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Comment by j9461701 | Hacker News Reader

The person who wrote the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual mentioned this, and how - as described in the show - it's probably killing you and building a clone with your memories instead of transporting you. He thought about tweaking the lore so it didn't do that, using wormholes or the like, but decided to stay true to the show's established canon.

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Star Wars: cloning takes ages, clones have to be raised and trained. Lets make a clone army to fight the mass produced robot army.

Star Trek: cloning takes seconds. You can have as many copies of a veteran warrior as you want. Dangerous mission? just send in the red shirts and a few highly trained veterans in the hope that nobody important dies (again).

I found it interesting how Star Trek (at least TNG) avoids the ethical dilemmas via vague technological handwaving. Because, right, if you beam down a bunch of redshirts and they die, can't you just have the transporter remember their patterns and resurrect them? Of course they'd have no memories of the away mission that killed them, but that seems like a small price to pay to avoid death.

But instead we have "pattern buffers" that "degrade" quickly, and presumably keeping around copies of the full quantum states of many humans would require too much storage.

Schlock Mercenary does a great job handling the nature of consciousness boundaries and death in a post-Singularity world (technologically speaking - digital minds retain their own personalities in this story), as well as some of the ethical concerns.

It really takes off in the book "A Little Immortality":

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2016-12-05

but the core ideas leading to that book go back much further in the comic's archives.

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