Okay, I'm not a big Star Trek guy. There are several episodes of the series (particularly STNG) that I've enjoyed, but when it comes to the intricacies of Trek lore I am not as well-studied as your more diehard Trekkie. I have, however, slogged my way through a few college physics courses and there are a few aspects that have gotten the little hamster wheel in my brain spinning. One of these is the system of teleportation portrayed on the show. From everything I can understand, people and objects getting "beamed" get broken down to the subatomic level to facilitate their being transmitted to a receiver at their destination where a computer--which would require a STUPENDOUSLY TREMENDOUS amount of processing power--would reassemble these people and objects into their original forms.
Well, copies of their original forms, but you know what I mean. Anyway, for the sake of today's blog, I'm going to assume that those dilithium crystals really are some badass energy sources and that computers will have gotten powerful enough by Star Trek's time. My question is not so much a technical aspect but a somewhat social aspect that fan fiction writers might want to consider.
The Star Trek mythos or gestalt or whatever term may be more appropriate here requires that if a person is beamed from a particular origin, he/she/it has to be the same person as or near indistinguishable copy of that person upon arrival and reassembly at the destination. Yeah, I know there have been some really nasty glitches on some episodes and movies, but they were just that--glitches. Most everyone else comes through more or less as the same person or--to get to my point--with more or less the same identity.
Now, there is currently some debate within certain circles on what makes up someone's personality. Is it just a particular arrangement of the molecules that make up a particular person's brain? Something that emerges from activity of neurons? Some special "other quality" or "spirit" like some dualist would say? Whatever the case, it seems to me (and I just may be missing something here) that if such a technology as Star Trek's teleportation were to exists this question would likely to have been finally answered beforehand.
And until the mystery of mind is definitively solved, there's no way I'm letting Scotty beam me anywhere.
About Me
- A. A. Scribe
- No, I'm some OTHER Anthony Anderson, not the one you might have seen in movies or on Law & Order. In addition to short stories in "Twisted Dreams", "Horrotica", and "The Nubian Chronicles"; I am also the author of "The Vile, Sinister, and Most Utterly Diabolical Account of Latrina Emerson" currently available at Amazon.com or at lulu.com I'm also part of The Gothic Creatives administrated by Andrea Dean von Scoyoc.
