In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us, while under the influence of an alien entity, Picard disintegrates himself into a nebula. The crew spend hours trying to get him back and are about to give up, when Troi senses Picard’s disembodied presence nearby, and they are able to reconstitute his body from the transporter buffer, reuniting it with his mental energy.
So Star Trek has effectively confirmed the scientific existence of the soul, and the fact that it exists independently of the body, and that the soul can continue to exist without the body, and that the transporter can transport the soul without destroying it. So, no, the transporter is not a suicide machine.
Yes, they confirmed the objective existence of the soul within the context of their fictional universe, alongside faster than light travel, time travel, accessible parallel universes, stable wormholes, hand-held weapons that can vaporize a human being, and artificial general intelligence.
On the scale of science fiction hardness, Star Trek is somewhere between warm jello and cotton candy.
Ironically, Star Trek is considered “hard sci-fi”, even if there are other shows/books that are harder. The hardness of science fiction isn’t related to how plausible the science backing it is, but how much effort the story puts into explaining the “science”, and how internally consistent that explanation is. Trek spends a fair amount of effort into technobabble, and had dedicated technobabble writers whose job was to try to maintain consistency with those explanations.
Compare this with something like Star Wars (the movies, not third party novels), where nearly zero effort is put into explaining how magical Force powers work or why laser swords have a fixed length.
Hard sci-fi says “this is how this works”, even if it’s complete bullshit. Soft sci-fi says “just accept that these things work, so we can use them as plot devices”.
That’s more or less how I always took it, not necessarily to the accuracy of the science so much as consideration of the “science” with the closer to real life science being harder. That said star trek is still squishy but it’s actually sci-fi, whereas star wars by contrast is just fantasy in a space setting, not at all sci-fi whatsoever.
That is one theory of how teleportation will work. Otherwise, you have a replication machine.
Star Trek has multiple stores about people being accidentally cloned by the transporter.
Which implies it is creating a copy.
Which implies it is killing the original.
In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us, while under the influence of an alien entity, Picard disintegrates himself into a nebula. The crew spend hours trying to get him back and are about to give up, when Troi senses Picard’s disembodied presence nearby, and they are able to reconstitute his body from the transporter buffer, reuniting it with his mental energy.
So Star Trek has effectively confirmed the scientific existence of the soul, and the fact that it exists independently of the body, and that the soul can continue to exist without the body, and that the transporter can transport the soul without destroying it. So, no, the transporter is not a suicide machine.
Not at all, it’s fiction.
Yes, they confirmed the objective existence of the soul within the context of their fictional universe, alongside faster than light travel, time travel, accessible parallel universes, stable wormholes, hand-held weapons that can vaporize a human being, and artificial general intelligence.
On the scale of science fiction hardness, Star Trek is somewhere between warm jello and cotton candy.
Ironically, Star Trek is considered “hard sci-fi”, even if there are other shows/books that are harder. The hardness of science fiction isn’t related to how plausible the science backing it is, but how much effort the story puts into explaining the “science”, and how internally consistent that explanation is. Trek spends a fair amount of effort into technobabble, and had dedicated technobabble writers whose job was to try to maintain consistency with those explanations.
Compare this with something like Star Wars (the movies, not third party novels), where nearly zero effort is put into explaining how magical Force powers work or why laser swords have a fixed length.
Hard sci-fi says “this is how this works”, even if it’s complete bullshit. Soft sci-fi says “just accept that these things work, so we can use them as plot devices”.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MediaNotes/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness
On a 1 - 6 scale, Star Trek scores 2, squishy soft.
First time ever hearing that explanation, doubt many people share that view.
That’s more or less how I always took it, not necessarily to the accuracy of the science so much as consideration of the “science” with the closer to real life science being harder. That said star trek is still squishy but it’s actually sci-fi, whereas star wars by contrast is just fantasy in a space setting, not at all sci-fi whatsoever.
Star Wars is off the scale, it’s not sci-fi at all (There’s no “sci” part in it).
It’s fantasy.
scientifictionic*
Star Trek transporters imply a lot of stuff, many of them contradictory.
Transporters got nothing on holodecks.