(Hope that sounds convincing, cause hell if I know)
That’s kind of the premise of the John Scalzi book “Old Man’s War”. In the book, they take elderly people (aka Wise people), and put their minds/memories into young fit bodies. This, in theory, creates soldiers who are both Wise, and Young/Fit.
young fit bodies
Young, fit, green bodies
Yes!!
Thanks for the new reading suggestion!
John Scalzi is an amazing author. You’ll love it. Another good one by him is The Dispatcher. There’s even an audiobook of this narrated by Zachary Quinto
Indeed. And let’s not forget “The Kaiju Preservation Society”, and “Red Shirts”!
I just got both of those as part of a Humble Bundle. I haven’t yet read then, but am looking forward to then.
Huh, I’d read both Old Man’s War and Red Shirts without noticing they were by the same author.
He’s on Mastodon too, if you’re looking for fediverse follows.
Great book! That’s a must read for sci-fi lovers.
They just need a cerebral compensator.
Transported are kinda soft sci Fi, and plausible explanation for why a thing can’t be done is easily hand waived by technobabble about a device that says it can be.
Besides, their little murder boxes anyway, so, it’s not really you or is it?
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” -Heraclitus
Are you ever you? You are an amalgamation of experiences that changes from one moment to the next. You aren’t the same person now as you were ten years ago, and you won’t ever be the same person you are right now ever again.
Oh god I hope not I hate that guy
I don’t know about you, but O’Brien would certainly know.
Of course he does. He just doesn’t want her knowing.
Huh. A lot of the Keiko/ O’Brien squabble episodes of DS9 are going to be easier to watch, with that idea in place. He’s not divorcing or fixing his marriage, because he can simply outlive her and do better next time.
She’s more like a pet to him
So just filter out neurons and other majorly complicated nervous system cells. Your mind will still age, but your body will not, and that will make you last significantly longer than you otherwise would.
Couple that with advances in alzheimer’s/dementia/etc research, the average person could grow to be a century old without breaking a sweat.
Funnily enough in jujutsu kaisen many of the people who got transfigured by patchwork face die of shock because their mind doesn’t accept their new body as their. Also I vaguely remember an experiment where surgeons were trying to transplant a entire head. And one of the many issues was the fact that the brain kept waking up and rejecting the body because of small differences like a vain being in the wrong spot. I really need to dig that study up I remember it being a pretty neat and oddly terrifying read.
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Keiko needs to be careful what she wishes for.
“Sir, a Mister Hanson is requesting to beam aboard.”
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Excellent out of context quote from that episode:
Keiko: “I am your wife”.
Miles: “But you’re also twelve years old”.
Something like that.
This happens in the episode where everyone prematurely ages, and they are sent through the transporter to make them their “normal” ages. There’s no reason given why they couldn’t do that all the time.
Even more relevant there was that episode where a transporter accident turns Picard, Guinan, Ro and Kiko into twelve year olds and nobody points out they just discovered transporter induced immortality.
What really gets me about that episode is all of the effected characters immediately want to return to their normal age and nobody says “Hold up, I’m very okay with a couple extra decades of life” or centuries in Guinans case I suppose.
They also forgot about the fact that Barclay was aware during transport meaning that somehow your physical body exists while you’re being transported.
Really, the transporters work by power of plot.
Really, the transporters work by power of plot.
Most devices in sci-fi settings do.
True, but it’s amazing how much the transport is or is not able to do depending on the episode.
It’s more of a literary device than an electronic device.
Everybody except Guinan, she acknowledges childhood was long ago and wants to stay a kid and keep jumping on the bed.
Doesn’t Ro kind of linger on enjoying her childhood in a way she couldn’t because of the occupation?
And yeah in Futurama, Leela decided to stay a teenager so she could have a childhood with her parents ♥️
That episode is problematic in a lot of ways.
Especially Picard who, you know, has the health thing that accelerates with age or whatever
Let’s not even address the fact that transporter enyouthened Picard would presumably still have his cybernetic heart. Was it an adult-sized cyberheart in his kid-sized chest cavity? Did the transporter know how to resize the prosthesis to fit his changed body? So many questions!
I assume there’s some in universe reason why they can’t / don’t keep copies of the teleportation data, otherwise everyone would be effectively indestructible
“Oh no the captain got eaten by a space tiger”
“No problem, I’ll teleport a backup from an hour ago, he’ll be there in 5 minutes”
My first thought was wouldn’t that reset our memories to that point too?
Granted losing some memories or being dead is a pretty easy choice, but using it to reverse aging or other physical things would be a costly one
Would YOU lose “some memory”, or would you be destroyed and the transporter would recreate a person who believes to be you from a previous point in time?
And how do we know that isn’t what happens every single time someone is beamed somewhere?
Calm down Theseus
But yes, I’m on the “it’s essentially a clone” and the original is killed side of that argument, so it would just be a copy of you that believes they lost time somehow until someone told them what happened
With zero knowledge on the series, I’ll just go ahead and fill the lore:
They have tried it in the past with someone who died but the recreated body was just an empty entity. It had vital signs and reacted to stimuli, but it wasn’t the person and didn’t have a will to live.
There’s no scientific explanation, it’s one of the mysteries of life.
The end.
I know you said you have no knowledge of the series, but there’s actually one character (Riker) that does get teleporter cloned in an episode of tng. That’s probably the basis of this whole post.
And if I recall correctly they also used teleporter shenanigans to explain how scotty from the original series could still be around to rescue in tng.
So it’s a bit of an elephant in the room
A wizard did it
We do know they hold genetic templates, per Picard season 3. No reason they couldn’t hold full templates for VIP’s.
And now we know the real reason why Picard never aged…
I would argue that the transport buffer isn’t big enough, but I think they stored a pile of settlers in there one episode.
They’ve done that sort of thing a couple of times, but it’s always been a dirty hack that happened in an emergency. For example, in the TNG episode “Relics,” Scotty put himself effectively in stasis for 70 years by setting the buffer to continually refresh itself like DRAM, and in the DS9 episode “Our Man Bashir” there was a transporter malfunction and they had to wipe the memory of almost the whole station in order to find enough space to store the command crew’s neural patterns, overwriting Bashir’s holosuite program so the crew’s likenesses replaced the characters.
If you’d start this game, it’s hard to end it. Immortality, swarms of clones created just for labor, identity steal, and worse of all – people would grow negligent and the series would lose any stakes.
I think that at some point everyone agreed that the cycle of life is a core of what makes us humanoids and pushes us to strive for self-improvement.
It also prevents societal degradation, because immortality goes hand in hand with tyranny and lack of meaningful natural change.
the series would lose any stakes.
That’s the only real reason
and pushes us to strive for self-improvement.
That is why whenever you see old people having to wait in line or dealing with retail workers they are so understanding and polite. Which is also reflected in their voting, you know how they always want to raise taxes to pay for welfare programs they do not benefit from, peace despite not having anything at stake, and a more tolerant understanding society. Also their TV choices. I just think Fox News (average viewer age in 60s) is so gentle and naive.
I was thinking about this as a deep philosophical question yesterday. Wondering, if that technology was available would I be totally unafraid of accidental death, knowing that I could simply be restored to a recent backup. I came to the conclusion that I would still feel, and act, the same as I do now. Which made me realise that I must believe there is something more to us than pure biology as the backup wouldn’t be “me”. I’m certainly not religious and have no concept of what this “more than biology” might be - it just came as a logical result of my feelings about my backup.
If we had these back ups, are you sure they are you though? If you died, the ‘you’ that you feel you are right now would be gone, but a new one based on a saved state of the old you would be born with your memories. Unless there is another form of energy our consciousness takes then we would die just the same, but with a new clone that would feel like they are a continuation of the same person.
Yeah, they’re you.
If my convoluted comment made sense, it would depend on how you define ‘you’. Like say there is an afterlife, if I died and was replaced by this backup, ‘I’ would experience this life after death, being a ghost or whatever, while a new ‘me’ would come about thinking they were saved and living.
It’s at least as likely that “afterlife” you is a copy as any backup.
Heck, you today aren’t really the same you as yesterday. You identify with yesterday you because you share most of the same memories.
That is true, and the whole ‘ship of Theseus’ thing. I enjoyed the game Soma, this concept is a main theme of the game
Still a difference whether you turn into a different person through change and learning or whether you end. Period. While a different person does whatever, believing to be a continuation of you.
What is the difference? If somebody stops you then restarts you, are you the same person? If half your brain is destroyed doctors recreate it from a back up and merge it with the surviving half, are you still you, half you, someone completely new?
Read “Schild’s Ladder” by Greg Egan. It’s a hard sci-fi novel where “backups” play a significant role in people’s lives.
Do you want Eve Online? Because this is how you get Eve Online.
Off the top of my head: When Pulaski got old age disease, they just transporter beam deaged her to fix it.
In Rascals, they made several people about 12, despite them starting from various ages (from maybe 30 to hundreds of years old). Of course they beamed them back to older in the end.
But wouldn’t that also erase your memories?
For immortality, I would consider keeping a journal…
You end up having a lot of journals.
They showed that in Doctor Who with Lady Me, who lived forever but had a mortal memory.
Assuming teleporters don’t just kill and replicate you, as I kind of suspect they do
All the more reason to keep a journal! Lol.
I think the fact that it kills you is more pressing.
No they are saying that since aging is the degradation of cells, being recreated by a transporter consistently would result in constant new cells that weren’t degrading like the old ones.
The flaw here is that the transporter recreates people in the same state they were in when they were destroyed to be tp’d, ensuring the cause for original degradation remains present and thus gaining continues
The flaw here is that the transporter recreates people in the same state they were in when they were destroyed to be tp’d, ensuring the cause for original degradation remains present and thus gaining continues
Unless, of course, the plot demands different. Notably in these episodes:
- Unnatural Selection: Dr. Pulaski ages rapidly and they use the transporter to repair her DNA and revert her to her normal age
- The Most Toys: O’Brien deactivates a weapon that Data fires just as he is being transported
- Realm of Fear: Barclay discovers a whole missing crew within the transporter beam somehow
And of course the bio filters that explain why nobody gets any unexpected diseases when they visit planets.
Would childhood biological processes restart, if the cells were reset? Even if not, I feel like there would be complications if that was done to the brain, like sudden personality changes after your first teleport in a long time.
I’m not entirely sure how memories are stored in the brain but I feel like if all the neurons in a pathway were reset, it’s affect the memory.
It’s true. Also you die every time.
reminds me of “The Teleporter Problem” by Merryweather Media
https://www.instagram.com/merryweather.media/p/Cd_kP8oKg3u/?img_index=1 - unfortunately the only non-paywalled, non-reddit link I could find (there’s a reddit post with higher quality comic strip panels)
and of course, this one: “The Machine” by Existential Comics
There are multiple answers, with different degrees of truth
The patterns aren’t (typically) stored long term, something implied about transporter buffers seems to indicate they can hold incredible amounts of data that starts to degrade very quickly. New patterns are taken each time they transport AFAIK.
But, instead maybe that “cell damage” is just part of the details you get when you retain enough pattern detail to include peoples recent memories.
But, instead maybe the actors age in real life and keeping track of making them look perpetually youthful with makeup would be really hard so whatever the excuse is it’s just an excuse.
something implied about transporter buffers seems to indicate they can hold incredible amounts of data that starts to degrade very quickly
Exactly. I always understood the difference between replicators and transporters to be the level of detail in the scan. The replicators don’t need as much detail to make a convincing steak or a cup of tea. So they can store those scans at a much lower resolution and have a full, permanent library.
The transporters need an immense amount of detail to perfectly store your pattern, to avoid messing with your brain chemistry and causing transporter psychosis. It’s too much data to keep on hand for every crew member.
Voyager kept a whole group of pilgrims in their buffer for weeks on end.
“cell damage” is just part of the details you get when you retain enough pattern detail to include peoples recent memories.
This is (unknowingly) implicit in OP’s description of transporters as rebuilding someone at the molecular (as opposed to cellular) level.
If the meme is correct that people are rebuilt at the molecular level, then cell damage would be preserved across iterations.
That said, if you have sufficient resolution and detail to rebuild someone at the molecular level, I see no theoretical limitation that would prevent actively using modified transporters to heal damage, etc.
That said, I subscribe to the philosophy that your subjective experience / perspective / consciousness ends the moment you’re first disassembled by a transporter and never resumes (i.e. transporters are actually duplicators). So it’s not the fountain of youth in any meaningful sense if transporting is modified to repair damage.
That said, I see no reason why a heavily modified transporter couldn’t be used to Ship of Theseus your whole self cell by cell, thereby completely rejuvenating yourcellf without the pesky cessation of consciousness / death. So, yes, it could be the fountain of youth.
If I we’re to create a transporter like device, I’d have it copy my brain to a robot at the other end. Then when the robot was done I’d have the new memories added to my own.
I’d possibly add some sort of death expectation to the robot mind too so it didn’t seek to continue living, maybe just an acceptance that it’d be used as a tool by possibly thousands of people.
Might cause other problems, but at no point is the human broken into atoms.
This sounds a lot like the book Kiln People (David Brin). The dittos are born knowing they have specific expiration dates and the original human can decide whether to add the ditto’s memories to their own.
This discussion always gives me that sort of naseus disoriented feeling, in the good ‘makes you think scifi’ sort of way. Whenever someone brings it up I can’t help but try to figure it out and it basically goes through these thoughts each time:
Does consciousness require some kind of continuity that would be broken by disassembling our bodies (death, replacement)? Or does it emerge from the cells in a way that only requires the certain configuration of our bodies (sort of like waking up, or being unfrozen)? And will we ever know because if I teleported the way they do in Star Trek, I’d feel like the same person to me and you, so the me that left that teleporter never gets to chime in about wheter they’re still around. But then the person who went to sleep last night similarly doesn’t get to chime in either…
Also always think of that one Outer Limits episode, “Think Like a Dinosaur” with the teleporters.
So maybe transporters could be used for closing by sending the transmission twice or three times or hell just like don’t disassemble the person just rebuild them.
I’ve never undrestood why it couldn’t be used instead of surgery. Put the redshirt in that’s all stab woundy and get a fresh redshirt out.
side effect: memory loss since last transport
New game mode unlocked: Lemmings!
The book series undying mercenaries has fun with this. When a soldier dies, they can just print a new one, with most of the memories of the old one. They also hold a pattern of the body, so you come out the age you last updated your scan. There are a few quirks of galactic law involved. Most critical is only 1 copy is ever allowed at a time. Being caught breaking this law is grounds for summary execution (species/planetary, not individual).
Nothing quite like calling for an evac, after winning a battle, only to have a friendly missile drop from orbit to vaporise you (and so can be printed out back on the ship). Shuttles are slower and more expensive.
Oh no!
Maybe that is a feature instead of a bug.
Send a redshirt down.
Have him run into combat.
He dies.
Build another one from the saved pattern.
Have him run into combat.
Repeat until the enemy runs out of ammo. And you only have at most one redshirt with PTSD. You could even be clever and use the dead as raw material. Take your one red shirt and make him throw the hundreds of his previous lives into the recycler. Or to save time just make a bunch more redshirts and have them do it, then have them jump in the recycler. The end result is 0 casualties, since you have the exact number of individuals as you started with
Or to save time just make a bunch more redshirts and have them do it, then have them jump in the recycler. The end result is 0 casualties, since you have the exact number of individuals as you started with
Boba Fett would like a word… :D
What if you went in with an empty stomach and came back after a night of binging on shore leave, alcohol, unsafe sex with strange aliens, too many nacho plates filled with guac, salsa and sour cream and an unhealthy amount of sweets, chocolates and fried food … you’re beamed back to the ship with an empty stomach again and no diseases.
Scotty, clean my arteries and erase this hangover.
Captain Kirk every time he returned to the ship
And no memory of it happening because the stored pattern includes your brain.
And just like that we have a Star Trek x Altered Carbon crossover
No futzing about with a spinal disc, though.
Also no bleak cyberpunk overtones
Is it a copy or are the molecules sent?
I believe the molecules are sent.
That’s what they claim. Pretty sure it’s just a convenient lie that the engineers tell everyone to keep morale up. That’s the only explanation I can see for the officers always barely “making it out” of every single underdog scenario they jump into.
They’ve died dozens of times, but keep getting printed out and told they made it because they’re special.
That’s the premise of the two sons in Venture Bros, except clones!
Could be there’s too much data to store, so it’s just read once, transmitted, part of it is kept in a buffer in case retransmission is necessary, and then discarded.
I think the buffer is there to hold the pattern until it is completely received.
What’s the difference between any two water molecules?
Energy
Kinetic energy, or woo-woo “energy?”
reverse polarity tachyon energy.
for example, as long as they are not the exact same temperature their energy levels differ
Right, I thought that would go without saying. So: what’s the difference between any two water molecules at the same temperature?
Well, then the meme is incorrect.
Hey, reality check guy here. None of this shit is real. It’s a meme about a scifi show.
Rude.
i mean it’s effectively just cloning, which doesn’t transfer any memories made after the last scan, since it… isn’t magic…
i think dark matter is the closest i’ve seen to a show that actually acknowledges that this is how that kind of tech would work, and it’s a damn shame it was cancelled…
i imagine that in the trek universe the tech would be extremely regulated, probably only allowed to be used in situations where people are very likely to die and thus circumventing the death entirely. Now, with away missions that becomes more difficult as you can’t strictly know when someone’s actually dead, and i’d imagine the federation would look very dimly upon having two copies of people walking around…
It’s not cloning though. Cloning creates a person with an identical genetic blueprint.
Rebuilding someone at the molecular level will create a person entirely identical, including cellular damage, scars, etc.
what you just said is what 90% of the population considers cloning, words can have informal definitions.
Informal definitions that aren’t very useful when discussing effects and implications of the technical details.
i’d imagine the federation would look very dimly upon having two copies of people walking around…
They seem to be okay with Riker and Boimler having transporter clones.
Dilithium crystals are essentially magic.
Read an old Larry Niven story where he used this idea. Back in the 1900’s scientists theorized that aging was caused by garbage building up in the cells. If you transported and left the garbage behind your body would revert to a younger stage without memory loss.
Love Larry Niven!
I don’t accept the premise – the pattern is read on transport, yes? Rather than a fixed record of one’s composition. Therefore, the only aging you won’t be doing is for the duration of the transport process itself. Chump change.
They regularly allude to the idea of “pattern buffers” that hold on to a copy of you for as long as the plot requires.
Like how Scotty sat for decades in the transporter buffer. How the doctors kid in strange new worlds was stashed in the transporter buffer most of the time.
Multiple TNG references using “last transport” as a reference point for Crusher to talk about mysterious space sickness of the day.
Sure, but I don’t think those are used as a matter of standard practice. The idea of some immutable, archival pattern being used for each trip doesn’t track.
I thought you were read into the buffer until your pattern was wholly scanned and then replicated onto the target from it
Sounds right to me.
