits in the afterlife, all thinking they are you. Sounds like a perfect definition of Hell. No thanks.
I dunno. All I hear is, "we can't do it now so it can't be done!" Good thing we kept at it with cellphones, AC power, flight, etc.
I think Dr McCoy (aka "Bones") from Star Trek had a justified fear of teleporters 😂
Also Captain Archer from the "Enterprise" series was afraid of them in episode one, where the machines were still not cleared for human use and he witnessed one reassemble an inanimate object incorrectly... which made his fear justified until he was in a life or death situation later in the same episode (he would have been killed if not teleported, and there was still a possibility that the teleporter didn't work correctly for humans. fortunately it worked and he lived LOL).
The idea of teleporters is still freaky, its supposed to tear you apart on the atomic level and reassemble you at a distance...
By "he lived" you mean the clone who got out was convinced he was the original. :D
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