A lot can happen in 4 months 4 days which is how old this post is! Enjoy the post but be sure to check out the new stuff too!!Whenever someone is talking about technology that was first predicted on Star Trek ultimately it always comes back to the holy grail of fantasy technology, the transporter. I’ve discussed in the past my concerns over a transporter transit system and the quality of the people who would be employed to run it (ever had your bags not make it to your destination? Now imagine your arm or leg.).
But in a conversation with MC over on the Midnight Movie Club blog it has come to my attention that the creation of the transporter essentially leads the way to immortality by way of save game points.
To get what I’m saying you have to understand two concepts:
- the basic concept of save points in video games, points in which you re-spawn or start over if you fail or are killed. I sincerely doubt that anyone reading this blog would not be familiar.
- the slightly more complex and fictional method in which the transporter device works.
So the basics of the transporter are this, the device scans you at a quantum level using a molecular imaging scanner. Then Heisenberg compensators make a map of all your subatomic particles whilst the transporter breaks you down into a matter stream (basically the signal) and stores you briefly in a pattern buffer before transmitting you to your destination where you will be reassembled.
It’s the pattern buffer that is of most interest in this line of thinking. See apparently according to wikipedia:
It has been calculated that about 1045 (2150) bits is the number of bits of information required to perfectly recreate the average-sized U.S. adult male human being down to the quantum level on a computer—specifically, 2.0057742×1045 bits.
To put that in some perspective today a 1 Terabyte device can store around 1012 bits. I don’t really have a good grasp of the scope of that size however it would seem to me if we took in account the growth in storage over the past twenty years in isn’t beyond the realm of possibility to get to this kind of storage.
So one day it’s conceivable that we might have readily available storage capacity to store the pattern of a human being.
Picture this then, you are about to go on holiday climbing Kangchenjunga which has a reasonably high mortality rate for climbers (apparently up to 22% in recent years). Rather than fly there you take a transporter beam, the device scans you, copies you, breaks you down and delivers you to the foot of Kangchenjunga where you climb and are one of the unlucky climbers to die in an avalanche.
As part of your insurance and last will you made precautions and when they beamed you over you bought space and stored a copy of your pattern in a data centre. They retrieve the pattern reassemble you and viola you emerge to be told that things did not go so well for you on Kangchenjunga and you should probably give it a miss.
Potentially the ultimate in save games.
Now obviously there are all sorts of issues relating to this, legal implications regarding when they could restore you (ie they find and confirm you are deceased to avoid duplicate copies). You wouldn’t have your new memories and the philosophical questions of what makes you who you are and what about the soul?
These are just the tip of the iceberg of the issues that we’re going to have to deal with as science and technology catch up to science fiction.
Links:
- Kangchenjunga photo by Jakub Michankow
- Transporter entry at Memory Alpha
- Transporter entry at Wikipedia
- Transporter illustration found at Ex Astris Scientia
- 11 most dangerous mountains in the world for climbers
See, my observation, while also gaming related, was in a different direction. Since Data is a machine, made of parts and built from schematics, and since his mind and memories were likely also in the cloud that is the Enterprise computer, so you could rebuild him and then reupload all his memories and OS.
It would be like reassembling your computer after it blew up from the same model parts and then replacing the, no pun intended, data from backups.
In gaming terms, it is like saving your games on a hard drive and them moving them to external storage just in case something bad happens.
I think this is completely valid. The problem with Data is that the writers backed themselves into a corner. Of course his tech could be replicated, of course they could back up his systems and memories.
Also there was all this talk about him being unique and yet Kirk and co encountered androids at least as sophisticated as Data a couple of times.
That’s probably why his death didn’t really have that much emotional impact, there were many possibilities to bring him back.
(Whoa, did the theme change again?!)
This post has successfully gotten me all re-energized (ha ha) about transporters again. Now I really want one. My wife would have no excuse for stopping me from parachuting. Police could be much more bold (but then again, so could the criminals). Come to think of it, that could really screw up the planet. People would have no reason to avoid serious risk taking (other than pain, I guess). I can see how that would get out of hand really quickly.
It did change, it’s a long story but I bought a new premium one because the last one was too much of a beta theme. In a couple of versions it should be a well rounded theme.
The new one I bought was really complicated and really hard to do anything with so I went to WordPress’s default standard and figure I’ll just modify it over the coming weeks but maintain its simplicity.
The transport technology opens up way too many mind hurting possibilities!!
I always think about the many many problems this kind of tech will have with travellers getting displaced or half-transported or just getting lost to who knows where. Blackouts where the backup generator fails, a queue of people ‘waiting’ to be re-energized, a transport center that has to decide to ‘can’ data with half transported humans. Regimes transporting people into the sea..or outerspace or just into a queue and then formatting the harddisk.
Ah I could go on for hours