(Hope that sounds convincing, cause hell if I know)
That’s kind of the premise of the John Scalzi book “Old Man’s War”. In the book, they take elderly people (aka Wise people), and put their minds/memories into young fit bodies. This, in theory, creates soldiers who are both Wise, and Young/Fit.
young fit bodies
Young, fit, green bodies
Thanks for the new reading suggestion!
John Scalzi is an amazing author. You’ll love it. Another good one by him is The Dispatcher. There’s even an audiobook of this narrated by Zachary Quinto
Indeed. And let’s not forget “The Kaiju Preservation Society”, and “Red Shirts”!
So just filter out neurons and other majorly complicated nervous system cells. Your mind will still age, but your body will not, and that will make you last significantly longer than you otherwise would.
Couple that with advances in alzheimer’s/dementia/etc research, the average person could grow to be a century old without breaking a sweat.
Keiko needs to be careful what she wishes for.
“Sir, a Mister Hanson is requesting to beam aboard.”
Excellent out of context quote from that episode:
Keiko: “I am your wife”.
Miles: “But you’re also twelve years old”.
Something like that.
This happens in the episode where everyone prematurely ages, and they are sent through the transporter to make them their “normal” ages. There’s no reason given why they couldn’t do that all the time.
Even more relevant there was that episode where a transporter accident turns Picard, Guinan, Ro and Kiko into twelve year olds and nobody points out they just discovered transporter induced immortality.
What really gets me about that episode is all of the effected characters immediately want to return to their normal age and nobody says “Hold up, I’m very okay with a couple extra decades of life” or centuries in Guinans case I suppose.
They also forgot about the fact that Barclay was aware during transport meaning that somehow your physical body exists while you’re being transported.
Really, the transporters work by power of plot.
Everybody except Guinan, she acknowledges childhood was long ago and wants to stay a kid and keep jumping on the bed.
Especially Picard who, you know, has the health thing that accelerates with age or whatever
Let’s not even address the fact that transporter enyouthened Picard would presumably still have his cybernetic heart. Was it an adult-sized cyberheart in his kid-sized chest cavity? Did the transporter know how to resize the prosthesis to fit his changed body? So many questions!
I assume there’s some in universe reason why they can’t / don’t keep copies of the teleportation data, otherwise everyone would be effectively indestructible
“Oh no the captain got eaten by a space tiger”
“No problem, I’ll teleport a backup from an hour ago, he’ll be there in 5 minutes”
If you’d start this game, it’s hard to end it. Immortality, swarms of clones created just for labor, identity steal, and worse of all – people would grow negligent and the series would lose any stakes.
I think that at some point everyone agreed that the cycle of life is a core of what makes us humanoids and pushes us to strive for self-improvement.
It also prevents societal degradation, because immortality goes hand in hand with tyranny and lack of meaningful natural change.
the series would lose any stakes.
That’s the only real reason
My first thought was wouldn’t that reset our memories to that point too?
Granted losing some memories or being dead is a pretty easy choice, but using it to reverse aging or other physical things would be a costly one
Would YOU lose “some memory”, or would you be destroyed and the transporter would recreate a person who believes to be you from a previous point in time?
And how do we know that isn’t what happens every single time someone is beamed somewhere?
Calm down Theseus
But yes, I’m on the “it’s essentially a clone” and the original is killed side of that argument, so it would just be a copy of you that believes they lost time somehow until someone told them what happened
O’Brien won’t be sharing that secret with anyone. Not even Keiko.
There are multiple answers, with different degrees of truth
The patterns aren’t (typically) stored long term, something implied about transporter buffers seems to indicate they can hold incredible amounts of data that starts to degrade very quickly. New patterns are taken each time they transport AFAIK.
But, instead maybe that “cell damage” is just part of the details you get when you retain enough pattern detail to include peoples recent memories.
But, instead maybe the actors age in real life and keeping track of making them look perpetually youthful with makeup would be really hard so whatever the excuse is it’s just an excuse.
something implied about transporter buffers seems to indicate they can hold incredible amounts of data that starts to degrade very quickly
Exactly. I always understood the difference between replicators and transporters to be the level of detail in the scan. The replicators don’t need as much detail to make a convincing steak or a cup of tea. So they can store those scans at a much lower resolution and have a full, permanent library.
The transporters need an immense amount of detail to perfectly store your pattern, to avoid messing with your brain chemistry and causing transporter psychosis. It’s too much data to keep on hand for every crew member.
Voyager kept a whole group of pilgrims in their buffer for weeks on end.
And just like that we have a Star Trek x Altered Carbon crossover
This sort of teleportation also effectively kills you, right? Once you are molecularly demolished, your direct stream of consciousness stops, while “you” who steps out of a teleportation machine in a destination point is your perfect copy with implanted memories.
i mean it’s effectively just cloning, which doesn’t transfer any memories made after the last scan, since it… isn’t magic…
i think dark matter is the closest i’ve seen to a show that actually acknowledges that this is how that kind of tech would work, and it’s a damn shame it was cancelled…
i imagine that in the trek universe the tech would be extremely regulated, probably only allowed to be used in situations where people are very likely to die and thus circumventing the death entirely. Now, with away missions that becomes more difficult as you can’t strictly know when someone’s actually dead, and i’d imagine the federation would look very dimly upon having two copies of people walking around…
Dilithium crystals are essentially magic.
What if you went in with an empty stomach and came back after a night of binging on shore leave, alcohol, unsafe sex with strange aliens, too many nacho plates filled with guac, salsa and sour cream and an unhealthy amount of sweets, chocolates and fried food … you’re beamed back to the ship with an empty stomach again and no diseases.
Scotty, clean my arteries and erase this hangover.
And no memory of it happening because the stored pattern includes your brain.
But wouldn’t that also erase your memories?
If they can selectively remove pathogens during transport, I see no reason they couldn’t selectively choose which parts of things to revert to a younger state and what to leave as is for things like memory preservation.
I’m already leaning towards transporters “actually kill you and clone you” and the extent to which they can manipulate the “you” that comes out is making me lean even harder lol
“Hey Scotty, when you beam me back up, can you give me a huge rodney?”
I think the fact that it kills you is more pressing.
For immortality, I would consider keeping a journal…
Assuming teleporters don’t just kill and replicate you, as I kind of suspect they do
It’s true. Also you die every time.
Is it a copy or are the molecules sent?
You die every time you go into the transporter. The transporter has a heck of a time saving your consciousness/soul. A husk that resembles you and has your memories comes out the other side, but the moment you enter the transporter its nighty night.
No it doesn’t. People always think that even though Geordie explains it perfectly well in the episode where Riker gets duplicated.
In the universe of Star Trek, matter and energy are interchangeable.
“But that’s not physically possible…” someone ALWAYS says, so I’ll cut you off right there.
It’s FICTION, and in the FICTION of Star Trek it’s always been possible from the very first episode.
Your atoms are ripped apart and converted to energy, the store in a confinement beam to prevent them scattering all over the place and mixing in with the ambient energy. A pattern is sent along with that confinement beam; basically instructions on how to convert the energy back into matter and put it together. Think of it like sending a jigsaw to someone along with a picture of how it’s supposed to look.
When Riker was cloned, it’s because Geordi initiated a second confinement beam, thinking he would need it. But he didn’t so he terminated it. The beam, however, bounced off the atmosphere. So we have a second confinement beam, and a second pattern, but no “Riker” matter. So it used the ambient energy to recreate the pattern.
That’s just how it is. That’s how it’s always worked. The “That’s not actually possible crowd” just need to deal with it.
Yeesh.
So your getting killed then revived at your destination. Edit considering the debate in our existence is it possible that there are people in the star Trek universe that refuse to use transporters for the same reason we are having this debate. They’d probably be the star Trek equivalent of the Amish.
Atoms aren’t consciousness though. Matter is energy. However, your consciousness exists in a non-corporeal sense. There isn’t a glob of atoms somewhere in your brain where the continuum of consciousness resides. They didn’t explain that on TNG.
None of this is actually settled science at all though, is it? Not enough to be talking about it with such certainty anyway.
Actually yes, there really is. Memories are just connections between neurons and synapses firing in an individuals brain. Emotions are just chemicals and hormones secreted from the pineal gland and regulated by the hypothalamus as part of your bodies endocrine system.
There is no such thing as a “soul”, or even of some magical idea of spiritual consciousness. Everything we are, every memory, thought, emotion, phobia, personality trait, intelligence…is all biological.
We’ve known that for decades by this point.
deleted by creator
