(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
Yes!!
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”!
I just got both of those as part of a Humble Bundle. I haven’t yet read then, but am looking forward to then.
Huh, I’d read both Old Man’s War and Red Shirts without noticing they were by the same author.
He’s on Mastodon too, if you’re looking for fediverse follows.
Great book! That’s a must read for sci-fi lovers.
They just need a cerebral compensator.
Transported are kinda soft sci Fi, and plausible explanation for why a thing can’t be done is easily hand waived by technobabble about a device that says it can be.
Besides, their little murder boxes anyway, so, it’s not really you or is it?
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” -Heraclitus
Are you ever you? You are an amalgamation of experiences that changes from one moment to the next. You aren’t the same person now as you were ten years ago, and you won’t ever be the same person you are right now ever again.
Oh god I hope not I hate that guy
I don’t know about you, but O’Brien would certainly know.
Of course he does. He just doesn’t want her knowing.
Huh. A lot of the Keiko/ O’Brien squabble episodes of DS9 are going to be easier to watch, with that idea in place. He’s not divorcing or fixing his marriage, because he can simply outlive her and do better next time.
She’s more like a pet to him
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.
Funnily enough in jujutsu kaisen many of the people who got transfigured by patchwork face die of shock because their mind doesn’t accept their new body as their. Also I vaguely remember an experiment where surgeons were trying to transplant a entire head. And one of the many issues was the fact that the brain kept waking up and rejecting the body because of small differences like a vain being in the wrong spot. I really need to dig that study up I remember it being a pretty neat and oddly terrifying read.
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Keiko needs to be careful what she wishes for.
“Sir, a Mister Hanson is requesting to beam aboard.”
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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.
Really, the transporters work by power of plot.
Most devices in sci-fi settings do.
True, but it’s amazing how much the transport is or is not able to do depending on the episode.
It’s more of a literary device than an electronic device.
Everybody except Guinan, she acknowledges childhood was long ago and wants to stay a kid and keep jumping on the bed.
Doesn’t Ro kind of linger on enjoying her childhood in a way she couldn’t because of the occupation?
And yeah in Futurama, Leela decided to stay a teenager so she could have a childhood with her parents ♥️
That episode is problematic in a lot of ways.
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”
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
We do know they hold genetic templates, per Picard season 3. No reason they couldn’t hold full templates for VIP’s.
And now we know the real reason why Picard never aged…
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
and pushes us to strive for self-improvement.
That is why whenever you see old people having to wait in line or dealing with retail workers they are so understanding and polite. Which is also reflected in their voting, you know how they always want to raise taxes to pay for welfare programs they do not benefit from, peace despite not having anything at stake, and a more tolerant understanding society. Also their TV choices. I just think Fox News (average viewer age in 60s) is so gentle and naive.
I would argue that the transport buffer isn’t big enough, but I think they stored a pile of settlers in there one episode.
They’ve done that sort of thing a couple of times, but it’s always been a dirty hack that happened in an emergency. For example, in the TNG episode “Relics,” Scotty put himself effectively in stasis for 70 years by setting the buffer to continually refresh itself like DRAM, and in the DS9 episode “Our Man Bashir” there was a transporter malfunction and they had to wipe the memory of almost the whole station in order to find enough space to store the command crew’s neural patterns, overwriting Bashir’s holosuite program so the crew’s likenesses replaced the characters.
I was thinking about this as a deep philosophical question yesterday. Wondering, if that technology was available would I be totally unafraid of accidental death, knowing that I could simply be restored to a recent backup. I came to the conclusion that I would still feel, and act, the same as I do now. Which made me realise that I must believe there is something more to us than pure biology as the backup wouldn’t be “me”. I’m certainly not religious and have no concept of what this “more than biology” might be - it just came as a logical result of my feelings about my backup.
If we had these back ups, are you sure they are you though? If you died, the ‘you’ that you feel you are right now would be gone, but a new one based on a saved state of the old you would be born with your memories. Unless there is another form of energy our consciousness takes then we would die just the same, but with a new clone that would feel like they are a continuation of the same person.
Yeah, they’re you.
If my convoluted comment made sense, it would depend on how you define ‘you’. Like say there is an afterlife, if I died and was replaced by this backup, ‘I’ would experience this life after death, being a ghost or whatever, while a new ‘me’ would come about thinking they were saved and living.
It’s at least as likely that “afterlife” you is a copy as any backup.
Heck, you today aren’t really the same you as yesterday. You identify with yesterday you because you share most of the same memories.
That is true, and the whole ‘ship of Theseus’ thing. I enjoyed the game Soma, this concept is a main theme of the game
Still a difference whether you turn into a different person through change and learning or whether you end. Period. While a different person does whatever, believing to be a continuation of you.
What is the difference? If somebody stops you then restarts you, are you the same person? If half your brain is destroyed doctors recreate it from a back up and merge it with the surviving half, are you still you, half you, someone completely new?
Read “Schild’s Ladder” by Greg Egan. It’s a hard sci-fi novel where “backups” play a significant role in people’s lives.
With zero knowledge on the series, I’ll just go ahead and fill the lore:
They have tried it in the past with someone who died but the recreated body was just an empty entity. It had vital signs and reacted to stimuli, but it wasn’t the person and didn’t have a will to live.
There’s no scientific explanation, it’s one of the mysteries of life.
The end.
I know you said you have no knowledge of the series, but there’s actually one character (Riker) that does get teleporter cloned in an episode of tng. That’s probably the basis of this whole post.
And if I recall correctly they also used teleporter shenanigans to explain how scotty from the original series could still be around to rescue in tng.
So it’s a bit of an elephant in the room
A wizard did it
Off the top of my head: When Pulaski got old age disease, they just transporter beam deaged her to fix it.
In Rascals, they made several people about 12, despite them starting from various ages (from maybe 30 to hundreds of years old). Of course they beamed them back to older in the end.
Do you want Eve Online? Because this is how you get Eve Online.
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?”
Here be your huge Rodney. Though you’ll have a wee bit of trouble with the franchise compensator.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_McKay#/media/File%3ARodneyMcKaypic.jpg
This is a bigger Rodney, although the franchise compensator will have to work even harder:
Scotty, beam me back up and I want a bowl of guac in my hand when I arrive.
But a pathogen is an entirely separate life form, which they can apparently distinguish from one another. It wouldn’t require editing the transport pattern itself. Just lock onto the pathogen, lock onto the person. Now transport the person with everything minus the pathogen.
Not sure if that’s how it works but it seems like a different challenge than editing a person’s memories or editing together two different transporter patterns.
For immortality, I would consider keeping a journal…