y'know, it is interesting how fear of teleporters is handled but never stigma against teleportees. this hypothetical star trek grandparent is very understanding, but in the early days of the technology i can imagine many people wouldn't be
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
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Aldebaran's great, okay,
Algol's pretty neat,
Betelgeuse's pretty girls,
Will knock you off your feet.
They'll do anything you like
Real fast and then real slow,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I don't want to go.
Take me apart, take me apart,
What a way to roam
And if you have to take me apart to get me there
I'd rather stay at home.
Sirius is paved with gold
So I've heard it said
By nuts who then go on to say
"See Tau before you're dead."
I'll gladly take the high road
Or even take the low,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I, for one, won't go.
Take me apart, take me apart,
You must be off your head,
And if you try to take me apart to get me there
I'll stay right here in bed.
I always liked the idea of teleporters that are just wormhole pairs.
If you want to travel from New York to Paris you have to first go to your local wormhole station, walk through that and be taken to the central station for all US wormholes, walk over to the international portal and be taken to the global interface station, which would be located wherever the electricity is cheapest so probably somewhere in Iceland, then you walk over to the French national station, and be taken to some facility in France, and then from there walk over to the Paris wormhole.
All wormholes are 20 m across by standard allowing cargo containers to transport through, with the Americans have made system unnecessarily complicated by standardizing their wormholes to 2.5 giraffe widths.
Excuse me sir or ma'am (or none of the above) do you want to co-write a movie? lol this is an amazing premise if it hasn't been done (and my apologies if you're referencing a movie i'm not aware of)
have the kids ask the grandparent if they voted trump. if so, which it probably is. just means the grandparent is nothing more then a moron with nothing but nonsense and lies for their arguments.
In the Star Trek universe transporters were invented in 2124. The grandparents wouldn't have been alive to vote for Trump, unless there is another Trump in Star Trek canon I dont know about.
The universe is a hologram, and our physical brain is just an antenna tuned to the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness exists separately to your body, so if the transporter builds an exact copy of your body (and brain) you will just tune back in to your same consciousness when you're done transporting.
Thanks Hugh
What if the transporter makes an exact copy without destroying the original?
Then the copy gets a new consciousness but has all your memories.
What drugs aren't you on? And can I come along?
Dmt probably, and youll have to ask the entities in the waiting room for that
Everyone always focuses on the Ship of Theseus or the existential parts of this, but the societal impacts would be crazy.
Millions of people teleporting to the most beautiful places on earth and wrecking them, highways and boring parts of cities abandoned, mass death of people teleporting into a crush crowd at Mecca, landmarks toppled under the weight of teleporting tourists and bosses teleporting into your house for a "work from home" meeting, weapons and bombs being teleported into war zones...
Things would eventually find a new normal and teleporting food and resources around would remove the need for ships and trucks, you could explore the world much more easily and there would be lots of science to do in hard to reach places, marine biologists would have a field day exploring the deep ocean, doctors could teleport cancer cells out of patients, space agencies teleport probes, bases and astronauts to the moon and around the solar system...
Like it would be such a huge upheaval with so many implications. It's interesting that people really fixate on the "would I die though? What does dying even mean if I'm still around?" part, even though I think that's maybe the least interesting thing. I guess it taps into a very primal survival instinct?
Can I just teleport the poop out of my colon and the piss out of my balls, so I don't have to get up to go to the bathroom?
Or you could eat whatever you want and then teleport it out of you. No more fatties -- unless they like that shit.
Where are you storing your piss again?
Depends on how the technology works. It's more likely that you would need someone's how to receive or both ends, even if it were technically possible to just teleport randomly from point a to point b I feel like that feature would be disabled on commercial models precisely to stop the above from happening.
I would be the guy who says, "Open-source teleporters only."
I ain't risking having myself modified surreptitiously. 😑
uses teleporter
is inexplicably desperate to try the New Improved Coca Cola
But if they were open source they'd have the worst name possibly, and possibly an equally awful UI.
I guess we can be glad that "the GIMP" is taken so nobody will reuse that for a future FOSSeporter
The first one wouldn't have a ui, it'd be a Unix-style command, probably called tsck killu or something.
- Bob's Alternate Teleport Engine - A reimplementation of the standard protocol.
- Ben's Unified Teleporter Template Placed Largely Under Ground - You do need to dig a big hole, but the result is very neat, with just the teleport pad and controls showing.
- Complex Linear Indoor Teleporter - Works like a corridor, letting you just walk from one building to another.
FOSSeporter makes it sound like everyone is dancing lol
The important part is to start with the acronym and then try and figure out what it can stand for.
No worries, its not you that was modified its your clone. Youre dead!
So the real dilemma here is if you believe in a spirit or after life. Essentially you wouldnt ever get where you were going. But you would.
Honestly, who's to say that somewhere in the infinity between every second consciousness doesnt jump from one location to another breaking the continuation of persistent matter.
I’d use a teleporter with no hesitation. What’s important is my memories and sense of self, not the actual meat it’s in. I could find out I’m a copy of myself right now and not be bothered.
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Teleporting will be so expensive and energy intensive that only billionaires will do it. It will be orders of magnitude more disruptive to the environment than private jets. You won't have the luxury to worry about your molcules.
This happens now to you every night. Your stream of consciousness ends forever and a new one is created upon waking.
Pleasant dreams
Damn, I was going to ship of Theseus you about the cells in your body replacing themselves constantly, but apparently our brain neurons last a lifetime.
Now I don't think I would ever use a teleporter, either. Shit.
muscle cells too. the muscle cells you have now are the same cells you had as a kid (not entirely sure how far back it goes). they dont even divide when you gain muscle, the cells just get bigger and absorb nuclei from neighboring cells to support the extra mass. the cool thing is the nuclei stick around even if you let the muscles atrophy, so theyre forever changed by having once been big. thats probably part of why its easier to get back to muscle size youve been at before.
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A distinction between a teleporter and a transporter...
To teleport implies the original matter is instantly moved from one place to another so there would be no destruction and reconstituted copy. A wormhole would seem to be the only realistic way that could be achieved.
A transporter, well that means copy then kill. No one knows if the kill part is painful because noone survives it. I find it funny Riker's copy is actually the "original" and his lack of death is considered a transporter accident. Yet he is the one treated like the copy...
And all that said, barclay's experience in the transporter beam is more suggestive of a wormhole style device.
I don't know why I bothered to write all this out...
A transporter is just Jason Statham in a suit. SCNR
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I mean, yeah, it probably would do that. Unless it works like the universe where they're called transporters.
We'd argue over the Ship of Theseus every Christmas over replicator Turkey
Meanwhile Buddha: have I got some bad, but also good news for you...
Star Trek teleporter: fax machine / shredder combination (remember that time the shredder bit malfunctioned and we got double Riker..?)
Wormhole: just a weird long gateway (with a chance of spaghettification). No problems there unless it somehow takes you through some sort of hell dimension or something.
Stargate: somehow both, because let's be frank, the Ancients were kind of dicks. (Also, didn't actually need the whole buffer thing, that one Orlin built in Carter's basement with a box of scraps was completely analog, no computer bits, and it worked just fine until it didn't.)
The Stargate ring transporters didn't distirybthe copy, they just fired the object out in a straight line inside hyperspace. Though the Asgard system properly did kill the original.
Schlock Mercenary (webcomic) had a couple of good takes on this concept. The "wormgates" in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side. As a side effect, the Gatekeepers could make copies of you in transit, which is how they kept their galactic dominance intact, by interrogating and shredding gate-clones. Arguably, they murdered trillions of sapients with their gates.
In-universe, it's impossible to generate big wormholes, but the F'Sherl'Ganni "faked" it and everyone just kind of assumed there was some weird physics they'd figured out that nobody else knew.
The Teraport, in SM (or "tear-apart" as it was sometimes called derisively) at least had some continuity, by porting you through billions of microscopic wormholes. Whether that kills you or not, well, that's between you and Carl.
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