Said no...
firstly, I like who I am and that other person wouldn't be mean.
secondly, on concept - I don't see how the science works, where is the second machine that buts me back together? How do you deal with the loss of matter that is taken from the beamin location that is used to make the other me?
Makes nice science fiction, but little if any science fact.
I still don't think I could do it.Uh, remember the transporter malfunction in the first Star Trek film?
"What we got back didn't live long ... thank goodness."
But that's just it... it wouldn't be you but rather a copy of you. The "you" right now would end up going away.
That's what I've been saying! If there was a transporter that could take me to a more Earthly destination instantly, like to Japan from Philly, would I be interested? Sure, but not if I knew that it wouldn't be "me" walking out of the other end but rather a copy of me. That person would look like me, have the same memories as me, perhaps even the same 'essence' of what makes me to be me, but the first & original copy, me, would go away. I would not be walking around the streets of Tokyo with my own eyes but rather somebody who looks like me; "I" would be gone, never to be seen again.I certainly wouldn't, because "I" would be killed. It would only be a copy of me which would be recreated.
That indeed is what I was watching when I pondered this question.... (as in Christopher Priest's book and film, The Prestige) ...
The problem, as portrayed in the movie, is that your 'old' self doesn't simply disappear but rather is still quite alive & functional after the copy steps out of the chamber on the other end. Since you can't very well have two identical selfs running around how do you solve that issue? The solution chosen by the movie is most definitely not one that I think would enjoy very much.Maybe only if it was 100% safe, but it is not.
As has already been said here, "Transporters" have a number of major technical problems - like converting a physical human being into a form of energy, beaming it to a receiver, and then rebuilding it with all the bots in exactly the right place. Even our own DNA gets rewritten - badly - as we age, doing it electronically each time we transport may present some new 'rewrites' of the code with some interesting effects...
This is one reason why, in my books, I've avoided 'transporters' and gone for space lifts and atmospheric re-entry along the same lines as Asimov, Clarke and others. Check out "Out of Time" Out Of Time: Amazon.co.uk: Cox, Patrick G.: 9781425959951: Books and "The Eneny is Within!" The Enemy Is Within!: Amazon.co.uk: Cox, Patrick G.: 9781453575512: Books or The Enemy Is Within!: Amazon.co.uk: Cox, Patrick G.: 9781453579411: Books This last one is also available as an E-book from Xlibris
Yep, with any new technology, nobody really wants to be the first one to step into it.I'd prefer to watch my big sister go through it first.
I think that actually was done a few times in the Star Trek universe.... I sort of like the idea of the transporter keeping my make-up and current brain content on record, it seems like it could be used to re-set you or re-build you in case of medical disaster.
(See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.) Using a pair of ions, or charged particles, group leader Christopher Monroe and his team place each in a vacuum and keep them in position with electric fields. An ultra-fast laser pulse triggers the atoms to emit photons simultaneously. If the photons interact in just the right way, their parent atoms enter a quantum state known as entanglement, in which atom B adopts the properties of atom A even though they're in separate chambers a meter apart. When A is measured, the information that had been previously encoded on it disappears in accordance with the quirky rules of the quantum world. But all is not lost: because B is entangled with A, B now contains the information that was once carried on A. That information, in a very real sense, has been teleported.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1874760,00.html#ixzz1APVyVVoj