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I had this argument a little while ago, and someone mentioned that this was answered somewhere in ST lore, but will ask here.
When you are teleported to another place, are you killed and essentially "remade" in the place you're teleporting to, or is there a confirmation that the entity teleported from A to B is the same person.
(Sorry to be all deep on a cat pic, but this convo came to mind and I can't ignore it now)
Considering that it can lead to a clone, it's definitely the first explanation.
In fairness, the clone being made is more from people abusing the "part of you is missing, so we'll try and patch that up before putting you back together" function, and happened twice with extremely specific circumstances. You can't just factory-print people with it.
They didn't, but why couldn't you? You have their pattern, all you need is matter/energy.
They reconstituted pulaski with a hair from her hairbrush.
She was a clone
She wasn't reconstituted, the hair was used as a reference to tweak her pattern. They didn't just print out a spare Pulaski, leaving the old one on the station.
I remember that being discussed endlessly in Enterprise. But the solution was "fuck that, the ship is exploding, beam me up", not any answer to your question.
The Second One. The supernatural parts remain the same (the Vulcans make a big deal out of that, and would have a fit if people were being killed), the exact same matter is moved, and people remain conscious during the process.
In Star Trek, cloning is a much more complex affair, needing to grow the clone and all. If the transporter just copied people, destroying the original, they could just use that instead.
What about the Rikers?
Riker was split during the process, since the person doing the teleporter thing did an ill-advised/unprecedented thing and basically tried to transport them twice simultaneously, using two transport beams, and reintegrate the patterns later, so that the interference didn't cause them to lose too much of him, and they had enough to use the pattern repair mechanisms to patch any gaps (more than 50% lost is generally considered unrecoverable).
Part of the interference resulted in one of the transport beams being echoed down to the planet surface, and the transporter presumably did its best to fill in the gaps so that they didn't just get half a Riker, and they ended up with two whole Rikers instead.
If it was a simple clone -> store -> kill/replicate, Scotty wouldn't have needed some whole convoluted song and dance to keep someone in the buffer for decades, and Franklin'd not have died.
It does beg the question of whether you could intentionally do it. Scotty was very limited by the technology available to him, but the later versions of the Enterprise might have been able. It's interesting to think about. All of that said, I think you support your position very well and I appreciate the thoughtful response!
Hm, in theory, possibly, but not by doing Scotty's method, since that was basically constantly redoing the transport over, and over internally, without actually materialising the pattern. DS9 has transport patterns moved into regular computer storage, but the requirements were considerable. 5 people required the combined computer storage capacity of the entire station.
If you can do that, it doesn't seem impossible to copy the pattern itself using the computer, feed the copy right into the transporter, then materialise the copied pattern. As far as the transporter is concerned, you're just transporting the same thing a whole bunch, loading the patterns into the buffer from a different device.
You would need more than just a transporter to achieve that, though.
According to the non canon Star Trek Technical Manual, the transporter physically disassembles your particles, moves them to the destination location, and reassembles them with quark level accuracy. So-called "Heisenberg compensators" are a key technology to allow this to occur.
The on screen canon is at least somewhat consistent with this, but maybe not entirely.
If the person who appeared at the other end was the same person then Thomas Riker wouldn't have been able to exist.
The transporter is a person shredder.
Every time you are fed into it a version of you dies and another one is born