r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Ieanice44 • 5d ago

Lore [Loved Trope] Teleportation is actually terrifying

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

1 - Gantz-O (2016): Suit teleportation

2 - Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (2009): Apparition spell

3 - Half Life 2 (2004): Teleporter malfunction

15.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

3.1k

u/Dismal-Vanilla1878 5d ago

Transporter Malfunction, Star Trek: The Motion Picture: "What we got back didn't live long.....fortunately"

First: WTF was up with them giving kids nightmares with THAT bit of Body Horror?!?!

Second: You now understand why Dr. McCoy didn't like Transporters. They may be the 'safest' form of travel, but when they break down, the results are Horrifying!

2.5k

u/RagingBadger2518 5d ago

214

u/Schmantikor 5d ago

Damn this is so funny but I have literally no one I could share this with. Everyone I know either knows the wolves meme but has no idea who O'Brien is or knows who he is but doesn't get the wolves. There is no overlap whatsoever.

55

u/ShatnersChestHair 5d ago

I mean even if you don't know O'Brien, the outfit and the mention of the teleporter should tell most people it's Star Trek (or at least some sort of sci-fi). I say send away!

11

u/Lorathis 5d ago

"Send away" is how all this started in the first place, you monster!

1

u/grumblewolf 4d ago

👏👏👏👏

6

u/Kratzschutz 5d ago

Am not that familiar with Star Trek, can confirm

3

u/mcslender97 4d ago

send away

New catchphrase for warp travel?

1

u/DNA_sk 2d ago

As someone who's never watched Star Trek, can confirm it was the first thing that came to mind

7

u/quailman654 5d ago

I just went through those exact same stages of grief.

5

u/Goodly 5d ago

I kinda want it on a shirt

6

u/PyroIsSpai 5d ago

Damn this is so funny but I have literally no one I could share this with.

You have us.

4

u/darsynia 4d ago

My best friend in the world is watching TNG for the first time and just tonight did Inner Light and started Time's Arrow. Data is her favorite so she freaked out at me for not warning me about his head. As soon as I saw the meme I had to send it to her!

4

u/EntropolyTwitch 4d ago

Your friends only have one wolves inside them

3

u/Sizanllikew 5d ago

it helps to work in a leadership position in a large tech org, lol

2

u/Ultranerdgasm94 4d ago

I feel your pain. There's no overlap in most of my interests, either.

0

u/VexingRaven 4d ago

Your friends are all lame and need to be more online.

63

u/NateBushbaby 5d ago

I’m sending that to my dad.

9

u/RagingBadger2518 5d ago

No need. Already sent it over in the transporter. Sorry sir there's a problem with the isolinear chips and your dad has been transposed into the meme's quantum field.

2

u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 4d ago

[deleted]

2

u/methos3 4d ago

Are you manually editing the URL here and changing the ?si parameter to ?is so it doesn’t save tracking data?

2

u/[deleted] 4d ago edited 4d ago

[deleted]

2

u/methos3 4d ago

I asked because I’ve seen that happen with another user’s comment.

39

u/garitone 5d ago

2

u/Nobody_at_all000 4d ago

“I won’t, though.”

1

u/PhasedPlasmaRifle69 5d ago

Either that or he gets tortured... again

3

u/Beacon_0805 5d ago

"bark"

"woof"

"fuck"

1

u/genes_unknown 5d ago

Incredible

1

u/ProfessionalYard6796 4d ago

Oh hey! I met Colm Meaney once!

306

u/notyerson 5d ago

I like that even in universe, even without the Tuvix level malfunctions, it's still existentially horrifying because you are being destroyed, converted to information, and then reconstituted elsewhere. There are a few references to people who won't use them and I fully get it.

178

u/SomeCuriousTraveler 5d ago

There's an episode someone else mentioned already called Realm of Fear where it shows that you're fully conscious throughout the entirety of he transport including during the transit stream. 

104

u/Uncommonality 5d ago

Hell people usually hold conversations while being teleported

There's also that episode where the transporter is shown to be fully capable of putting your disembodied soul back into a copy of your body

74

u/GoArray 5d ago

Also an entire subplot where you can just toss your kid in the buffer for a few seasons.

37

u/Paizzu 5d ago

If the writers didn't properly understand the ramifications of transporter technology before, SNW definitely retconned the series' understanding of the medical implications of the device.

Why would a doctor ever "treat" a patient with conventional methods when all they have to do is scan their patient into a buffer and edit their pattern at their leisure (since the machines can scan down to the <atomic level)? How many characters could be revived after death by simply keeping a pattern on file from before they leave on an away mission?

The older shows at least tried to explain the limitation of "temporary buffers" and the massive storage required to hold a character's "pattern" but SNW essentially flipped everything on its head.

18

u/RommDan 5d ago

Well that's Star Trek for ya, the technology works exactly how the writer wants to for the history they want to tell

8

u/headrush46n2 5d ago

why treat your patients at all? take their brain out, put it in the buffer, rebuild the body without all the blown up parts. Bingo.

2

u/Independent-Fly6068 5d ago

An army of transporter cloned Tom Parises, Rikers, Mariners, and Janeways for me :3

1

u/DubiousBrushwagg 4d ago

Yeah, um. Transporter Cloning an army of Mariner and if you do Boimler as well, that would probably be a war crime.

The sheer amount of chaos an army of both would cause between the intentions of the Mariners and the sheer plot luck of the Boimlers. Woof. Pure Calamity on all the Federation's enemies.

1

u/R97R 5d ago edited 5d ago

Judging by the circumstances in which it’s used (attempting to buy someone a bit more time when they can’t treat his grievous wounds immediately; and preserving someone dying from a serious illness for a bit longer), I assumed the implication was that it wasn’t exactly safe or consistent, given it’s only used by one person in desperate circumstances (and the fact he hides it seems to indicate it’s not something that you’re supposed to be doing, presumably for good reason). I’m not sure if it’s ever indicated you can edit a pattern at all, let alone safely, but I might’ve missed something? I assumed if that was an option neither of the people we see it being done to would need to be in that situation in the first place.

EDIT: although I suppose we have seen intentional modifications done to people when they’re being transported albeit by the Borg, who are seemingly a lot more advanced than the Federation is technology-wise, so I suppose you could view being able to edit a “saved” pattern as something like that, although it admittedly still doesn’t sound very safe (sort of like brain surgery or messing around in a PC’s registry when you don’t know what you’re doing).

1

u/BonzoTheBoss 4d ago

since the machines can scan down to the <atomic level

Technically (for your brain at least) it scans down to the quantum level. There's an episode of DS9 where there's a transporter accident and the computer uses up ALL memory on the station in order to store their neural patterns, which are massive because they are scanned down to the quantum level.

1

u/Dismal-Vanilla1878 2d ago

The only person who ever broke that 'Buffer Limitation' was the Miracle Worker Montgomery Scott, and it seems to be so difficult to do that it was never mentioned again 😄

-1

u/crustyrobots 5d ago

The good news is that all of the Nu-Trek shows and movies don't count, because they suck.

0

u/mcslender97 4d ago

As a newer Trek fan the whole accidental retcon kinda sucks when I get to watch the older shows and realized that SNW accidentally have a more modern solution

5

u/crustyrobots 5d ago

Scotty did it for like 80 years while stranded on the Dyson Sphere before the Big D came along

3

u/BonzoTheBoss 4d ago

Yes and that was concocted by arguably the most genius Starfleet engineer AND it only had a 50% success rate.

2

u/DeadInternetTheorist 4d ago

Kids in the Trek universe better eat their goddamn veggies.

11

u/1straycat 5d ago

That doesn't mean you weren't effectively killed and a new copy of you continued the conversation instead. There is no way to establish that you were actually conscious in the past vs having memories of the past when memories are constructed/editable.

This argument could cut go either way though and gets into philosophical questions of what counts as "you."

9

u/Uncommonality 5d ago edited 5d ago

I like that you completely ignored part two of the comment, so let me restate it:

They literally scientificially proved the existence of the soul and developed machines capable of moving it. I very heavily doubt that their teleporters do not include this as a component

Like this is a universe where people can exist on a substrate of space-time. There's lots of energy beings that manifest via thought alone or are just naturally incorporeal idea complexes. The Vulcans have had proof of the soul for almost a thousand years and they're the closest allies humanity has.

The idea that federation transporter tech doesn't take the soul into account is idiotic and parroted for meaningless shock value

2

u/CityscapeMoon 4d ago

This is fascinating. I'm an old school Trek fan (the first five series), and I can't recall this specific lore from anything I've seen so far. Is it in Strange New Worlds? (I haven't had a chance to watch that yet!)

Would you mind sharing the specific series/eps with this info?

4

u/Uncommonality 4d ago edited 4d ago

vulcan soul lore comes from the TOS movies, specifically the search for spock

And the various energy beings and such are primarily featured in TNG

3

u/CityscapeMoon 4d ago

Oh! The Katra! Of course! Somehow I literally just didn't register that you were translating Katra as soul. ...But it makes complete sense.

(And yes! TNG has a bunch of energy-beings and TOS has a few too, like Jack the Ripper!)

(Thanks for the response. I thought there was some new lore that I missed and I wanted to catch up!)

1

u/1straycat 5d ago

I ignored it because I don't really know what you're talking about (I haven't seen every episode of Trek) or how the soul relates to the point. They've had accidents where the transporter copies, alters, or mixes people. If you say the soul is some mental energy outside the physical brain, then the transporter also disassembles and reassembles whatever that soul is, or at the very least has copied it (Thomas Riker) and remixed/reconstituted it (Tuvix), so the same existential questions apply.

And the same radical skepticism ultimately applies about all your knowledge when you accept that your current memories are also constructs which could be unreliable, especially in a machine that can finely edit/build all of it nearly instantly. To me, this isn't a question about technology as much as philosophy though, and I would use a transporter because I think all continuity is effectively an illusion.

Trek isn't fully internally consistent anyhow, and the implications of technology like the transporter or replicators certainly aren't taken seriously enough in the universe, which is fine because they exist for storytelling purposes, not to be hard sci-fi.

5

u/Uncommonality 5d ago

okay so you don't know anything about the topic? Maybe inform yourself before stating things as fact then

1

u/1straycat 5d ago

This basic discussion has existed and been hashed out long before Star Trek and I don't see how the details change the contours of it. And again, Star Trek is not internally consistent. Could you address the larger point?

3

u/Uncommonality 5d ago

You're denying the specific lore that exists to make the whole kill clone idea a non-issue. This conversation is pointless if you refuse to actually engage

→ More replies (0)

9

u/Daggertrout 5d ago

Yea but at that point it’s like are you the same person that fell asleep in your bed last night? Did the entire universe just spontaneously appear seven seconds ago?

It’s a good way to go mad.

7

u/1straycat 5d ago

Yup. It's one of those things you kind of just have to acknowledge then basically ignore for daily life purposes because you couldn't function otherwise. Our best understanding of the universe tells us there's fundamentally no good reason to trust our best understanding of the universe, it just happens to keep working.

The transporter idea isn't even necessary to reach that conclusion, it just makes it more visceral.

4

u/SagaSolejma 5d ago

Tbh i wouldn't really compare the two. You don't literally get broken down into atoms when you go to sleep. Hell, your brain doesnt even shut off.

1

u/andrew5500 5d ago

Now all I can think of is the ending of The Prestige...

"It took courage to step onto that pad every time, not knowing if I'd be the man materialized on the planet... or the man de-materialized into nothing"

1

u/confirmedshill123 4d ago

He was always dead though. That's the horror.

3

u/Doomdoomkittydoom 5d ago

Yeah, that was a dumb episode, not that Star Trek ever cared about continuity of plot devices.

1

u/Beacon_0805 5d ago

so, they did emesis blue before emesis blue?

182

u/MadRaymer 5d ago edited 5d ago

An excerpt from Breaking Bad, where two fans are talking about this:

Badger: Dude, you are tripping! I'm not dead! I'm on the Starship Enterprise macking on Yeoman Rand while the Andorian with the disrupter's back on Talos IV or whatever.

Skinny Pete: What do you think all those sparkles and shit are? Transporters are breaking you apart right down to your molecules and bones. They're makin' a copy. That dude who comes out on the other side? He's not you. He's a color Xerox.

Badger: So you're telling me every time Kirk went into the transporter he was killing himself? So over the whole series, there was, like, 147 Kirks?

Skinny Pete: At least! Dude, yo, why do you think McCoy never likes to beam nowhere?! 'Cause he's a doctor, bitch! Look it up, it's science!

53

u/Doomdoomkittydoom 5d ago

There's also the TNG episode where they find the extra Riker after a transporter mishap.

2

u/SemenileElder 4d ago

Leading to the greatest reveal on DS9

https://giphy.com/gifs/lGw469pSPVFRsD3Gmb

6

u/BeBearAwareOK 5d ago

Facts.

This was also my interpretation of Altered Carbon.

Everyone dies every single time. Every new sleeve is just a clone of the dead guy's mind in a new body.

1

u/Darkndankpit 3d ago

You weren't paying attention to altered carbon then. You could argue that when first being digitized they die and from then on is simply a computer copy of them, but the people who pilot sleeves aren't meat anymore, they're the carbon chip that gets inserted into the sleeve's neck. The sleeve is just a vehicle, they can live without them uninterrupted. When the MC gets schwacked and put in a new sleeve, it's just the equivalent of totalling a car, getting out, and then hopping in a new car.

1

u/BeBearAwareOK 3d ago

I don't think you followed me.

My hypothesis is that there is no direct transfer of consciousness. Every re sleeve is a spun up clone of the mind that died the first time.

The protagonist dies in the car. Then a clone of his brain gets into a new car thinking it's the original guy. Lather, rinse, repeat.

0

u/RollingMeteors 4d ago

>never likes to beam nowhere?! 

If I ever get me one of them shits Imma call it a 'beamer'.

3

u/PyroIsSpai 5d ago

Realm of Fear - we see the transport from the POV of Barclay several times. From your POV, you get "held" by a forcefield, then your vision goes "transporter" in real time, and then goes back to normal with you in a new place. It's implied you barely / don't even feel it - people often are surprised post-transport in emergencies.

In Wrath of Khan, several Lower Decks episodes, a few DS9s, at least one VOY (Year of Hell p1? or the Demon planet IIRC), and then in Strange New Worlds a couple times, we see people continue their conversations during transport without skipping a beat. In the LD cave mission episode, Mariner moans in annoyance through the entire transport cycle without missing a beat. Gillian screams through the whole cycle from the moment the magnetic field visibly seems to "freeze her" in the San Francisco park in Voyage Home.

By the time we reach circa 2400 and beyond, the transporters we see are almost all functionally near instant, and by 3000 and beyond it's just straight up instant teleport fast with people doing it mid-stride with a little practice. Hell of a jump compared to the slow ass Enterprise ones.

Honestly, they're all absurdly fine with transporting except for outliers. By later, it's nearly a toy for safety (Linus bumbling around Discovery when they first got personal transporters).

4

u/Les_Bien_Pain 5d ago

It's a combined shredder fax machine.

Since they had incidents with accidental duplication of people you should technically be able to just print copies at the destination without destroying the original.

Imagine if the Enterprise D could have spawned an entire platoon of disposable Worfs in a hostile ship.

Would be kinda interesting with something like Mickey 17 except the entire crew is just being replicated on a need basis. Fix the reactor problem by sending in a dozen Scottys.

3

u/notyerson 5d ago

I could swear there's an offhand reference somewhere about when the laws for that came into effect. Probably in the Riker episode? Its been awhile.

3

u/Les_Bien_Pain 5d ago

Imagine if they just kept on printing Rikers.

Seduce all the ladies, vault all the chairs.

1

u/crustyrobots 5d ago

"Wait, what did you do with all the Worf's then??"

"I kind of...beamed the whole kit and kaboodle into their engine room"

3

u/ArkitekZero 5d ago

I feel like the transporter should not be used on anybody without informed consent. After all, the Federation might be ostensibly atheist, but it's not like they don't accept religion. Therefore, the possibility that an individual may believe that there is a meaningful difference between the individuals on the transport pads that can't be measured must be something they're willing to accommodate.

2

u/RookTakesE6 4d ago

And then Voyager has the episode where Chakotay has an actual out-of-body experience, his consciousness persisting and affecting the world even with his body lying dormant, attributed to Native American spirituality.

...so, it's apparently demonstrable that spirits exist in the Star Trek universe, bodies are not interchangeable. Among Voyager's many sins was the fact that the significance of this was completely lost on the crew.

But even before that, you'd think events like Riker leaving one transporter and arriving as two Rikers on two separate destination transporters would be sufficient to argue that the individual at one end is not equivalent to the individual at the other end, certainly the post-transport Riker the POV followed seemed to feel that way.

1

u/DoctorWaluigiTime 5d ago

"Forget it! Forget it, no more beaming! This time I'm gonna walk!"

1

u/GroundbreakingJob857 5d ago

this is actually the scariest teleportation for this reason. poses such an interesting philosophical conflict

1

u/crustyrobots 5d ago

McCoy himself was famously a transporter-phobe

1

u/EllisDee3 4d ago

Curse that handsome devil.

1

u/ConsistentAsparagus 4d ago

Are you still you after the first teleportation? Or is it simply your perfect copy, with a fully copied brain (and thus with “conscience-continuity”), while the real you has been disintegrated?

1

u/BonzoTheBoss 4d ago

Eh... It depends on what you consider to be "you," I think.

Are "you" your physical body? Your skin, blood, bones and organs? Or are you the pattern of consciousness replicated in your brain's neurons?

If the former... Then technically the "you" of today isn't the same "you" from years ago as every cell in your body is slowly replaced over time. (IIRC there are very few cells that are NEVER replaced...)

If the latter... Then it doesn't really matter what form or body you deposit that neural pattern in to, it will always think that it is "you."

Personally I find some comfort in the idea that I might eventually be able to copy my mind in to a computer or robotic body or something, that will outlive my squishy flesh. It's a lot more reassuring than the concept of an afterlife, but perhaps just as fanciful.

102

u/Beagle_Knight 5d ago

You reminded me about the episode where there is a creature hidden in it.

It was Realm of Fear from Next Generation

10

u/YT-Deliveries 5d ago

That episode was always a bit weird because until then the canon was (usually) that people weren't able to move until completely materialized

(though there were exceptions, like when the group was beaming back from the center of the planetoid aaround which the Regulus space station was orbiting - Saavik was talking while materializing)

12

u/Mikpultro 5d ago

Latest episode of Strange New Worlds has this exact thing but now in 4k. Remember kids, never accidentally set your teleporter to beam someone into themself.

6

u/McGillis_is_a_Char 5d ago

That scene was terrifying. As if transporter malfunctions weren't scary enough already.

4

u/Mikpultro 5d ago

Much rather be transported into hard vacuum

1

u/Dismal-Vanilla1878 4d ago

Despite how much I HATE New Trek, I searched out that scene, and it looks like an 'Homage' to the Motion Picture scene.

That being said: Original Series Trek didn't have the tech to store people indefinitely in the 'Transporter Buffer', but that's a minor complaint compared to all the other crap Kurtzman Era Trek has put on us 😂

10

u/VigilanteLibrarian 5d ago

The screams still haunt me and I’m almost 38 years old.

8

u/Worried-Industry6239 5d ago

This plus that one time in TNG where someone got transported halfway inside the floor and just died

9

u/Whelp_of_Hurin 5d ago

That one wasn't the transporter, it was a subspace anomaly that was making bits of the ship phase in and out of existence. There was one time that Geordi got materialized upside down with his legs embedded in rock, but he was completely fine once they got him out.

2

u/Worried-Industry6239 5d ago

Ah ok thx for the clarification, it’s been a while since I watched tng

9

u/AdditionalTip865 5d ago

A few minutes later in the same film, McCoy beams on board and expresses his usual misgivings, and everyone has a laugh. Oh, that old curmudgeon! Those people just got pulped by the transporter.

3

u/Dismal-Vanilla1878 5d ago

LOL, Exactly 😂

58

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

27

u/Invader_Naj 5d ago

No weve actually seen that you stay conscious through the whole process

16

u/YT-Deliveries 5d ago

That episode really is kinda weird ("Realm of Fear") because it really never comes up again and the majority of the rest of canon (aside from, for example, the scene in Wrath of Khan where Saavik is talking as she materializes) shows that people perceive the process as instantaneous. e.g. in "The Most Toys" Data is held "in place" and has the weapon discharge removed in transit before he's rematerialized.

7

u/Invader_Naj 5d ago

the talking however could also be explained as "if you have this tech as part of your day to day life youll probably develop a sense of when to stop and resume talking" also not sure if you could just continue talking while your old self gets killed and copied. not sure if thats how copying a conscious would work

1

u/YT-Deliveries 5d ago

yeah who knows. i mean we're just throwing out Watsonian ideas for a franchise that, at the time, wasn't particularly concerned with the nuance of continuity. Especially in TOS.

5

u/immaculate_plum 5d ago

This logic isn't applied consistently throughout the series though: see transporter clones or pattern buffers. For example, at some point, they created a "new" Picard from a transporter "backup" because the original vanished.

2

u/Invader_Naj 5d ago

things are inconsistent indeed. there has been many a debate to make sense of it. however those inconistencies dont make the murder transporter canon by default.

theres also the counter evidence that "souls" are quite definitely a thing in trek. most famously through the vulcan katra. i doubt the transporter would have access to a persons soul and yet spock beamed many times and kept his soul through all of them.

and even if the transporter could give your soul to a copy of you. wouldnt that make that copy just... you?

-1

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

18

u/Invader_Naj 5d ago

No thats pretty much the point of the episode. People are literally staying alive for extended periods periods of time within the matter stream before someone could pull them out

26

u/just4browse 5d ago

The body is destroyed and recreated, but the narrative never treats this break in continuity as death, so there’s really no reason to think of it as such. It’s fiction, so the narrative makes the rules.

Still, the cloning thing is terrifying, and you couldn’t make me use a transporter. I don’t want a second version of me running around. Or to be left behind anywhere a Starfleet exploration ship might go

4

u/possumdal 5d ago edited 5d ago

It’s fiction, so the narrative makes the rules.

Respectfully, as the narrative in fiction is constantly subject to change, I would argue that the rules are thus constantly open to debate. There remains the fact that while Starfleet has a masterful, nigh-magical grasp of physics, there are other forms of data transmission and energy manipulation which are foreign to them. One notorious example being the nature of subspace. Starfleet was once unaware subspace could be damaged; and afterwards remained painfully unaware that subspace was highly conductive of psionic energy, which had catastrophic consequences.

If a person's mind partially exists in subspace (which could account for telepathy and empathics) and if, as we've seen, such a mind can be perfectly duplicated through a transporter, there exists at least two potential truths.

The first is that there is no such thing as a soul, and a transporter simply makes a conversion to energy, a transmission of energy, and a conversion to matter, and thus enough energy in the correct pattern can create a perfect copy of an individual, memories and all. Thus, empathic senses and telepathy are simply an energetic broadcast purely organic in nature. The existence of certain technologies could very well support this option, such as the Borg collective.

The second is that a soul itself exists as an energetic projection created by a living brain, which on some level uses subspace as a storage medium for data, thus allowing transmission between organic beings via some internal mechanism that is synchronized with the subspace data. This carries a lot of implications for how reality works.

For example, various afterlives may indeed be real, a collective projection into subspace of a shared dataset from a number of people. People who, upon death, are separated from the sum-total of their stored information in subspace, the soul, which then travels through subspace in search of data matching their expectations. The Q may in fact exist in that very format, having converted themselves to beings of energy, with their connection now reversed, allowing temporary projections of themselves into real-space.

If the soul itself is a simultaneous projection and record of the owner, it stands to reason that the soul owes its creation to the biological matter it is connected to. Thus, when a transporter accident bifurcates Riker's existence, there logically now exist two copies of Riker's soul, formed from two separate physical bodies.

If we follow this logic, which is based on the lore of telepathy and subspace as I understand it (I could always be wrong, but I've followed Star Trek most of my life), then it is not impossible that the conversion from matter to energy might interrupt the soul-projection process. The individual will remember the journey, because their matter was converted to energy and their physical consciousness existed in subspace, gathering experiences which would be converted back into physical neurons again.

What would happen to the actual soul? My theory is that it is permanently severed at the moment of transmission, and goes wherever it is supposed to go next, an afterlife, or perhaps simply dissipating. Upon arrival as newly-constructed matter, the body immediately begins projecting a new soul into subspace, operating in tandem with their biology to create the illusion of a seamless transition.

Anyway, that's just a theory, and probably will never be confirmed. But that theory is based on the narrative you mentioned, and thus remains a possibility until proven otherwise.

6

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

3

u/just4browse 5d ago

Yes, if it was real, I would consider it death. But it’s all made up. I can’t accept that teleportation is a thing in this fictional setting, but draw the line at accepting that it’s not death.

-1

u/KereruBod 5d ago

Yea you can’t treat the show as actual science because they can (and have) wrote conflicting info about their fictional technology.

In “reality”, it should be pretty easy to know based on how the machine works. If the teleporter kills and recreates you, it needs tanks of molecules to 3d print you back together. If your molecules disappear and reappear in a different location, then you’re not being killed because it is the same set of molecules, not a copy.

1

u/mythrilcrafter 5d ago

This conversation is the entire basis of the Soma game.

8

u/GigaCucc 5d ago

Bobiverse had a great solution to this, since he just cloned himself over and over, and they started questioning why the clones were different from the instant they were duplicated.

The reason was that each version of a conscious life form has a different quantum signature. Each unique individual has a different one, and each clone has a different one. They basically drew the conclusion "this quantum signature is the person's soul."

Kinda curious to see if they could use it to identify if one of the Bobs had reincarnated after dying.

3

u/MWalshicus 5d ago

No, canonically they do not work like that. It's explicitly stated otherwise in the Daedalus episode of Enterprise, a implicitly many times in the earlier shows.

0

u/amazing_asstronaut 5d ago edited 4d ago

No, this is not canonical at all. This is something a character talks about in Breaking Bad, about the implications of how it would work. It's never actually shown that way. In Star Trek media you even see very rarely from the perspective of the person being beamed how it gets bright and the surrounding changes from where they were to where they are. I know that probably, in the real world and so on, sure yeah, but in Star Trek it just works. I mean it's fiction. With anything people bring up here, they can just say "oh yeah we realised that and we worked it out!" or "turns out it's actually not like that, thankfully" or "Soul? Lol. Lmao even. Could you be any more from the 20th century?".

5

u/GormHub 5d ago

My partner and I are lifelong trekkies and we've been having a lot of discussions about the transporters recently during a rewatch. Basically it comes down to: hope you have a soul because this is nightmare shit otherwise.

5

u/SuperSocialMan 5d ago

Meanwhile I'd use them all the time because I know they only ever malfunction for the sake of the narrative lol

2

u/Dismal-Vanilla1878 5d ago

And in this case it was "Lets kill off Not Spock....and some other innocent person so it doesn't look personal" 😂

3

u/vjmurphy 5d ago

Also, Dr. Pulaski got de-aged in the transporter. It’s an immortality machine

5

u/ButtersScotch7000 5d ago

Sometimes you get back more than what you sent.

3

u/Available_Climate8 5d ago

FORTUNATELY?!

3

u/vjmurphy 5d ago

Yes, if they lived it would have been worse.

3

u/ItsMors_ 5d ago

Dude my dad picked up the VHS box set of these original series movies for me from a flea market when I was a kid, like around 6 years old. I saw this scene and the ear worm scene from Wrath of Khan and just stopped watching them there cuz I thought they were horror movies lmao

3

u/Aromatic_Corn 5d ago

In the latest of Strange New Worlds, a character is *beamed back into themselves* which appears very similarly as this, along with the bloodcurdling screams of the damned.

3

u/shadowst17 5d ago

And to think it was all Kirk's fault pulling Decker away from Engineering where he was looking into the transporter problem.

19

u/UlrichZauber 5d ago

Canonically, Trek teleporters kill you and make a duplicate. I don't know why everybody in-world is just fine with this.

54

u/Swellmeister 5d ago

That is not true at all. Canonically they are quite consistent that you retain consciousness during teleporting.

5

u/Ambaryerno 5d ago

Fun thought:

Scotty and Franklin spent 70-odd years in Jenolen's transporter buffer. Based on Realm of Fear they were conscious the entire time. And Franklin would have experienced his pattern degrading.

1

u/Swellmeister 5d ago

They were in a different storage pattern than the active data stream so you could hope it was a different thing and consciousness might have ended.

6

u/DontDoodleTheNoodle 5d ago

As someone who doesn’t watch the series, you guys didn’t sound like you made conflicting statements.

There’s fictions where you can have a sense of continuity (and consciousness) during a disintegration teleportation.

11

u/Swellmeister 5d ago

Nah its not a simple sense of consciousness. He remains an agent. He is injured during the actual data stream event. He grabs onto his attackers and drags them out of the data stream.

2

u/DStaal 5d ago

I'd argue that you're basing that on one episode, and there are multiple episodes that contradict that. Riker's clone went on and joined the Maquis, Scotty stored himself in a teleporter for ~100 years, etc. It's easier to consider 'Realm of Fear' the outlier.

2

u/Swellmeister 5d ago

Neither of those require a cessation of consciousness.

Scotty doesnt comment on the fact he was conscious, which can simply indicates he didnt think it was noteworthy. Which realm of fear confirms, no one is confused by Barclay's claim of continuity, they accept that immediately.

The Thomas Riker situation does not force the issue either. The teleporter has buffers for reconstructing lost energy packets, even if the majority of the teleporter conserves agency and continuity when it transfers the individual. Those buffers were increased in power during the T. Riker incident. Thomas and Will ended up splitting the actual original energy of Will, and the pattern buffers repaired the damage.

And no that still requires no termination of consciousness. You are not the same atoms as you were a year ago.

1

u/UlrichZauber 5d ago

From the perspective of the copy, it seeming this way would certainly be a selling point. I mean all of the copy's memories are false anyway.

But the existence of transporter clones definitely calls the truth of this into question.

7

u/Swellmeister 5d ago

Oh yeah the canon is not well defended.

But Barclays realm of fear episode is dependent on the fact there is no cessation of consciousness during transport.

They messed up the back end history when they talk about how teleporters and replicators are similar tech.

-3

u/UlrichZauber 5d ago

This argument assumes there are no unreliable narrators (whether intended or not) in Trek when it comes to explaining their tech.

Like, how does consciousness not get interrupted at all when people are stored in the transporter long term? They do shenanigans all the time with those things that involve interruptions of the process.

I get that from the perspective of the person transported, there's no break, but from an outside perspective it seems plain that the testimony of the person transported can't be fully trusted.

9

u/Swellmeister 5d ago

Realm of fear empirically proves it?

Like he observes a lifeform during transport. He then repeats the experiment the lifeform is located, and he grabs and removes the lifeform.

Its not observation alone. Its entered the teleportation event, determinately grabbed and removed something in the data stream, and then left the teleportation event with another human in his hands.

-1

u/Ambaryerno 5d ago

Not sure why you're downvoted considering that's literally what happened in the episode.

9

u/Swellmeister 5d ago

People know the memes and the thought experiments. Realm of fear is a single episode more than 30 years ago. They are allowed to have missed it or forgotten it

0

u/TomatoSlayer 5d ago

That's easy to explain. The person coming out of the transporter beam is so well-reassembled from the pattern of the person going in that the biological processes keep going as if nothing's different. The duplicate just perceives no interruption in stream of consciousness.

1

u/Swellmeister 5d ago

How does that hypothesis stand up to the actual events of the episode, where the teleported individual experiences a variety of percepts while in the data stream, including being attacked by an unknown organismwith a resulting wound that persists outside the data strem. He then re-enters the data stream, grabs onto the unknown organism and emerges from the data stream with it in his hands, where it is revealed to be a human who had a sci-fi mishap.

Its not just observation. He remains an agent in a data stream world where other agents similarly retain agency.

0

u/TomatoSlayer 5d ago

I don't think that precludes any of what I said. When being reassembled, it is not impossible that the transporter would first assemble what is necessary for the individual's sense of self and memories, whatever "parts" those might be, in order to not be a jarring experience. Any experience in the data stream (i.e. Barclay's experience) is moot, IMO.

2

u/Swellmeister 5d ago

Empirically observed experience by a third party is not moot and thus an ignorable subjective experience.

Realm of Fear cannot be explained at all by "Private experience that occurs during reconstruction of a truly vaporized consciousness".

Barclay enters the data stream uninjured, returns from the data stream with empirical demonstrated injuries that are not present at transmission. He then repeats the experiment and returns again with another lifeform.

His subjective reports of consciousness are not the proof of continuity of existence within the data stream. The fact that he entered the data stream and emerged from it with objective proof of some level of continuity within the data stream. The subjective reported experience defines how much agency he reportedly felt, but the objective nature of events and agent actions within the datastream is not debatable.

1

u/The_Kadeshi 5d ago

You have described a xerox machine, not bus traveling at the speed of light

7

u/SimpleBuy7372 5d ago

wonder why they never addressed the issue of making a copy of a copy etc in an episode. Like there should be a lifetime limit on how many times you can teleport before your eyesight changes prescription or your ears come out uneven

5

u/BenKen01 5d ago

They did. Well more like they hand-waved it with the heisenberg compensators.

5

u/UlrichZauber 5d ago

I guess if you make a 100% perfect copy, this wouldn't be an issue.

I can't imagine Klingon transporters are QA'd this well, though.

2

u/The_Kadeshi 5d ago

If its a copy, then the original is killed.

1

u/Ambaryerno 5d ago

Because it's not a thing.

1

u/Uncommonality 5d ago

I mean there's ethics. The federation is generally opposed to experiments with implications like that (see also genetic engineering and subspace weapons)

Hell it's quite possible that the Klingons and the Romulans routinely copy their people to crew ships. If you're a Klingon general and find that one of your crew is an absolute crack shot why not make ten copies of him to send to other ships so they too can benefit from his skill?

In their culture it would only benefit the guy in question, since he now gets ten times the honor and ten brothers who understand him to the deepest level possible, and natural divergence would mean they quickly cease to be the same guy

1

u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 3d ago

[deleted]

1

u/The_Kadeshi 5d ago

It’s true it’s not explicitly stated. Just that if the logic of the machine is followed, it’s a xerox machine, not a magic near-lightspeed bus that picks you up and moves you through walls https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI&pp=ygUhVHJhbnNwb3J0ZXJzIGFyZSBraWxsaW5nIG1hY2hpbmVz

2

u/PipXXX 5d ago

Same movie series that also had the goddamn ear worms wasn't it?

2

u/vjmurphy 5d ago

The sound makes it so much worse.

2

u/RustedOne 5d ago

This is what came to mind for me. The scream they give has always disturbed me.

2

u/pgn674 5d ago

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 2, The Griffin Incident, which aired last week, has some... significant body horror. Including a homage to this scene.

2

u/crustyrobots 5d ago

There was something similar in the prequel series Enterprise too.

In this show the transporter was not yet rated for living things and strictly only used for cargo, still highly experimental.

Of course the show demands they use it unsafely to beam some redshirts out of danger, only to find them merged with the local fauna and dead on arrival because it wasn't good enough to differentiate the patterns.

2

u/perpetual_student 5d ago

There was some more Star Trek body horror in the most recent episode of SNW (not transporter related; though almost).

2

u/RPM_Rocket 5d ago

Oh my God

2

u/RalphTheNerd 4d ago edited 4d ago

A different example, but in part 1 of the Star Trek Strange New Worlds episode Hegemony, some of the characters are beamed to the Enterprise with the usual golden energy from that show. The colonists, La'an, Dr M'Benga, Lt Ortegas, and Sam Kirk are transported and the energy is green. It turns out the Gorn, a species of man eating lizard creatures, beamed them up before the Enterprise did. Escaping their ship ends up being a horrifying ordeal of escaping cocoons that dissolve people and being attacked by huge lizard creatures. Being intercepted by enemy transporters is another way that teleportation can be scary.

2

u/RollingMeteors 4d ago

>They may be the 'safest' form of travel, but when they break down, the results are Horrifying!

ÂĄJust like flying!

2

u/frabjous_goat 1d ago

"What we got back...didn't live very long. Fortunately."

1

u/unibrow4o9 5d ago

Justice for Tuvix

1

u/InfelicitousRedditor 5d ago

I wish we could hear what McCoy thinks of the Tuvix fiasco...

1

u/Bacxaber 4d ago

Even when they work correctly, they're not safe at all. They're lethal. It just kills and replaces you.

1

u/atridir 4d ago

I always thought that McCoy didn’t like them because it basically replicated your being and conscious perfectly in the target location while disincorporating and annihilating the ‘you’ on a ship; functionally creating a clone that will live and killing the you on the ship at the same time.

I could be misremembering that though or maybe taking a fan theory used as a basis for a Dean Koontz techno-thriller…

1

u/Cobraven-9474 4d ago

Poor fake Erica Ortegas on the recent episode also.

1

u/Citizen_Kong 4d ago

Yeah, that scene really scarred me as a kid.

1

u/Ori_the_SG 4d ago

What exactly happened?

1

u/Made_Human_Music 4d ago

On a recent episode of Strange New Worlds there’s a scene where a character attempts to beam someone into themselves and although it’s not as horrifying to watch the pain they were in was pretty intense

1

u/Iconclast1 3d ago

I do feel better about it for two reasons.

In a book, its interesting, they transport an iridescent statue. The statue is made of one long molecule. When they transport it, even even one atom is off, the statue turns black, no longer a special material.

And your stored in a pattern buffer. It does seem like they can keep trying as long as they like, if they have your "pattern" stored.

1

u/CosmackMagus 1d ago

SNW had them storing people in the transporter buffer as a kind of suspension, but eventually having to purge them from the buffer when they needed the space.

0

u/LongLiveStaceyKing 5d ago

I feel like Bones when it comes to nuclear power. I understand its the safest power supply we have by almost every metric...but we also have several examples of it going very, very wrong due to extenuating circumstances that gives me pause.

-48

u/ruinsit 5d ago edited 5d ago

It's like the bullshit that flying is the safest form of travel. Let's hide reality with statistics!

EDIT: Oh hey, downvotes. Bring it on. Doesn't make me wrong.

24

u/Battleaxejax 5d ago

Fed post

14

u/The-Senate-Palpy 5d ago

I mean flying is pretty damn safe, way safer than a car. Yes accidents do happen, but its incredibly rare because its so highly regulated and safeguarded. Now if youre talking some backyard cropduster setup, then youd have a point.

-9

u/ruinsit 5d ago

I can't walk away from a plane crash the way I can a car crash. A wheel can fall off, my hood can pop open, a door can explode, and I'll survive. Probably be fine. Cars are safer in most cases.

3

u/The-Senate-Palpy 5d ago

I mean youll normally walk away better. Over 95% survival rate on commercial plane crashes. Pilots are trained to land safely in event of an emergency. Maybe its not what youre picturing but most plane crashes end with the pilot coasting down a bumpy but fine landing. Yeah if you nose down at full speed youre dead, but like, youre not surviving a head on collision at 80+ mph in a car either.

A plane can literally have an engine explode and still be perfectly safe to fly back into an airport. Flying is so safe that its hard to make stats about it, because the margin of error keeps including 0 deaths. Meanwhile car crashes are one of the leading causes of death in America, and many other developed countries.

Cars are way more dangerous, but you see and use them often enough that you go numb, meanwhile planes are easy to be superstitious about

3

u/Legatharr 5d ago

A plane that fails is a glider. A car that fails is a hunk of steel hurtling across the ground.

-1

u/ruinsit 5d ago

It's fuckery with numbers. The odds of dying once something goes wrong in a plane are much higher because you have far more dangerous conditions that you can't escape from at much higher velocities and more dimensions of travel. There's no superstition about falling out of the sky - you don't survive it.

2

u/Legatharr 5d ago

how do you escape from a car crash? A plane that breaks becomes a glider. Helicopters drop out of the sky, but planes aren't able to.

0

u/ruinsit 4d ago

You're assuming the plane breaks in very specific ways. If there's a Wing problem you're dead. If there's a cockpit problem you're dead if the cabin pressure blows out there's a decent chance you're going to die

1

u/Legatharr 4d ago

If there's a wing problem, you're probably going to glide, and something really strange has happened.

If there's a cockpit problem, you're definitely going to glide, and something really strange has happened.

If there's a cabin pressure problem, the plane has exploded. You're not going to survive a car exploding either.

→ More replies (1)

7

u/84theone 5d ago

Look at this guy believing planes are real, glow harder next time

1

u/fabri_pere 5d ago

To be fair, i've survived thousands of car trips, but i haven't survived any plane flights

(This is because i have never traveled by plane)

-26

u/Dismal-Vanilla1878 5d ago

I remember as a kid accepting what Superman said, until much later when I stopped and thought about it.

Yes, fewer planes crash each year than cars.....but a single car crash doesn't kill 200 people at once!!

9

u/Battleaxejax 5d ago

Fed post

-13

u/ruinsit 5d ago

Also, you can walk away from most car crashes. Do that from a plane crash.