Twenty years ago my friends and I decided that a transporter takes you apart - i.e. kills you - and puts the meat you occupy back together. But it would be lifeless.
The only way such a thing could really work is if it was some sort of interdimentional gateway that you pass through, with your atoms unmolested.
I’d probably still hold my breath, though. :)
Transporters are the natural extension of 3d printing technology. Will they ever do living things? Maybe, if we manage to not exterminate mankind.
Theoretically thanks to quantum entanglement it would be possible but the original is destroyed, not transported you would end up with an exact copy in theory..
“and puts the meat you occupy back together. But it would be lifeless.”
That explains Democrats.
The show itself played with this concept; once with the accident that created two versions of Riker, and once when Scotty used the technology to lock himself in a loop, to keep himself alive in the computer in the hopes someone could come and rescue him.
The transporter was of course just an outgrowth of the duplicator. In both cases we were changing matter to energy, and storing a pattern; the duplicators could change the pattern back to matter; the transporter supposedly deleted the pattern, and had some unknown capability to transfer what one would think of as “soul” (the alternative being that we declare there is no such thing as soul, and the transporter instead has just mapped every synapse in your brain, with the current state value).
The duplicator, combined with the relatively infinite power avialability of trilithium crystals, would practically speaking destroy the concept of economy. Nobody has to ever produce anything, because we have an infinite energy source that can generate an infinite number of items. We just need to create them once, and store the pattern.
Why did anybody grow any food, once we could simply duplicate it? The show sometimes had people complaining that the stored food didn’t taste quite right. But that implies that the duplication is NOT perfect, and if not perfect, the transporters had to in fact be mutating people in bad ways.
In a debate like this, we need to stick to any facts that are readliy available...
Forget those crude fake transporters used in Star Trek... The Asgard certainly found a way around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle... Seeing is believing...