They did say replicators and transporters were very closely related
I read a novel a year or two ago with exactly that premise. There was also a Tesla-based movie a couple years ago with the premise. Great stories both.
MM (in TX)
Yep. My take as well. You kill the person and create a copy. The problem goes even deeper. Human consciousness is something nobody can explain or grasp. In fact, if you didn’t have one you could not be convinced through any scientific test that it even exists. Where would that consciousness go when you were vaporized?
And if it doesn’t go to the “copy” would the copy be “alive” or just so much meat - a corpse?
You read my mind!
My take too. No way I’m volunteering to be vaporized.
I heard an opposite opinion a long time ago challenging that position that still bothers me, and I don’t have an answer for it: Not one atom or molecule that was in our bodies ten years ago is still in it. They’ve all been recycled. So in a sense, we’re already a copy of something that existed in the past and doesn’t exist any longer.
If true teleportation of people ever becomes possible it would lead to some interesting moral questions. Since no matter is actually being transferred, you would end up with a copy in a sense. The star trek transporters we think of would basically have to vaporize the original.That pondering has already been done, in a great SF story:At least that's my take on it. More interestin stuff fer ponderin.
The most traditionally science-fictional story in the book, "Think Like a Dinosaur", uses two props of the genre, aliens and matter transmitters, to set up the narrator's moral dilemma. Michael Burr works for the hanen, an alien race resembling dinosaurs: he guides infrequent human star-travellers through the 'migration' process. In the course of the transfer, the humans are copied, one of the copies travelling on to their stellar destination, while the other is exterminated before regaining consciousness - the hanen way of thinking (hence the story's title) allows no sentimentality over the eradication of the copy left behind. When Burr releases a traveller from a malfunctioning device, only to discover that transfer has actually been effected, he must end the life of the copy he can only view as human... In this story, the technology is not cutting edge but a device of artistic licence, which aficionados of Hard SF might deplore - a clever method of achieving an artistic end: the unflinching examination of the human psyche, and Kelly does it brilliantly.---infinity plus review of Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly