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!
That sounds about right. Reminds me of an outer limits episode (with sentient intelligent dinosaurs).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667991/
There it is even MORE blatent, What do you do when you don’t get confirmation that the person made it to the destination ? Then after you revive the original, you find out they did make it to their destination and then you have to kill the original..
Interesting. Any idea where I can get some of these sentient, intelligent dinosaurs? For nefarious purposes only, I assure you.
The US Senate and Congress ?
Oh wait.. you said intelligent. My Bad !
It was also effed up that they could never find a more interesting plot for the Thomas Riker/Riker-2 character than to have him join the lame-ass Maquis.
I thought that, too. And his disguise in that episode was pretty lame, too — side-beard stick-ons? Really? Because someone would have thought he was a different Riker if he just had a goatee?
Well, they probably would’ve thought he was from the Mirror, Mirror universe if it was just the goatee.
Annnd…this post reminds me of “The Prestige”, actually, now that I think about it….