1 hour ago, martin-w said:

And perhaps we could speculate that a species capable of creating such a wonderous device would also have developed close to light speed spaceship travel and to me that would seem less risky than a matter stream being beamed many lightyears away, through dust and debris, radiation fields, etc. 

I'm not sure of that. The current science of interstellar travel suggests that ships physically traversing the medium face serious risks of hitting something, and the faster you go, the worse it gets because the energy transferred by whatever you're hitting gets higher and higher, much like the descent of a meteor through earth's atmosphere, but of course much worse, and because of that you need heavier shielding the faster you go which adds mass etc etc.

Saf(er) velocities seem to be around 5 PSOL because there's also the problem that the faster you go, the  more you're getting bombarded from all sides from what amounts to higher and higher energy collisions with cosmic rays......

Alternately, your super-high powered whatsis beam burns through space at lightspeed, turning everything it meets to atoms, and continues on its way, unimpeded.

Could the signal be corrupted by such encounters? Maybe, but then you just use the equivalent of modern internet error checking, or send repeated bursts of the information until the other side gets the entire signal, or maybe you send preliminary "obliteration burts" to clear the way for the main signal, or some combination of all three....

I wonder if you even need to send the information of an entire human being!

I'm thinking that despite appearances, humans are probably genetically similar enough that you could conceivably have some basic common (or randomized) templates available at the arrival nexus, and your transmat thingy would simply send your particular variations, cutting down on the bandwidth and energy requirements....

But.

Does that make the 'transported' even deader, now that the reconstituted 'arrivee' is slightly altered from the original? Well, as you keep saying, dead is dead, so does that matter? (presumably you've already taken that parameter on board and still made the decision to go for it)

Unless you are being transported unwillingly, like a convict to a penal colony.... (Shades of Australia)

1 hour ago, martin-w said:

That's exactly what I said...  😏

Which is why I said at the end "I agree".

1 hour ago, martin-w said:

In terms of human beings, Its not about "fears" its about "fact". And  in my opinion, if people KNEW they were killing themselves if they used the device, then no, I don't think there's any way the vast majority would use it.

People don't become "desensitized" to killing themselves simply to get somewhere conveniently.  Giving their lives for a VERY important cause is something that human beings have been known to do, but no, not for just getting somewhere conveniently.

And I disagree by thinking that human beings and their cultures are almost infinitely malleable, and that especially over time, one person or cultures "No way, Jose". can be another cultures "What's the big deal?"

Yes, death and fear of death is powerful and suffuses our culture.

You can barely get through the day without hearing about it, and almost all of our literature mentions it, deals with it etc.

But we can imagine (or are even now living in) cultures that handle those fears differently, or mitigate them with counter-myths. (you are going to a better place, you will be brought back in a different form, you will return again and again until you gain infinite whatever....)

I offer a counter-myth for a transport-capable culture: You are not meat! You are the sum of your life and accumulated knowledge, and that is data that can be stored, altered, corrected or transported, irregardless of any transitory and temporary physical containment.

Will people buy that? (or some unknown variation?)

Maybe we'll find out one day.

In some future culture that may have already uploaded all or most of itself into computers and is living in the matrix, it might be a no-brainer.

 

I think you would be better off spending the money on developing warp speed capability, which would reduce lightspeed teleportation to the equivalent of snail mail.

27 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

I'm not sure of that. The current science of interstellar travel suggests that ships physically traversing the medium face serious risks of hitting something, and the faster you go, the worse it gets because the energy transferred by whatever you're hitting gets higher and higher, much like the descent of a meteor through earth's atmosphere, but of course much worse, and because of that you need heavier shielding the faster you go which adds mass etc etc.

 

No different then, interstellar material a show stopper for both long distance beaming and our relativistic velocity space ship too. Heavy shielding wouldn't be physical though for our starship, it would be some kind of electromagnetic field.  There are solutions to the Alcubierre Metric now that don't require negative energy, but the velocity is just  a fraction under lightspeed, not above, and in that instance I'm not sure if the wrap bubble itself would guide cosmic dust around the ship. Maybe, maybe not. 

 

36 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Alternately, your super-high powered whatsis beam burns through space at lightspeed, turning everything it meets to atoms, and continues on its way, unimpeded.

 

Are you talking about the transporter beam itself? If so, that doesn't sound feasible to me. Not only are you proposing an enormously powerful signal being transmitted, and maintaining the precise data required for all of the travelers trillions of atoms to be rematerialized in just the right place, but you are now proposing even more power to burn up interstellar matter. Getting beyond the realm of even speculation  now. We are in to godlike energy levels. 

 

41 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Could the signal be corrupted by such encounters? Maybe, but then you just use the equivalent of modern internet error checking, or send repeated bursts of the information until the other side gets the entire signal, or maybe you send preliminary "obliteration burts" to clear the way for the main signal, or some combination of all three....

 

 It's getting even more of a pain in the bum now and unfeasible. "Obliteration bursts". 😁 Something tells me your beam with godlike power levels that retains such high intensity that it can obliterate dust particle over a distances of many lightyears might be something we leave for Star Treks Q. Or a Kardashev 3 civilization.  😲

 

49 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

And I disagree by thinking that human beings and their cultures are almost infinitely malleable, and that especially over time, one person or cultures "No way, Jose". can be another cultures "What's the big deal?"

 

When it comes to committing suicide  to visit Aunt Mabel? 😁 I think not.

A vital cause, maybe an existential crisis or a planetary crisis, or a brave volunteer to save numerous others, yes, maybe but not for basic transport. That would be utterly illogical. I don't think we are infinitely malleable. Malleable but not to the extent of casting logic aside and killing ourselves for basic transport. As I said, for that to be the case some philosopher somewhere would have to convince people that its okay to step into the transporter and that you aren't really dead. The average person isn't going to want to kill themselves when they visit Tesco's, or beam down to the Earth after a trip on the latest space pleasure cruiser. I can just picture the scene, passenger interviewed after he arrived back home. "Why did you use the transporter, it killed the original, you are just a copy." The passenger quick as a flash replies, "oh yes, I know but it was more convenient than spending 30 minutes on a reentry shuttle". 🤔

We'd pretty much be a failed society if we thought its was okay to let people die every time they conducted basic travel. And there would be something intellectually lacking in us if we thought it was perfectly okay to die when we took a basic trip. 

 

1 hour ago, HiFlyer said:

In some future culture that may have already uploaded all or most of itself into computers and is living in the matrix, it might be a no-brainer.

 

The same would apply in terms of killing themselves and making a copy. Once their organic neurological patterns were destroyed they would be dead, and the copy retained in the computer data base.

And if that copy in the computer database was truly sentient, then that too would die if it was deleted and another copy generated. And on and on. 😲

 

 

What definition of "dead" are you using?

Traditionally, it means death of the body. For some, it means the consciousness lives on in some higher plane of existence and for others, it means total death, consciousness and everything.

On the other hand someone who is in a coma could be "brain dead" but the body is kept alive artificially so they are not considered "dead".

2 minutes ago, martin-w said:

We are in to godlike energy levels.

At the higher Kardashev levels, aren't we talking exactly about throwing around 'Godlike' energy levels? I've thought for quite some time that with the addition of "Warp power" and "Di-and-Tri-lithium crystals, Star trek's universe took a sidestep around the Kardashev scale, though I still wonder what level they would come out at if somebody were to attempt to apply that scale to them.

Consider that they routinely zap around Zettabytes of data or more via the beaming process in real-time, they manipulate matter at the atomic level to make a sandwich more easily and more casually than us driving to Mcdonalds, they can destroy or reconfigure entire planets at will (the genesis device) when modern calculations show that the required energy for just dematerialization of a person (much less the rest of it) greatly exceeds the power of every nuclear bomb ever detonated by who knows how many thousands of times.... And they do this while bystanders stand casually a few feet away discussing sports scores.

In Picard, there was a scene with stands in the middle of a street (Yikes) with people transporting in and out as casually as walking through a doorway (think of the mind-boggling amount of energy being tossed around so casually, and the implied power of such a civilization) and in Star Trek Discovery people often transport between floors of the starbase rather than bothering to walk!

The federation also routinely builds Death-Star scale Starbases (Starbase Yorktown, Star Trek Beyond) etc...

So yeah, if we decide to keep using Star Trek as our touchstone, they can probably do pretty much anything they blankety blank want! 😮

Including super energy beams (Don't forget Gary 7) and I pity any lower civilizations that want to pick a nit with them.

Don't mess with these people!

 

59 minutes ago, martin-w said:

and if that copy in the computer database was truly sentient, then that too would die if it was deleted and another copy generated. And on and on. 😲

In a culture that believed that the retention of the data was what was important, not its existential continuity, that would be a moot point. The data is the data. We mostly don't feel that way right now, but 'they' might, and that would be their choice to make, whether we agree or disagree.

4 minutes ago, martin-w said:

We'd pretty much be a failed society if we thought its was okay to let people die every time they conducted basic travel. And there would be something intellectually lacking in us if we thought it was perfectly okay to die when we took a basic trip. 

🤔 So now in addition to 'weird' etc, we add "failed society" and "Intellectually lacking" to your (I suggest subjective) feelings about the morality of this process.

I'm gonna think that if that's how you feel, then that's how you feel, and I even have some empathy for the argument; but I point out (again) there are going to be others that disagree, (as there always are) and fortunately or fortunately, I myself am disinclined to believe my attitudes on such and such are immutable, immortal or binding in any way on the greater mass of humanity, now or in the future.

I'm pretty sure my/our our descendants are going to eventually be doing many things that would be regarded as nearly insane by our contemporary standards, and I'm ok with that! The future is their story to write.

5 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

Di-and-Tri-lithium crystals

For the record, dilithium already exists and is unremarkable.

It is “a strongly electrophilic, diatomic molecule comprising two lithium atoms covalently bonded together. Li2 is known in the gas phase.”

Apparently “According to a periodic table shown during a Next Generation episode, it has the atomic number 87 (which in reality belongs to francium), and the chemical symbol Dt.”

Edited December 2, 20232 yr by dmwalker

1 hour ago, dmwalker said:

For the record, dilitium already exists and is unremarkable.

It is “a strongly electrophilic, diatomic molecule comprising two lithium atoms covalently bonded together. Li2 is known in the gas phase.”

Apparently “According to a periodic table shown during a Next Generation episode, it has the atomic number 87 (which in reality belongs to francium), and the chemical symbol Dt.”

They apparently use (I believe) the non-physical (subspace) component of  the physical dilithium

Edit: And don't forget they apparently have more antimatter than they know whut' to do with!

Edited December 2, 20232 yr by HiFlyer

On 12/1/2023 at 10:31 AM, dmwalker said:

I didn't see that movie but I wonder how Khan, in 2259, could do something which, as far as I  know, even Star Trek TNG couldn't do in the 24th century.

Because JJ Abrams and just about all associated with him are hacks, and anything that advances the action gets thrown in there with not even a pretense of common sense or hint of scientific accuracy. There's a scene burned into my brain of a turbolift fight in the inside of the Starship discovery that showed miles of open space in the interior of the saucer section alone. Shades of Doctor Who! The wackiness goes on and on, which is why I just gave up and stopped watching.....

 

Edited December 2, 20232 yr by HiFlyer

1 hour ago, HiFlyer said:

The wackiness goes on and on, which is why I just gave up and stopped watching.....

I gave up early on, with the introduction of the spore drive using a giant tardigrade. I was a bit dubious from the start with the idea of a "Vulcan Hello" but I thought maybe that was from the time before the Vulcans settled down and embraced logical reasoning.

Edited December 2, 20232 yr by dmwalker

19 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

At the higher Kardashev levels, aren't we talking exactly about throwing around 'Godlike' energy levels?

 

Yes, my point. And why a mega, hyper powerful beam that can travel trillions of miles and wipe out dust particles all the way to its destination, and miraculously prevent and more dust particles ending up in the beam, would be pretty Kardashev type 3 godlike. Maybe not 3, perhaps 2, or 2.5  😏

 

19 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

I've thought for quite some time that with the addition of "Warp power" and "Di-and-Tri-lithium crystals, Star trek's universe took a sidestep around the Kardashev scale, though I still wonder what level they would come out at if somebody were to attempt to apply that scale to them.

 

Maybe type 1, but probably not quite that. Type 1 civilization can access all of the energy on its entire planet and store it for consumption. 

 

19 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

So now in addition to 'weird' etc, we add "failed society" and "Intellectually lacking" to your (I suggest subjective) feelings about the morality of this process.

 

Correct. If you have a populace that likes to commit suicide for basic transportation, rather than simply jumping on a shuttle, "because its more convenient" more convenient to kill yourself, then they would be intellectually flawed. Why on earth would you commit suicide when you just had to jump on a shuttle. The point is that it flies in the face of basic, objective, logic. And also flies in the face of a human beings genetic programming. Remember, we are talking about the human race here, not some hypothesized alien species who's thought processes are radically different to ours. There may well be WEIRD species out there. And remember, "weird" in a personnel sense is defined as: an odd, or unconventional person.

And al alien species or a human civilization, that committed suicide when they used basic transport, would indeed be odd and unconventional to me and US. 

 

 

 

14 hours ago, dmwalker said:

I gave up early on, with the introduction of the spore drive using a giant tardigrade. I was a bit dubious from the start with the idea of a "Vulcan Hello" but I thought maybe that was from the time before the Vulcans settled down and embraced logical reasoning.

 

Discovery was an abomination.

There was legal action over the tardigrade nonsense.

https://gizmodo.com/court-reaffirms-star-trek-discovery-copyright-suit-dis-1844753933

 

 

2 hours ago, martin-w said:

Maybe type 1, but probably not quite that. Type 1 civilization can access all of the energy on its entire planet and store it for consumption. 

The federation apparently doesn't need to. They seem to have more energy than they know what to do with.

2 hours ago, martin-w said:

Correct. If you have a populace that likes to commit suicide for basic transportation, rather than simply jumping on a shuttle, "because its more convenient" more convenient to kill yourself

 Or perhaps they simply have a version that differs from yours, of what defines the 'self'.

• 22 Century problems: Dear Abby, my son keeps printing Uzis, and.......
• 25th Century problems: Dear Abby, my daughter keeps printing rabbits, but she never takes care of them. When they die, she just shrugs and prints a new one; she and all her friends think bodies are interchangeable and disposable. What should I do!?

 

 

Edited December 3, 20232 yr by HiFlyer

59 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

The federation apparently doesn't need to. They seem to have more energy than they know what to do with.

 

I recall from an episode, I think it was TNG, that the planetary power source is fusion. Not antimatter. Antimatter seems to be reserved for Starships. 

Manufacturing  significant quantities of antimatter for starships is the question. So far, in accelerators, we have managed to create a few nanograms. ☹️

Although I have heard that the Trek technology involves solar powered orbital platforms that use solar energy to convert matter to antimatter. The claim is that sub-space physics is involved. 😁 Basically the writers just invented a load of pseudoscience.

Edited December 3, 20232 yr by martin-w

23 hours ago, dmwalker said:

What definition of "dead" are you using?

Traditionally, it means death of the body. For some, it means the consciousness lives on in some higher plane of existence and for others, it means total death, consciousness and everything.

On the other hand someone who is in a coma could be "brain dead" but the body is kept alive artificially so they are not considered "dead".

 

Death is defined as brain death. No neurological activity. If somebody in in a coma with no brain activity they don't keep the body alive. They are dead.