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The way transporters work in most sci-fi is that you die every time and are replaced with an exact replica that has all your memories up to the time of transport.
 
The way transporters work in most sci-fi is that you die every time and are replaced with an exact replica that has all your memories up to the time of transport.
Then SOMEBODY should be doing great business issuing death and rebirth certificates. Or is that automatic, like web cookies?
 
The way transporters work in most sci-fi is that you die every time and are replaced with an exact replica that has all your memories up to the time of transport.

Lol…
there was a tongue-in cheek scene about that in the movie "Doom", too.
 
The way transporters work in most sci-fi is that you die every time and are replaced with an exact replica that has all your memories up to the time of transport.

I love that scene.

“This Book is Full of Spiders” by David Wong (page 53-54)

“So does anything scare you doctor? Anything irrational?”

“Of course. Here, I’ll volunteer my most embarrassing example. I feel like I owe it to you… Are you a fan of science fiction?”

“I don’t know. My girlfriend is.”

“All right, but you know Star Trek, and ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? How they can teleport people around?”

“Yeah. The transporters.”

“Do you know how they work?”

“Just … special effects. CGI or whatever they used.”

“No, I mean within the universe of the show. They work by breaking down your molecules, zapping you over a beam, and putting you back together on the other end.”

“Sure.”

“That is what scares me. I can’t watch it. I find it too disturbing.”

I shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, think about it. Your body is just made of a few different types of atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. So this transporter machine, there is no reason in the world to break down all of those atoms and then send those specific atoms thousands of miles away. One oxygen atom is the same as another, so what it does is send the blueprint for your body across the beam. Then it resembles you at the destination, out of whatever atoms it has nearby. So if there’s carbon and hydrogen at the planet your’re beaming down to, it’ll just put you together out of what it has on hand, because you get the exact same result.“

"Sure”

“So it’s more like sending a fax than mailing a letter. Except the transporter is a fax machine that shreds the original. Your original body, along with your brain, gets vaporized. Which means what comes out on the other end isn’t you. It’s an exact copy that the machine made, of a man who is now dead, his atoms floating freely around the interior of the ship.Only within the universe of the show, nobody knows this.

"Meanwhile you are dead. Dead for all eternity. All of your memories and emotions and personality end, right there, on that platform, forever. Your wife and children and friends will never see you again.What they will see is an unnatural photocopy of you that emerged from the other end. And in fact, since transporter technology is used routinely, all of the people you see on that ship are copies of copies of long-dead, vaporized crew members. And no one ever figures it out. They all continue to blithely step into this machine that kills one hundred percent of the people who use it, but no one realizes it because each time, it spits out a perfect replacement for the victim at the other end.”

I stared at him.

“Why did you tell me that?”

He shrugged. “You asked.”
 
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