There's a 4th option - the transporter DOES effectively kill you and create a replica, but the characters just haven't figured it out because of normalcy bias and the implications that come from this technology being in such common use and likely used by them multple times. That answer would be very difficult to come to terms with psychologically and most people would just go into denial and accept any answer given to them that makes that internal conflict go away. Just like they did when they found out their warp engines destroyed the fabric of reality and then just ignored it.

I remember Roddenberry explaining at a convention exactly what a transporter was. "The transporter was a technical marvel of its time created with a goldfish bowl, water and a pack of glitter that saved us thousands and thousands of dollars on new set pieces we didn't have to build for shuttle craft and expensive models of ships landing on planets."

The Gene Roddenberry explanation always suited me. He was asked "How does the Heisenberg Compensator work?" He replied "Very well, thank you."

So, I totally believe the transporter is a murder machine, but I think the more troubling inconsistency is something I realized after watching TNG again. Let's say that in the Federation's moral stance is that the copy of you is still the real you. But then we have a Season 2 episode where they talk about 'transporter traces' which are an entire person's data stored in the transporter for an extended period of time... so if transporter copies are the same person... then why should anyone die in Star Trek? When that red shirt dies on the mission to a dangerous unexplored planet? Why not use the transporter trace and rematerialize them on the ship as whole and living again? For those of us in camp 'The transporter totally kills you' the answer is obvious, the copy isn't the original person. They're dead. But if the Star Trek universe believes them to be the same person, then any captain or transporter operator who simply lets people stay dead is a confirmed monster. Before anyone argues that a transported dead person would have to stay dead, they state very clearly in the episode that one can compare a person's last transporter trace against their current state and 'correct' any differences... So you totally could transport a dead person back and have them living on the other end. Hell, even if someone died on some random shipboard accident, you could just use the trace from the last time they transported and resurrect them. No one in Star Trek should die ever according to that episode.

this goes back to an old philosophical problem called The Ship of Ageus. The ship was important to the ancient Greeks, so they kept it for many years, Each time a board would wear out, it would be replaced. After some time had passed, every single piece had been replaced. So now the question is: is it still the same ship? The answer depends on whether you believe in the pattern theory of identity or not. This is the theory that what give a thing or person identity is the particular pattern of components instead of the preservation of the actual components themselves.

Except that in an Enterprise episode the guy who invented it said that he'd proved definitively that it doesn't kill you and replace you with a copy. The only answer is that the disassembled pattern remains you in transit until it is put back together. Which when you think about it makes perfect sense because physicists are always saying that the idea of solid matter is just an illusion anyway. So, what we are really talking about is a machine which can break that illusion and then restore it in the exact right way. Either that or the part which remains conscious is supposed to be their soul.

The one aspect to the transporter is it's ability to bestow immortality. We've seen it revert several people to children with their full adult memories, so why not be able to take a couple years off every now and then to be perpetually in your prime? We've seen it restore Pulaski to her proper age when she got the aging disease. All they needed was a hair sample from before she got sick. They only actually needed the hair because she'd never used the transporter and there was no record of her previous pattern. This was also done in the TOS animated show. This second one is interesting in that it should be able to cure anyone of anything by just "restoring" them back to how they were before. Why would Worf need dangerous surgery for that shattered spine when a stored transporter pattern could restore him to full health? Heck, even if that's not possible, Scotty was able to jerry rig a transporter to keep himself alive for decades, so why not use that for the terminally ill until medical technology catches up with their condition? Could you mess around with a genetic sample and use it to "fix" congenital conditions like Geordi's blindness? One the whole, the one thing I hates about Wrath of Khan was the talking while being transported, especially since there was nothing that couldn't have been saved until after materializing.

"What we got back... didn't live long... fortunately." -Star Trek: The Motion Picture, transporter tech

Dr. Polasky also feared the transporters. And it was used to cure her of a higly contagious disease that made her age super fast by combining her previous transporter scans.

Clearly the answer is yes. Your molecules are scrambled, stored in a buffer then put back together at the new point. You die. But the you at the new location can't tell the difference so everyone just ignores the reality.

There is a Twilight Zone episode that explored that point. They have a teleporter which doesn't dematerializes the original, they wait for confirmation that the person arrives, then destroy the original. The conflict of the episode comes when they don't get the confirmation at first and the original lives on. Later the confirmation comes in and the transporter operator has to deal with his orders to kill the version of his end.

There's another possibility: maybe in the future they figure out the philosophical problem where someone reconstructd from a memory pattern actually IS the same person even though the matter in their body is different. It's the Ship of Theseus.

Plato discussed this over 2000 years ago, with the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. It basically questions whether a ship, that has over time replaced all of its parts, is really the same ship. If the human body replaces every one if its cells every 10yrs, are you really the same you? If instead a transporter disassembles every part of you, including your thought patterns, and reassembles you verbatim does it really matter the original you is gone? In every possible way, you are still YOU.

Fun Fact about the Transporter for those who may not know: It was created due to lack of budget, as having the ship on the planet of the week every time would've been expensive. To think, if the original Star Trek had been given more budget or had more technology (after all, it was the 60's) that there'd be no transporter at all and so many plots just gone.

Wait, was Scotty conscious the *ENTIRE* time he was in the Transporter buffer in Relics? He was in there for *YEARS!*

I lost my mind and wrote a college essay long rant about Star Trek transporter tech. Sucking up the particles in the air, oxygen and helium and stuff, then reassociating them back into the world would probably cause a sonic boom or a few seconds of a vacuum where the body materializes. If it's creating a new body from new atoms. My thought was that the transporter disassembled your atoms into basic units, able to move them unhindered by solid objects or other atoms, and reassembled them on the other side. The flow of information is the literal particles of your being. If it was just information gathered, there would be no distance problems. You just send a message across space with that information to rebuild the atomic structures in the correct order. Or hell, it would be like a song file. Megabytes of info. You could create infinite people anywhere in the galaxy. Only difference is the new memories the person creates. You'd have to download the update lol the newest memories up to the point you wanted to transport them. And i believe this idea would freak people the fuck out lol. The transporter seems to be similar, but unlike, the food replicators. Everyone talks about how the food doesnt taste as good as the real thing. Like something is missing. And they can add extra stuff to the chemical structure of the food to make it more nutritious. If they were the same, you could add memories and skills to people just by downloading the thoughts. No need for school or training. I just read a great comment talking about how an atomic particle can be in 2 places at one time. I forgot about this idea, and it's true scientificly. You effect one it effects the other, or rather you effect itself in two places at once across any distance simultaneously (faster than the speed of light). Problem is, how do you get all those halfs of the particles of a body to the same location? If this was the way they traveled, again no distance would be an obstacle. It would eliminate the need for space crafts. Or you could use it to move the whole space craft and its occupants instantaneously to anywhere in the universe, or to anywhere there was a machine that created this effect if there was a range limit, like the horizon line of space. Cant see farther than a group of stars you'd have to transport there, and then again. Jumping or skipping thru space like a stone on water. Or maybe that is how they make ships travel faster than the speed of light. And there is a limit. Rematerializing every second a few billion kilometers forward. But there appears to be a difference between transporter and warp. Yeah, warp bends the galaxy around the ship. Anyway traveling would feel like transporting if they used the materialization method. I wonder which is faster? What if they set up a line of space bouys along a straight section thru space? Each one just a bit shorter away from another than its possible to transport. Like planet to planet travel with transporters. If a ship left at level 9.9 warp at the same time someone transported, who would arrive first?

If nothing else, I do hope that the transporter operators make sure that the transport grid is kept free from flies at all times.

* The transporter can create identical duplicates * The transporter can re-materialise people as children * The transporter can merge people, creating an entirely new person with combined memories * The transporter can de-merge people, creating two entirely different beings * The transporter can restore a person to an earlier form using saved DNA, causing that person to lose memories If you cut and paste a computer file, is it the same file or a copy? If your parents conceived you 1 second later or earlier, would your consciousness still be you? Do clones share the same consciousness? I think there's enough philosophical controversy to suggest that a person may be killed and copied. For the transporter to be commercially viable there would have to be solid scientific evidence that souls don't exist and human consciousness exists solely in the brain as a set of arranged atoms, that are moved rather than copied. In DS9 and Voyager, religion supposedly still exists and it’s suggested nobody fully understands consciousness. I think The Orville has it right when it comes to transporter technology. They realise what a messed up idea it is and have sensibly not included transporters in the show.

This was canonically addressed and laid to rest in the Enterprise episode "Daedalus" where the inventor of the transporter, Emory Erickson, mentioned how many questions and objections people had about his creation and specifically said he had to prove that the person on the receiving end was the same as the one who left and wasn't "a transporter clone." Ergo, canonically the transporters do not kill you and create an exact duplicate; you are the same person on the other end when you arrive.

I personally prefer Possibility 3, though I do have a very, very quantum answer. And no, it isn't about quantum cloning. Read on at your peril, hypothetical reader. OK, so, in a nutshell; all matter is effectively an illusion. There is nothing as certain as "these are the particles that make up a person" rather, there is only "if you were made of particles, this is where they would most likely be." This idea of a particle existing as a wave with no definite fixed point location was proposed by De Broglie, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. The De Broglie wave function of every particle of your body exists at basically all points in the universe, though at vanishingly low probabilities. There's lots of things that can affect the amplitude of the De Broglie wave, like moving closer to the speed of light, for example. If you walk across a room, it can be mathematically viewed as the peak amplitude of the De Broglie wave changing place. If you could, using some basically magical device, know the exact properties of an object, down to its combined wave equation, you could potentially just "move" this information somewhere else. That wouldn't clone the original, it would just make the original be somewhere else, exactly as if you walked across the room. If anyone subjected themselves to reading that, then have a cookie. If anyone who read it actually understood it, then have another cookie. I wrote it and I can't decide if *I* understand it.

On a tangent, when there's a transporter accident that creates a duplicate, such as the one that created Tom Riker, how can law actually establish which one has claim to being the "real" version? The episode glosses completely over this, but because Will Riker has claim to all birth records and other documentation of identity, Tom is effectively an undocumented immigrant. With that said, Will's only claim to that documentation is audience sympathy. From Tom's perspective, Will is an identity thief and a usurper. I just think there are a huge number of implications that need to be settled. Which is why I propose the steamiest new legal procedural on television: "Riker and Riker, Attorneys at Transporter Law". A transporter accident victim and his duplicate partner boldly at a law firm dedicated to helping star fleet explore and settle strange new worlds of science fiction law. But as they represent the little Maquis against Big Transport Pad, can their partnership survive an old flame trying to navigate a love triangle only ethical because she's cheating on her man with a version of himself which was never trapped at a desolate outpost for seven years? Or is it vice versa?

I can't believe you got this one wrong. The answer is neither #1 or #2, but rather somewhere in the middle. The transporter essentially scans you like a Xerox machine, making a blueprint of you, then uses that blueprint to break you down into subatomic particles. Those same subatomic particles are then transported inside a matter stream to the location you are going to, and reassembled on the spot. You are very literally the exact same person, all the way down to your original molecules. Memory Alpha does a great job of explaining this. If you want to argue whether the transporter kills you, I suspect the best analogy would be to imagine if you were to drown in a swimming pool and be immediately resuscitated by CPR, only there's less brain damage by lack of oxygen, via the transporter. Scotty used the transporter to break himself down into his core sub-atomic particles and contained them within the buffer, because in that form, he did not need to eat, breathe oxygen, etc. It placed less of a demand on their tiny ship with limited resources. (Also, convenient for the sake of the show, as he gets to show up at his same age.) If the transporter could simply duplicate beings, no crew member would ever stay dead, and furthermore, Janeway wouldn't have needed to murder Tuvix, as she could have simply used the transporter to make a duplicate from him, and then recreated Tuvok and Neelix from that duplicate. Heck, she could have just avoided that step and recreated them from computer memory. Quite simply, the transporter technology can not, and does not, create duplicates. This is made very clear in a first season episode of TNG where a somewhat hostile energy being possesses Picard and forces him to beam out of the Enterprise in energy form only, leaving all of his physical matter in the buffer. Despite his physical matter still existing within the ship, the crew still can not simply "reform" him as his energy (soul, essentially) is gone, and they'd essentially be beaming back a corpse. The dialogue is very clear in this episode in explaining this. As for the duplicate Riker? We already know that multiple parallel universes exist in Star Trek. We also know from multiple series that people can cross over from mirror universes via transporter accidents, going all the way back to Mirror, Mirror. This was re-emphasized heavily in DS9 and Discovery. Who knows which is the original Riker, but the other is just a near parallel from a very close mirror universe. A universe where Riker never made it back from the planet.

Their transporter doubles drop into a water filled tank below the transporter. The remains later are processed in the food replicator. Picard: ‘Computer, Solent Green - Earl Gray - Hot’.

I don't know if I agree with you about the 2nd Riker's promotion. You have to remember that he has been down on the planet for 8 years. He has been out of service. He has to become reacquainted with life in Star Fleet. In the matter of fact there is a chance that they would have forced him into retirement (he hasn't seen his own family and he has to accept the fact that they may not accept him) or taken his rank away until he had a full psychological evaluation to make sure that he psychologically sound. He has been in solitude for 8 years. Today if you leave the US Armed forces for a period of time and return, you will lose rank. We do this to retrain you on your responsibilities and make sure you're up to the task. Riker is the 2nd in command of a star ship. The Federation has to make sure that he can handle the stress. I'm not too sure how the Armed forces handle people who have been POW's or in a situation that isolated them for long periods of time, but I highly doubt high ranking officials are given the same responsibilities they had. At least not right away.

In the Season 2 episode "Unnatural Selection," Dr. Pulaski comments that she's concerned that her atoms will be scattered across the galaxy every time she steps into a transporter. And Dr. McCoy is afraid of having his atoms scrambled when he gets into the transporter. He insisted on being transported to the Enterprise by shuttlecraft in "Encounter at Farpoint."

There are FOUR lights!

Considering the way Food Replicators work, I'd say Transporters operate like option #2. For the people who say 'who cares,' I would just like to remind them of Tablet computers , Flip/Smart Phones, Hyposprays, 3D printers, Cloaking devices (look it up), Voice interface computers, Bluetooth, Google Glass, Portable memory (floppy disks, USB sticks), Focused ultrasound technology, Biometric data tracking for health and verifying identity, GPS, Automatic doors, Big screen displays, Real-time universal translators, Teleconferencing, VISOR bionic eyes for the blind, Diagnostic beds and probably more that weren't on this list that I found on the Internet within 5 seconds of thinking 'what were some Trek inspired inventions.'

Imagine working in Tech Support for the Transporter manufacturer -- "You say your First Officer was beamed up from a planet, but they won't beam into the transporter room? Try turning the whole Transporter off, waiting 60 seconds, then turning it back on... That didn't work? Well, just load the copy of the First Officer's data into the Transporter.... You didn't make a copy of the First Officer's data? Then I'll have to transfer you to Starfleet personnel. They can make a hard copy replacement of the First Officer."

What really bugged me in the "transporter is totally safe" is that Geordi said to Barclay that transporter is safe and accidents are very rare literally 2 (or 3?) episodes after he and Ro had been made "ghosts" due to a transporter malfunction... Yeahhhh

In realm of fear, Barclay and Deanna talk about the transporter "breaking you up into a million pieces".

Here's my analysis of the transporter -- yes...the "you" that is transported dies, and a duplicate "you" is created at the other end..but "you" don't know that because "you" still think you're "you". And why not? The "you" that materializes is still "you", but the one that was dematerialized is "gone", and a duplicate is created -- like a clone. This was demonstrated when a duplicate Riker was stranded on a planet for 9 years because his pattern was reflected...how could it have created two of him -- which one is "real"? Are they both "real"? Yes, they're both real, and both were created from the pattern of the dead Riker who was being beamed up.

There was a TV episode of something (sci-fi short stories or something like that) where space dinosaurs (Saurians) had developed space travel and transporter technology. The process scanned you, transmitted the data to the destination, where a new you was created, then a message was sent back confirming they got you, then your original body was disposed of (the Saurians called it "balancing the equation"). The episode centers around a technician and the woman he is performing the process on. The process is interrupted when they lose communication with the destination, so they don't have a confirmation, so they can't dispose of her. So she gets a little room and the technician falls in love with her. Then hours or maybe days later they restore communications and get a message that the process completed successfully. Now it is the technician's responsibility to kill and dispose of the woman he has now fallen in love with.

I always wonder about the poker games they play in TNG. La Forge admits he is capable of cheating with his visor, Troi is a psychic, Data an android. Poor Worf must loose every time, won't be good for his anger managment..

I'm not sure if some one else mentioned this, but another bit of evidence for Possibility #1 is the TNG episode "The Next Phase" (S5 Ep24). This is where Lt. Cmdr. La Forge and Ensign Ro are out of phase with with everyone else because of a transporter accident.

It’s also possible there are different types of transporters based on different technologies. The transporters in older episodes are noisy and clunky and take longer to work - while later transporters are comparatively fast and seem like a smoother ride. Also, there’s an infamous transporter accident you didn’t mention that I would have liked to hear your analyze. It’s in the Star Trek motion picture called Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Was Kirk responsible for making scrambled molecules of the unfortunate officers he ordered to the Enterprise ahead of schedule or was it just a literary bad omen? My clock says it’s 11:11.

Steve, that very concern DOES exist in the show, and it's Dr. McCoy that is the one concerned about it. In the early episodes, he insists on taking a shuttlecraft everywhere.

The Star Trek technical guide says the subject is disassembled and then reassembled down to a quantum level at the destination point.

So if the transporter machine has the ability to create 2 different Rikers, does that mean it has the ability to clone a person as well?

The 2001 "The Outer Limits" episode 'Think Like a Dinosaur,' expands on the 2nd possibility. The episode goes into the ethical ramifications of a failed transfer where the original is not destroyed as per proper procedure. It is discovered later on that the transfer was indeed successful, and the human operator is ordered to "balance the equation" by his dino counterpart. It's a good episode.

Based on the star trek next generation technical manual(which is considered absolutely canon), the answer is B. The transporter demolecularizes you at the quantum level by decoupling the binding energy of the subatomic particles which make up every atom in your body. HOWEVER, it maintains the exact quantum state of each particle in quantum operating mode(as opposed to molecular mode which is only safe for transporting non living matter). This ensures that when the person rematerializes it will be you( not a facsimile of you) as every scintilla of quantum information is exactly preserved. According to the manual, this exact quantum fidelity is responsible for it being you that rematerializes rather than an exact duplicate that simply thinks it is you. Also, to get around the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that states the exact position and momentum of every quantum particle cannot both be known with exact certainty; the transporter has a Heisenberg compensator that counteracts this and maintains perfect quantum fidelity.

I think both versions exist. Type 1 is the preferred method, and that's what most people are taught about how transporters work. But while it's reliable, and easier for people to accept philosophically, it's not quite as reliable and more technologically demanding than type 2. What transporter engineers get taught, but don't "speak with outsiders" about, to paraphrase Worf regarding the appearance of Klingons, is that most transporters use Type 2 as a backup! The transport engineers would rather beg forgiveness for "murder" when a transporter accident or negative space wedgie occurs that would have killed you anyway. This also would help explain why engineers with transporter specialisation like O'Brian are a thing, they're the people who actually know about Type 2, and in a pinch have the wisdom to pull off the miracles and then just shut up about how they do it. However this unspoken taboo starts to unravel if you work on starships for long enough to hear about or witness close calls with the transporter, or when smart people like people in Starfleet start using their brains rather than blindly accept the transporter as an appliance like a toaster. And some factions, I suspect the Romulans and the Dominion just use Type 2, and have no qualms about it. Ironically as it's so obvious, it's not widely spoken of either.

Personally, I think the phase shifted state is the default form of transportation. The person's information is simultaneously gathered as a backup copy that would be automatically reassembled in case something went wrong with the phase shifting. It explains why some characters are only nervous about something going wrong with the transporter, because they won't know if everything went according to plan and they are the same person, or if something went wrong and the backup system of reassembling them had to kick in.

Bones always hated being transported, especially as he got older. In the pilot episode, he was shown as an admiral and the story goes that he was promoted solely because it warranted him using a shuttle instead of being transported. So, Star Fleet's most capable DOCTOR disliked being 'taken apart and reassembled.'

I never really had a problem with the idea of the transporter. The technobabble about it was always about messing with quantum indeterminacy. Them talking about needing a Heisenberg Compensator always implied to me that in some way when it is working properly the transporter is making a person experience "spooky action" at a macro scale. Meaning the way It works would involve there being one version of a person who exists at two points simultaneously, but as quantum locality is restored they only exist at one of those points in space.

One example that I find wasn't mentioned but should have been was the transporter malfunction scene in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture".

The mind fills in gaps of missing information, often without us even knowing it. One thing that is amazing, I call it "the frozen second hand" but I don't know what others call it. When you're looking away from a clock, then shift your eyes to look at the clock, that brief moment your eyes are moving are not transmitting data. But the brain can't just process that no data is perceived. So when your eyes rest on the clock, it takes that image and uses it fill in the missing data, even though that time has already past, your brain crams that image in and makes you think you saw it during the time you saw nothing and you don't even realize it. That's why when you look at the second hand just right, that first tick takes longer than all the other ticks. So when you're dissembled or killed off, your brain isn't able to process information and when your reassemble, the brain makes up stuff to make you think you were conscious the whole time.

I’m surprised you didn’t mention the episode in which a malfunction resulted into two people being combined into a third person who was screaming murder when Captain Janeway decided to force him into the transporter and restore the two original people who then thanked her for it.

I had to watch this a couple of times before it occurred to me: Who says there’s only one way for a transporter to work? Why just the two choices? Either or, and not a combination of both, or something else entirely? The thing is, the universe is a very large place. Who is to say that transporter technology can’t arise X different ways within the universe, with each method of transporting objects or people being different? Perhaps some methods of transporting people or objects really does involve “killing” them and recreating them. Perhaps some don’t, and it’s a matter of knowing how each transporter works. Also: I’m assuming that the Federation went through rounds of soul searching with transporter technology before folks decided it wasn’t a murder machine after all. But imagine what they must’ve been talking about when the first transporter prototypes came out. I’m pretty sure they would’ve been somewhere between dazzled and disturbed by the technology. And since this is the Federation we’re talking about, folks must have sat down and talked about the pros and cons of this technology before deciding that: 1) ultimately, this is good technology; 2) it’s safe; and 3) it doesn’t kill living beings after all. After watching this video, I have to wonder now: Did the Federation guess correctly? Did they back the right horse?

My understanding of the transporter is that its like LEGO blocks....you get taken apart in one location and get reassembled in an other. Based on the fact that matter and energy are interchangeable, your individual cell are taken apart to the constituent atoms, converted to energy and sent down via a particle beam, converted back to matter and then reassembled atom by atom, cell by cell ...this is not a "duplicate"...its the very same atoms put back in their proper place....If I buy a house in Europe, and have every brick ,joist and shingle and nail in it numbered and moved to Canada, and reassembled exactly as it was, is it a duplicate?....Food for thought...good video Steve

I just thought of all the "RED" shirts that beamed down and were killed. Their pattern should still be in the buffer if now one has use the transported since they beamed down. The transporter chief could just make a copy of that person.

Transporter Murder Machine would be a great nerdcore band name.

In 20 years every single molecule in your body will have replaced itself with another. Assuming you're still alive, have you died in that 20 years just because you're now made of different molecules?

Ok, Encounter at Farpoint-McCoy refuses to use the transporter. Remember, Data suggested he take the shuttle and McCoy keeps calling Data, "boy" and asked Data if he was a Vulcan. McCoy is 137 years old. He is a Doctor, who probably knows better than everyone else in the entire series. The transporter ain't healthy enough for the Doc.

There was an early episode of Next Generation where Picard has his essence trapped in a planet's atmosphere (a "Nirvana" like cloud covering) and he exists as the cloud's energy for a period of time. The crew want him back and say something to the effect of, "We'll widen the confinement beam and transport him back. The version we have stored of his physical make up is from before his merging with the cloud so he won't remember it." This was a VERY early episode of TNG (first season, before ep10) so I've always taken this as somewhat of a fluke and misrepresentation. That said... it does pretty much "prove" that the transporter kills Ver1 and creates Ver2 with tech-magic.

"I teleported home one night with Ron and Syd and Meg. Ron stole Meggie's heart away and I got Sydney's leg." Douglas Adams, Life, The Universe and Everything.

You never talk about Miles Obrien's original dying, and his double taking his place to Take care of Keiko.

Heisenberg uncertainty principle or indeterminacy principle, That's why they have a Heisenberg compensator.

Hugh Jackman already covered this topic in an Indy video call "The Prestige"

There was an episode of "The Outer Limits" that discussed this, where the device created an exact copy but killed the original.

What about the "Tuvix" episode from Voyager? So not only can the transporter split people in two, It can combine people into one conscious being who pleaded not to be killed (split back in two again).

This reminds me of the gimmick in The Prestige (semi-spoiler?).

Another possibility is that the characters do actually get "murdered" each time in our terms, but future humans eventually just sort of got used to this idea and don't consider it "murder" anymore.

Fun Fact: Originally the Enterprise's saucer was suppose to seperate from the engineering hull and land on planets. But, it was deemed too costly so they decided to use shuttles to transport the away teams to planets. But because of budget and time issues the hanger set wasn't ready in time to film the pilot, so they put some sprinkles in water, stirred it around and made up space magic.

Doctor McCoy. He doesn't like having his atoms scattered across space.

How do you know that the You are the same You that went to sleep last night? I mean, you have (some of) the memories of that person from yesterday, but there's no continuity of consciousness. So basically you're just a copy of someone who died last night, but programmed with a slightly degraded copy of their memories. Scary thought, eh?

These theories are not what the show says, but I understand that this discussion is often had. No, it's not a murder machine. It converts matter into energy, transports the energy through a beam and converts that exact same energy back into matter. This has been addressed many times. However, your second theory is the basis for the popular sci-fi story "Think Like A Dinosaur".

Actually, in Enterprise, The guy who invented the transporter talks about how it was protested about "Is the person who arrives the same person who left" and all that... so it is mentioned, just... once.

Okay, I haven't watched this yet, but before I do, I have to mention a short story outline I've had lying around since the fall of 2022, and it concerns the human soul and transporters. Basically, every time you get transported, you are effectively killed and replaced by a virtual clone, and your original soul departs on the first transport. My struggle with this story idea is does all of your subsequent selves get a new soul eventually after the transport? Or are all of tham just soulless hunks of meat that are not sure how to explain that empty feeling that they all feel inside, and share with other transportees? And if you get a new soul after every transport, does the afterlife fill up with multiple copies of you only differentiated by the length of their varied lifetime experiences, only different from the last one to come along because of cause of death; all of them except the last killed in transport, but the oldest one hit by a hover-car, crushed by a falling piano, or was an unlucky bystander near a hover-by phasering? Sounds like a plot for a Trek episode if it ran on one of these stupid spiritual programming-only networks. How real-world scary is that? 😁😆

Given the mention of "Heisenberg compensators" in the technobabble, it seems a plausible assumption that the answer to the question is similar to that of whether light is a particle or a wave. And, some reassurance on the "break you apart and murder you" concerns: the human body completely replaces itself over the span of time, about one complete makeover molecule-by-molecule every seven years. Some parts, like stomach goblet cells, swap more frequently, while others, like cartilage and ligaments, tend to stay put for much longer. But, real-world nature basically does the same thing that the transporter does hypothetically, just much more slowly. I would therefore believe that as long as one's stream of consciousness remained uninterrupted throughout the beaming process, then one arrives on the ship or planet one's self, not having been murdered and replaced. It really is the safest way to travel, Mr. Sonak. Especially after the refit; she's a totally new Enterprise...

Lieutenant Riker was a missed opportunity. That was another time that they could have had Commander Riker finally take command of his own ship. From there Data could be promoted to first officer and now Lieutenant Commander Riker joins the crew of the Enterprise. The new character isn't wasted. The old character takes the growth he earned. And a shake up of characters on our favourite ship.

Other examples of preserved consciousness during transport include STVI. When Gorkon's entourage is being beamed onto the Enterprise, General Chang among others is show to be looking around (as in turning his head) while still materialising on the pad, and (be it deliberately or by restrictions in SFX) he's visibly fading into existence as opposed to being reassembled. And while being beamed up from Rura Penthe Kirk manages to keep up a stream of curses while fading out of and into existence.

The Blish novel "Spock Must Die!" (1970). "Doctor Leonard McCoy and Engineer Montgomery Scott discuss McCoy's fear of the transporter. McCoy posits that an original person is killed upon dematerialization and a duplicate is created at the destination. Scotty explains that the technology converts matter into energy, transmits it and reassembles it into the same original object, but McCoy is not convinced and he wonders what happens to the soul in a transporter beam."

Think how paranoid you would become, knowing that almost everyone around you is a replica of someone you know. Surprising that Barclay wasn't even more fucked up than he was

Sadly two possibilities of the transporter have not been explored in the show: 1. If the mind is stored seperately from the body during the transport, they should be able to put the mind into a different body. Beam a young cadett, keep his body in the buffer and combine it with an aged admiral. Do some plastic surgery and voila. 2. You could build a special buffer that holds a person like it did Scotty. If someone gets critically injured during an away mission you could scan the person, beam the individual into the special buffer and wait until the medicial personal has reviewed the scan and is prepared for these specific injuries. That should increase the survival chances n some cases.

6:39 There is a reason they were astonished scotty was able to keep his "signal" or "pattern" from degrading in the buffer for so long by putting it in a maintenance loop. Note they didn't say that this is a fix for patterns degrading if they are held in the buffer too long, just that this trick seems to hold a pattern for an astonishingly long time in that particular case. They keep persons matter (matter stream not data signal) in wave-form using entanglement networks to hold the "patterns" in the matter stream. The pattern buffer is taking minute samples for renormalization and then extrapolating huge portions of the persons pattern from it; data used to help keep the "resolution on the pattern" tight by adjusting the refraction fields used in the Buffer in realtime. Those recorded patterns can be used to reinforce that pattern in the buffer, or "imprint" a matter stream with it, but the system is doing everything it can to keep the matter stream intact. Even pumping energy into a degrading signal (thus the half powered matter streams emerge from a beam splitter split matter stream can each be "charged" back up to full and rematerialized. The DS9 incident killed them, and then used a completed pattern sample (which would have destroyed their matter stream signal anyway) particle scan, and then from the ridiculously huge file, imprinted it on to a newly generated matter stream. Sysco is the Bajoran's prophet, and jakes dad. Everyone was all to happy to avoid calling this what it was. They died, and transporter replicants were made. Still remember that the matter stream moves and holds patterns like it's light, or like you are a hologram being beamed by the light making your pattern up. If that light goes through a beam splitter your pattern/image will be duplicated. If your matter stream goes through a polarizer, your image will be duplicated with opposite chirality. All these matter streams patterns will be too weak to rematerialized from, but thats not a problem cause we can just dump energy into a pattern and make it materialize:D

Time travel & transporters in ST always bugged me because they are plot contrivances that essentially break this fictional universe. i.e. it's so easy to time travel in ST - just slingshot around the sun a la Star Trek IV & presto - you can easily travel forwards or backwards in to a specific DAY in the past/future. Or find that gate from The City on the Edge of Forever. Or create a temporal rift on demand like the Borg sphere in FC. Shouldn't the major space faring species constantly travel to the past to for self benefit? In short - this is not a universe where linear time as we know it seems to exist and therefore it should not operate like one. Now in fairness the Enterprise TV series had a story arc with temporal "cops" that would travel to the past to make sure that assholes weren't fucking up the timeline. But it's still lazy writing - does ST operate by Back to the Future rules where a change in the past does not immediately affect the future? :-/ As for transporters - it seems given how they apparently function "transporter" is a very poor name for the device. More like "cloning machine" or "rejuvenation machine." Shouldn't everyone in the ST universe essentially be immortal thanks to transporters? We already know that the bio-filter can pretty much cure all diseases and it's used as a plot device in numerous episodes to restore a character to their "normal" self. Why don't they take it one step further and use transporters to re-materilze your body to a static level of development so that you never age? Okay - I'm done ranting. Steve had it right - Possibility #3 all the way.... ^_^

The doctor in the original series objects to having her molecules scrambled and insisted on shuttle craft

You are wrong. Bones expressed his thoughts and fears about the transporter destroying people and recreating copies.

A fiction book called “Spock Must Die” was based on the premise that the transporter killed the person and made a copy. Scotty modified the transporter so it would leave the original person being transported on the ship and the copy would be beamed to the destination and then dematerialized when the mission was concluded. There was some sort of malfunction and the copy got bounced back so there were two Spocks on the ship. They were mirror images so the copy was the evil spock.

Don't forget Dr. Polaski also hadn't used the transporter, until that one episode where they forced her as a cure for the rapid aging disease. So Barclay clearly was not the only one in the 24th century with concerns about the transporter. Then again, Polaski was pretty old fashioned in many ways, so she might not be a great example.

The second your body is completely destroyed you died, a clone of you is created with your memories, thats it.

Mccoy hated the transporter and said he hate to be atomisized and then build again.

Let me start by saying I am such a HUGE fan of yours. I LOVE yours vids. What I wanted to say was ; watching these 3 year old vids (which are ((content wise)) just as good as your recent vids) I am so proud and happy for you for how much you have grown and improved! Compared to these vids, particularly your setup and background, have improved so much! You're great. live long and prosper.

In Enterprise "Daedalus" there's a line about how early transporters caused controversy, but that everyone just kind of stopped worrying about it. I imagine it's kind of like us with anesthesia - no one really knows if it prevents pain or just erases memories of pain.

Deforest Kelly's Dr. McCoy objected to the transporter based on how the technology worked, in addition to the risk of malfunction. He didn't like the thought of being taken apart and reassembled somewhere else.

On several occasions the 'pattern buffer' was used to solve a problem with transporting failures. This means a person with a degenerative disease which was diagnosed early in life could use the pattern buffer file to constantly correct the issue in later life. As I understand it, It also offers up the potential for everlasting life and youth. :>) Unless I have entirely the wrong understanding of things.

There’s a novel that explains this. When u teleport it moves your molecules and assembles them at the other end. The transporter is not reassembling new matter it’s the original matter.

Your missing another possibility. That they are disassembled, phased, then reassembled.

Personally, I think the transporter doesn't kill you - it just changes your body into another state, one that can be temporarily stored in the pattern buffer. But I do see how the argument could go either way. There have been plenty of other stories where a character "ascends to a higher plane of existence," or otherwise changes their biological and physical state, without people thinking that they died to cause it. On the other hand, having a character's soul sent to heaven or hell almost always happens because that person died. The inconsistencies in transporter technology that you pointed out really don't help. On the one side, Barclay is just standing around in a matter stream while having terrifying encounters with worms (and thank you for reminding me of another of the scariest TNG episodes that I had forgotten), but on the other there's Scotty just chilling in the buffer for decades. If he had been in some state of conscious stasis for that long, he would have completely lost his mind. As an aside, I don't think that Kirk and Savik being mid-conversation as they arrived suggests that they're fully conscious during the process. I think that it was more like pausing a movie on your phone, and resuming play once you've gotten comfortable in another room of the house.

Doctor McCoy actually expressed this very concern - that the transporter destroys the original self and copies it, leaving the first potentially dead. He also suggested this might mean he no longer has a soul because the one he had was not transported or copied. As I recall Scotty told him if the soul is eternal, it must remain and can't be destroyed. I remember this was in a book, but it seems to me it might have partly been covered in an episode.

According to the laws of Rodenbarryian Physics: 1) In the Enterprise episode Dead Stop we can see that even the most sophisticated replication machine cannot make living matter. 2) We have seen in many, many episodes that “neural energy” is a thing, it can leave your body, and when it does sometimes you're conscious, sometimes not, but you're still 'alive' and still 'you'. 3) My hypothesis is that when you dissasemble the person into a matter stream the 'neural energy' travels along with it.

Here's the thing though, does it transport your consciousness?

McCoy didn't like having his atoms scattered back and forth across space

Maybe it's a bit of both. You are transported by being phased, but a scan of you is buffered to patch you up if you are somehow injured during the phasing. In which case, Riker and one the Kirks were clones.

Similar thinking in the Michael Crichton book/movie "Timeline". An engineer even opts not to time travel because he sees the "transporter" as basically destroying, then reassembling the passengers. Also, don't forget the TNG Ep where an away team is turned to kids in the transporter. Plus that ENT Ep where the transporter inventor tries to save his kid.

Going along with theory #3, When asked about how the Heisenberg compensators work, Michael Okuda replied "They work just fine, thank you." Essentially saying, it's a TV show and in order to describe how some technology that hasn't yet been invented works, they go with the Apple notion of "it just works".

My strip of latinum says: A) the episode Dead Stop showed that in-universe no matter how advanced your transporter or replicators you cannot create replicate life, only iinert matter in the exact shape of a lifeform, but not actual life. The episode lonely aong us, where Picard got beamed into a cloud, they seemed to imply that for the transporer to work it must be the original matter which was transported in the first place, because they had to find Picard's energy signature in the cloud, THEN apply an old transporter pattern to that matter stream. We have also seen many times that "nueral energy" is a thing, and it is where consciusness but NOT emory resides, and it can be re-integrated into a body by the transporter. So I contend the transpoter does not kill you, the transporter can only work because it si your pattern, your original living matter, and your nueral energy all moved at once by the same beam.

That transporter scene in The Motion Picture is a lot more graphic in the book than the film. So to answer the question, yes it is.

I think the interesting thing about the transporter debated isn't how it relates to StarTrek but how it relates to the real world. If we ever invented a transporter would it be a murder machine. StarTrek is great in how it is used as a vehicle to explore interesting concepts that we can then debate and explore.

As a kid and an lifelong fan, I always thought how awesome the transporter would be... up until I saw some Science of Trek documentary back during the TNG run in the late 80s/early 90s where they showed flip phones, automatic doors etc. Basically science following Trek. They covered the transporter, using a 3D printer - brand new technology then - scanning an object and sending the data to the printer elsewhere and creating the object on the other end. Then they had the expert they used explain the theoretical process of the transporter - 1) Scan the person. 2) Make a duplicate elsewhere. 3) Scan and verify that the duplicate is identical - I presume meaning alive and functional. 4) Destroy the original. Since I can't envision the consciousness of being two places at once in this process, my opinion is that the unique person on the sending end would be destroyed. Yes, I'll take the shuttlecraft too please. Here's the fun part, as we know, science does follow Trek. So, perhaps one day there will be a scientific breakthrough, followed by a real moral dilemma about stepping on to some transporter platform equivalent. "Send me a shuttle, Scotty!"