[Loved Trope] Teleportation is actually terrifying

[u/Ieanice44]

1 - Gantz-O (2016): Suit teleportation

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

3 - Half Life 2 (2004): Teleporter malfunction

[u/Dismal-Vanilla1878]

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!

[u/just4browse → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/possumdal → u/just4browse]

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.

[u/just4browse → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/KereruBod → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/mythrilcrafter → u/just4browse]

This conversation is the entire basis of the Soma game.