- cross-posted to:
- futurism@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- futurism@lemmy.ca
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As long as we aren’t trying to fuck with the transporter technology that kills you and makes another you somewhere else, I’m fine.
But if the another you is undistinguishable at the quantum level… then it’s still you (as seen by external observers, and honestly, I could use a break).
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If another perfect copy of you existed, you be okay with being killed? That’s fucking weird.
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The “Ship of Theseus” example is how our bodies work normally, the transporter makes a new you out of separate matter in another place. Nothing implies a transfer of consciousness, just an exact copy of you is there. Of course, I realize that for the purposes of the shows and movies, none of this is a concern, but a real version of this would be ethically fucked up.
In practical terms, the transporter in order to preserve quantum identity, would need to be reproducing you at the same time as it destroys the old you. To be widely accepted by society, it would need to preserve consciousness continuity, so you’d briefly feel being in two places at the same time, then just at the destination.
Now, a power failure mid transfer… wouldn’t be pretty.
A transporter that can recreate you with all your memories can also recreate you with new Transporter Corp ® approved ones. I think I’ll pass.
not necessarily. having the transporter means we have figured out how to make exact one to one copy of an object on a molecular level. that doesn’t mean we understand how the informations in human brain are organized and that we can change them.
I believe I have read that it’s literally impossible to copy an object’s quantum state without destroying it, so in a real sense a transporter that’s indistinguishable at a quantum level would be moving you rather than creating a copy and killing the original.
Both are true. Copying a quantum state means moving it from one object to another, which turns the target into the source, and the source into… something else. If we managed to do that at a full body scale, a “you” would appear at a target location, while a bunch of “something else” would be left at the source location.
An external observer would say “you moved”, turning a pile of target “something else” into you, and leaving a pile of “something else” at the source. You yourself… well, as long as you don’t worry too much, you would also perceive having just moved from source to target.
Still, there remains that pile of “something else” that used to be you at the source location… but as long as everyone, including you, don’t decide to call it “a corpse” or “your previous you’s remains”, everything would be fine.
I suggest to you https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667991
I’ll one up you here
This. Watching this is why I’d never use a Star Trek transporter.
i think while it is interesting philosophical question, in reality we would get used to it quite quickly. every time you get in a car you place lot of trust in people driving in the opposite direction. everyone of them can be drunk or just a moron and every car ride can be your last. and in spite of that we don’t really give it a second thought and it usually works out just fine.
Not even close to the same thing. If you create an exact copy of me at a destination, that doesn’t make me okay with being disintegrated because another me is at the other end.
are you ok with closing your eyes when you go to sleep? how do you know you weren’t replaced during sleep? 😆
Are you suggesting my consciousness can be transferred to another body? Do you think that if an exact copy of you were made in another place, that shooting the first version of you in the face would cause you to suddenly wake up in the other body? I’m not understanding how you think this works.
Tl;dr: we dunno. 🤷♂️
If there is a way to make it happen, it’ll be interesting to find out how the universe resolves the resulting causal paradoxes. What happens if the cause of an event is able to observe the event before causing it? What happens if the cause of the event responds by not causing the event?
To my surprise and delight, the article itself confirms Betteridge’s Law of Headlines by starting off with:
A provisional answer is “no.”
Personally, I’ve never really seen the need for such a thing. There’s no great rush to jump dozens of light years away when we have hundreds of planets and moons and other large bodies we’ve barely even taken a glimpse at right here in our own back yards. We can go right up to a Kardashev II civilization without having to travel more than a few light hours away.
Don’t need to go light years, it’s the speed that’s important.
If you can hop to Mars in 8 seconds instead of 8 months we can explore our backyard a lot better.
There’s no great rush to jump dozens of light years away when we have hundreds of planets and moons and other large bodies we’ve barely even taken a glimpse at right here in our own back yards
None of those are habitable
Orbiting Habitats are
It’s not particularly likely that any of the planets or moons around other stars are habitable either. At least not “step out of the ship and take a nice deep breath of the fresh air, picking an apple off of a nearby tree and making some kind of comment about how it’s like Eden” habitable like is so common on TV. It’s likely that if there’s a native biosphere then that planet is going to be incredibly hostile to alien life like us.
Build habitats. If you’ve got the tech to build a starship then you’ve got the tech to build a habitat, it’s way easier. Habitats will give you exactly the environment you want, not whatever you happen to find.
As long as the atmosphere is roughly similar, the native biosphere would have very little defense against us. Sure, some of the defenses that local plants and animals developed against each other might cause issues, or they might not.
We would be an invasive species on the grandest scale. A completely foreign biology would maybe have useful nutrients, or maybe not. That would be the key, but the periodic table will be the same everywhere, and chemistry being what it is, we’d probably see similar molecules, at least the simple stuff. Basic hydrocarbons and such.
The complex biochemistry would be vastly different. That could trip up human explorers.
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It takes years of traveling at or near the speed of light to go to any of them. It takes tens of thousands of years at the speeds we currently reach.
Edit: Oops, read this wrong. I thought they were implying exploring close stars. They were discussing only our solar system, which is still large so takes a long time, but there aren’t any naturally habitable places, and nothing that’d be easy to terraform.
because, much like the show the warp drive is from, it’s not about colonization or exploiting resources, but meeting new people and going new places
There won’t be any new people there until our colonies get there in the first place, so it’s a self-solving problem. Tourists can travel as fast as the colonists can.
That’s a fantastic assumption
Got any evidence to the contrary?
I’m not the one that made a supposition 😉
You said:
it’s not about colonization or exploiting resources, but meeting new people
What new people?
Any that are out there :)
You have to assume we are uniquely special to think no one’s out there, do you have any evidence that that’s the case?
I think the best we can hope for if we get very very lucky with future laws of physics is a cheap way to travel near but slightly below lightspeed. Maybe some sort of way to lower the rest mass of matter.
It’s much more likely there will be no immediate application of whatever the full laws are, because new physics only appears in very extreme circumstances we can’t easily replicate.
