24th Century Ethics

So, as I was driving across the country last week, my thoughts of course turned to teleportation (as they do on a long drive — at least, they do if you’re a huge dork like I am). I was thinking about how easy it would be to drive the car into a transporter, beam to a transporter station in Dallas, and drive 15 minutes home. Moving would be so easy if we mastered the transporter.

Then I started thinking about how the transporter works — how it essentially creates a duplicate of whatever it’s transporting and then destroys the original. Star Trek: TNG even admitted it does this, in the episode where they find Riker’s transporter double stranded on a crappy planet from years ago. His original (which was a copy of a copy of a copy of a you get the idea with as many times as Riker had gone through a transporter before that) wasn’t destroyed when the copy was uploaded to his ship.

This creates a bit of a problem, as I see it. The copy and the original are both obviously living, intelligent beings, as proven by Riker and Riker-2. So, basically, every time the Federation uses the transporter, they commit murder in a very quiet, clean way. That’s kind of fucked up, innit?

Or am I wrong there? Let me know in the comments!