Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson@beehaw.org who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you're awesome aperson <3
I'm taking shuttlecrafts.
Star Trek The Motion Picture's transporter accident gave me nightmares.
Galaxy Quest's transporter accident made me laugh so hard I almost pissed myself.
Anything that ever includes Galaxy Quest is an immediate win from me. Doesn't help I've seen the movie so many times (it's a movie version of my weighted blanket) that I can vividly hear that 'exploded' line in my head.
Fuck you I've gotta turn the damn movie on again now.
I like the "Gay" folder lol
Gay just looked a little nicer than "Porn" lol
That makes it 10 times funnier lol
FYI your bottom image crashes Jerboa client 100% of the time lol
I'm still floored that Sigourney Weaver was 50 when she played that role. I've got 10 years before I hit that mark, and I already look like targ droppings.
She really hasn't aged either since that role. That woman is stuck permanently at a drop-dead-gorgeous 40.
I'm terrified of transporters
You and a significant amount of individuals in Starfleet apparently. I can't say I blame them too much. After all the shit that's gone horribly wrong? They have a point.
His head is on… backwards!
Or that pig that turned inside out and exploded.
Or that Vulcan science officer that turned inside out.
At least they have a better safety record than the fucking holodecks.
You just know there is a software engineer in Starfleet who was repeatedly reminding their superiors that leaving the "safety protocol" feature as a user option would end in disaster.
They probably eventually got word of Picard's debrief from First Contact too, and subsequently shut up about the matter. Innocents were one thing, the borg another, apparently.
Geordi: Reg, transporting really is the safest way to travel.
Barclay: Maybe you're....wait a second. Didn't it turn you and Ro into fucking ghosts like...2 weeks ago?
consider how often the enterprise threatens to explode, compared with how often they encounter issues with the transporter, and Geordie isn't exaggerating. he just isn't telling the whole story.
It's funny that when it's transporter people freak out at this idea, but technically every single person goes to sleep not knowing if the 'them' that wakes up was the same as the one that went to sleep.
We could effectively have individual consciousnesses dying each night and new ones picking back up the next morning.
Something to think about as you lie drifting off to sleep tonight.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/teleporter-3
Source to give credit and so you can read the title text, the panel that was cropped off, and the bonus panel.
Didn't even realize that it was cropped out. I saved this from elsewhere, I wouldn't intentionally deprive credit to the artist. I'll edit it into the description and give you the credit for that too. Sorry!
I've always wondered if your consciousness would transfer over.
There'd be a consciousness, it would have your memories and be indistinguishable to you, but I can't understand where the chemical/physical parts of the brain turn into me perceiving and experiencing stuff.
Well consciousness is just chemical and electrical impulses. If you manage to re-create everything down to the molecule in the right area then you could completely rebuild the consciousness. Also means you'd be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain. Provided you had an intense enough neural mapping and deep enough understanding of the human brain to accomplish that. Luckily in the Trek universe, at least at the time of the 24th/25th century, that isn't possible.
Your current consciousness, the one you are thinking with right now, would end.
A clone of you would go on at the transport site, fully believing that it is you, and that everything was fine.
Reconstructive teleportation is just remote replicators with mind control.
Feel free to prove the discontinuation of consciousness scientifically while satisfying all philosophic schools of thought on the matter.
If you make a perfectly exact replica of yourself do you suddenly perceive the universe from two perspectives?
Presumably not without some means of information transfer, but that doesn't mean that a replica isn't you, because it could also mean that there are now two of you, both of which have an equally valid claim to the original identity, but which immediately diverge into identities distinct from eachother by virtue of having slightly different experiences after the split.
Transporter accidents prove transporters work this way and are murder machines. To an outside observer a perfect clone is the same person, impossible to differentiate. But to the individual's experience, they die every time they are disintegrated in a transporter. It's a new consciousness being created when reassembled that thinks it's continuous. It's hand-waved away because it's how it's always been and transporters are a key part of the Star Trek setting.
There was that one episode with Barclay that showed he was conscious during transport and also showed that people could exist inside the matter stream (or whatever the technobabble is).
Yeah that whole episode had strange ideas. He grabbed a fish person from the matter stream and it became a human person when he integrated. That just makes no sense with how the transporter works! Even O'Brien couldn't figure that one out
I don't subscribe to the Star Trek teleporters killing you. They turn you into energy on one side, shoot that energy across subspace to the other end, and recombine you back into matter.
Why do I believe this? Because of several episodes where transported crew members, including Barclay, describe the sensation and what they see as they stream through the energy/matter conversion field. If they can describe the feeling and visual stimuli from end to end, I don't see how it's 2 different entities. It's the same one, converted from matter to energy and back again.
This also explains how Tuvix was created because of some plant getting mixed in with them. The weirder, harder to explain things, are the straight up transporter clones.
The problem is that transporters don't actually exist, so there isn't a "real" way in which they work. The show presented several different descriptions for how they worked, and the functionality had whatever feature the plot demanded.
So you get the ship's doctor who avoids it because she thinks it's basically as described in this cartoon, you get the copy of Riker from the time he Schrodinger escaped from that planet, you've got the autosaved DNA sequences that helped them reset after a virus was about to kill everyone, and you get teleported people perceiving their trip. All of that can coexist in just one of the mamy shows because it isn't consistent. Star Trek has some excellent detail, and explores some interesting hard scifi topics, but it's still just fiction.
There is a chapter or two from a book by philosopher Derek Parfit that tackles the transporter issue pretty head-on. It draws what I feel to be a pretty compelling distinction between the continuity of your conscious mind, referred to as Relation R, and the personal identity that is lost when using the transporter. He then asks which is more important. Worth a read if this stuff interests you.
Does that mean transporter clones are when the transporter ACTUALLY worked?
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/ webcomics has a very interesting story arc about teleporters and why they were replaced.
OK I'm not even a Trekkie but I was doing some elecromag homework and I have a really cool theory on this:
The teleporter thingy actually acts more like a guitar pickup, in a more E=mc^2 type of way, entirely perfectly converting the person into energy - not matter. (This would require an analog encoding from matter to energy). The biggest difference is the pickup totally uses up the entire person, so like if you strum a guitar and it converts to a perfect electrical wave (but the guitar goes mute).
This energy is a lot easier to transfer than just matter, but the person encoded within it still only exists once in that energy. (for the guitar analogy a speaker at the other end that picks up the guitar wave, and turns it back into sound)
Its then entirely used up to power the 'person builder' in an analog way, much more accurately than were able to recreate digitally (aka why tape record are the truest form of music recording we have, it accutate to a way smaller scale than we can capture digitally.)
This would then mean that we can't just duplicate the creation process, cause the energy only flowed into the machine one time in that exact fashion, and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person; then a way to accurately recreate that energy waveform to power the machine.
This also opens the possibility of the transporter 'missing' if somehow they moved faster than the speed of light, while the person was still being transported, and them being just a flash of light endlessly propagating throughout the void.
Idk if the things have range in the series, but it could also be that the angle a transporter can accurately capture that energy is limited, and so really far away things are too large to be able to accurately capture (unless you have a massive radar dish or something alike)
Transporters are death machines!
There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.
In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will 'balance the equation' (destroy the original) every time. That's easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who's already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to 'balance the equation'...
But what's the difference really
It would arguably be safer XD
With the traditional method if something goes wrong you're screwed, but with this one there's some time to confirm everything went smoothly before doing any damage to the original
That being said, the whole plasma-inator thing would be extremely dangerous
Would be safer to keep both until the mission is over in case one of them gets killed. After that, safer to keep the original and dismantle the away team member so they don't become supervillains bent on revenge.
Star Trek memes and shitposts
Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
