Depends entirely on the teleporter used. If its folded space youre still the og you, imo settings that use teleporters that rebuild you bit by bit seem poorly thought out to me. Why not cure all disease with that? Why not print of an infinite number of duplicates? Couldnt you be young forever with that tech? Just save a pattern from your twenties.
Theyre some of my favorite star trek episodes, but the ramifications of the transporter episodes never seem to stick around. Makes the world feel less fleshed out
There is some merit in thinking of it as a transmission only device.
That is, it cannot store any data, but deconstructs on one end and has to transmit and reconstruct on the other end immediately, because the amount of data is infinitely high.
For Star Trek, they are sending all your mass as energy. The data is there to make sure they put all your bits back together in the right order. Though that was ruined by the one episode where they did make a copy, despite how hard they tried to technobabble around it.
Depends entirely on the teleporter used. If its folded space youre still the og you, imo settings that use teleporters that rebuild you bit by bit seem poorly thought out to me. Why not cure all disease with that? Why not print of an infinite number of duplicates? Couldnt you be young forever with that tech? Just save a pattern from your twenties.
Theyre some of my favorite star trek episodes, but the ramifications of the transporter episodes never seem to stick around. Makes the world feel less fleshed out
There is some merit in thinking of it as a transmission only device.
That is, it cannot store any data, but deconstructs on one end and has to transmit and reconstruct on the other end immediately, because the amount of data is infinitely high.
If data is sent over a medium, then it could be stored, thus making copies possible.
For Star Trek, they are sending all your mass as energy. The data is there to make sure they put all your bits back together in the right order. Though that was ruined by the one episode where they did make a copy, despite how hard they tried to technobabble around it.
And the episode where they cure someone (i think picard?) of some space parasite or force by using the transporter to reset them to before they had it
And the episode where someone gets stuck as a whole ass sentient person in the pattern buffer
And tuvix
Again, some of my favorite episodes are “the transporter is fucked” episodes, but they leave a lot of holes in the narative imo