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Comment by yincrash | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason Star Trek teleporters have a "Heisenberg compensator", we cannot record both the position and momentum of a particle precisely. Scanning the "configuration of particles" to transmit to this theoretical printer is the first impossible roadblock. The human you scan can never be the same exact person printed.

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The reason Trek has it is likely a common misunderstanding of QM: it's not only that we cannot record both position and momentum, the information does not exist in the first place.

It's easier to see why if you think about Fourier transforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBnnXbOM5S4&themeRefresh=1

TLDW: an infinitely long wave does not (cannot) have any definite location, but it does have a definite periodic wavelength; conversely, a single impulse noise (a shockwave from e.g. a bullet or an explosion) has a definite location (in the direction of motion and at any given point in time) but no meaningful wavelength.

The more you constrain the possibility space of one, the looser the other becomes in a physical sense, not just the information you have about it.

If you can scan, why transmit at all? Just put the scan in simulation.

Right now, it's easier to scan than to simulate.

That said, we definitely don't have the means to 3D print even relatively simple tissues, last I checked we are still limited to structures thin enough to be kept alive by oxygen diffusion.

One of my open questions on this topic is: given we can cryopreserve small tissue without the freezing-damage problem, why can't we do a repeated process of:

1. cell culture tissue sheets that are ~1mm (or whatever) thick

2. cryopreserve each sheet

3. then assemble those sheets, still frozen

4. then thaw out as per normal procedure for cryopreserved organs

Caveat: I have minimal knowledge of biology, this may be a stupid idea for a whole bunch of reasons I don't even know the names of.

Simulations still need to run on something & need energy to power them. The better, more stable, higher fidelity simulation you want, the more mass & energy it will need. And that needs to come from somewhere - a thing many infomorphs tend to conveniently forget far too often.

To the extent what they’re suggesting isn’t bunk, it’s in being able to transmit genetic information and then print it to a womb. Then have a generation of psychopaths raised by a robot.

As with many topics, the Orions Arm Universe project has you covered - the Engenerator[0]!

Originally developed in-universe when a bunch of immortal cyborgs got bored on a colonization ship & decided to instruct a precursor probe to print a machine that prints a machine that will print their bodies on site. :)

The engenerator technology is completely safe[1] and can't be misused in any way.

[0] https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/486fee4017475

[1] https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/461009349a06e

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