Does the World Need more of YOU?

I am a Star Trek fan. Not a trekkie, but I enjoy the concept, the characters, and many of the philosophical questions that thread through the plots, especially in the series Star Trek Voyager, which to me is the pinnacle of the franchise.

Those who have watched are familiar with the Transporter. For those 3 people on the planet who don’t know what that is, it is a teleportation device that dissolves you and sends your molecules to a remote location where it reassembles you. Teleportation is a concept that is being researched, and I think it likely that if the world continues even another 100 years without entering a new Dark Age, the technology will be developed to accomplish something similar to Star Trek’s transporter. And this raises a lot of questions for me.

Will the real transporter actually transport your molecules?  Unlikely. It seems much more realistic that what will be sent is information. You will be read and enough information sent to immediately clone or rebuild you on the other end. But what about the spiritual component? Now, for those who think that we are each just connected cells, this is a vain point. But for those of us who believe that there is an energy in us that is not physically produced, this has meaning. Maybe the universe is such that the energy pattern that is your spirit will go to where you are. I don’t know, but it is an intriguing question.

Will the new assembly really be you? Or will it be a new person that just happens to have your memories? Some people seem to think that if it has your memories and exact constitution, it is you because those things are what define you. But suppose there was a way to replicate you without the original You disappearing, would that new creation be you? And, if information is what is being transported, then would there be a need to destroy the original You in the process? Or would the original survive just like the original does in a photocopying process?  If so, then that would create an interesting phenomenon: a new You every time “you” transported. If we have too many people for available resources now (which I do not at all believe), how would that work out?

The new You would be making new memories that would separate them from you and define them as a different person. Or would there be some invisible spiritual connection that would inform you of each other? Maybe you would see, in something like an hallucination, what they were seeing, and vice versa. That would get mighty confusing, and you would likely want to integrate again.

Once the purpose of the teleportation was satisfied, then what would happen to the copy? If you were teleporting to India to attend a cousin’s wedding while the original version of You stayed home, after it was done, would the copy have to report back to the station to be destroyed? That person might flee instead. Will we have a planet full of run-away clones on the lam?

If the pattern of what is you is copied so that the information can be sent to inform a remote assembly of a copy, couldn’t it be kept for emergencies?  When you die, couldn’t that information be used to rebuild you? But would that new build be you?  Or maybe you’ve had a bad time of it the last few weeks, and you want to do a reset back to the last time you transported, so you just have a technician destroy you and rebuild you from the last recording.

There are many issues involved with transporter technology. Maybe it’s so complicated that we’ll stick to transporting rabbits and kitty cats.