It's cool to think that technology like this might be around someday. But it's scary, too... I'm pretty nerdy most of the time, so whenever I think about transporter beams, I think about HOW, technically, they could be done.

The most practical thing I can think of is a machine that scans every molecule in your body and stores the information digitally inside it. Then it sends the information to the transporter in the place you wish to go (kind of like e-mail) and that transporter begins to decode it all. The receiving transporter would have a replicator of some sort, which would produce the molecules one-by-one until an entire copy of you has been created. Now there are two of you. So naturally, the old one must be destroyed to complete the transport.

So that raises the question: Wouldn't that *kill* the old you? And even if the new person looked and acted exactly like you, would it really *be* you? I think that once your old body died, your consciousness would die with it -- your soul would not move into the "new you," if that makes sense. Even if you don't believe in souls persay, it's a logical guess that the person created in the transport destination would not be you, and that the real you would die. Perhaps this new person would assume your identity and live the rest of you life for you, and no one would be the wiser, but you'd still be dead.

And if there is a such thing as a "soul," does this artifically created person get one? How would a human without a soul behave? Zombie? Maybe... Speculating about untestable things is fun. :-)

I don't know how else a transporter beam would work. I suppose there are a couple of other ways to quickly transport a person:
- By putting the person in a comfortable, airtight container and sending it into an elaborate network of small underground tunnels that will propel it at a high speed to a receptacle in its destination.
- A person could drive a car or take a plane, or any other old-fashioned method of transportation, then travel through time to arrive at the very same moment he departed, so the trip, for all practical purposes, was instant.
- By cloning the person who wishes to be transported, and rapidly accelerating the clone's growth until it reaches the same stage of maturity as the original subject. That raises the identity problem again though.
- By creating a movable, realtime animated hologram of the person, a la Star Wars (this was a favorite tool of the Emperor). Granted, the "transportee" wouldn't really have gone anywhere, but the illusion might be good enough depending on the circumstance.
- By creating a real-life version of The Matrix, where nobody actually goes anywhere, but they all THINK they have working transporter beams. Uh, yeah. Anyway...

The closest thing to a Star Trek-ish transporter beam is the idea I first mentioned. It couldn't be exactly like in Star Trek (in the sense that the transporter on TV beamed people in realtime: they disappeared first, then reappeared somewhere else), because what if something went wrong and your encoded molecular structure file went bad or something? Or what if a packet was lost in the data transfer? If your old body was already destroyed, you'd be out of luck. So there would have to be a point, if only for a few seconds, when two of you existed, as a safety precaution at the least. Also, you would only be able to transport to another machine, one that could receive the signal and assemble a new you. This is unlike Star Trek's beam that let people transport to anywhere they wanted to go.

So a real invention like we see in Star Trek has some logical obstacles to overcome, if nothing else. I don't know any of the actual technologies that could be implemented, but even if they existed I don't know how much of an actual transport the machine would be able to accomplish. I doubt I'd ever trust one of them, if they ever do get invented in my lifetime. I wouldn't be so much afraid of dying, but I sure wouldn't like a zombie version of me running around in my place, confusing my friends and family -- or worse! Scary thoughts, those.

-useless"Don't beam me ANYWHERE, Scotty"ness