[Shestagon]

You can view the article at https://ufplanets.com/content.php?58...st-Transporter

[Bryan]

To be honest I feel a bit like Lt. Barclay and would probably suffer from transporter phobia if this technology would ever become true on a Star Trek level.

And this is why: The problem I see is like in the article, you will get destroyed and rebuilt. I would always wonder if you actually die in the process and a perfect copy of you will appear with all your personality traits and memories. The copy would of course only remember how you beamed up and not be aware of the death of the original. This process repeats every time you beam. Similarly Scotty was saved as pattern in a transporter buffer for many years, was he dead or alive then? Was it just the blueprint for the copy which was stored? And then leave alone the more metaphysical question of having soul, etc.

In summary, I take the shuttle.

[Hevelin]

A big problem is the "perfect copy". Biophysics prevents that from happening.

And to answer your question, Patrokolus, a living organism is in a constant state of change down to the quantum level in all areas of its physical being, especially in the state of neural synapses. It's that change in the synapses that gives rise to coherent thought. Lack of change equates to lack of life. Destructive scans of the synapses literally kills the organism while saving nothing more than an imperfect record (compared to the original constantly changing organism) of the conglomerate state of the organism which can then be incorrectly reproduced, as is underscored by the transporter deaths in the first Star Trek movie.

IMO, the only way a transporter would not kill would be if it was actually performing a perfect, instantaneous, zero-loss matter-to-energy-to-matter conversion while maintaining all the functionality of the matter state without interruption. Which it doesn't.

I'll happily take the shuttle as well.

I find it ironic how the moralizing people in the Star Trek universe consider an imperfect copy of tyrants and criminals who use a transporter as "good enough" yet refuse to use the same transporter technology to counteract the loss through death of decent, caring, worthwhile human beings. Your example of Scotty's pattern being maintained for years proves it can be done.

Call me crazy but there seems to be something a bit off with the human condition.

[Soral]

To quote Doctor McCoy...

I signed on this ship to practice medicine, not to have my atoms scattered back and forth across space by this gadget.

I'll settle for a really fast ship at impulse speeds.

[Arthuron]

Definitely wouldn't want to "mill" about in that contraption (OK, throw your rotten tomatoes my way )

[Janeway]

Okay, I'm not going to lie. It has potential, I just hope that they continue this project and in the future we might have a functioning transporter. Although there probably will be people that are terrified of using it, which will be unfortunate.

Does anyone know if they have ever transported a live animal through it? Such as a mouse?
( EDIT: When that.. grinding process no longer applies they should try live animals.)

Another problem to this would be human society, if there's a device which can transport you to another place in a matter of seconds people wouldn't want to walk anywhere and would get more and more lazier. There needs to be some way of combating this laziness in humans, something to make people want to walk instead of technology helping them.

[Mazoue]

I agree, I think the biggest obstacle will be to tackle the whole destroying and recreating part of the process. My first feeling is, will that be me at the other end? As neat as this is... I fear having humans use transporters will be widely debated for a very very long time to come.