Please Don't Beam Me Up!
As much as I enjoyed the Star Trek series (and series, and series...) when I was a kid (OK, as a young adult. Give me some slack, will you?) I've always had a big worry about transporters. I know, they did several episodes on the various obvious problems with transporters, but as far as I know they never covered this one.
So you get onto the transporter stage, Scotty pushes the lever forward (what ever happened to buttons, guys?) and you are dismantled, atom by atom, and the information that constitutes your being is beamed off to somewhere else where you are reconstituted like a dehydrated noodle packet. You emerge hale and hearty with no discomfort, right? But wait...
... What about when you were getting dismantled? Doesn't that hurt? Like, a lot?
Well, that experience is edited out, so you have no memory of it. No problem? I don't think so. This me is the one that's going to get disintegrated, probably in agony. I'm sorry, but I don't give a damn how happy that other me is going to be to have avoided the hassle of actually going from one place to another. I'm the one who pays the price for that bastard's laziness. No thanks!
This reminds me of the time I had to have a something-or-other-scope stuck down my throat to check out my esophagus and stomach. The doctor explained how it would all work, saying, "Now, you have to be awake during the procedure, because I need your cooperation. But don't worry, I'll give you a sedative so that you won't remember a thing."
Wait a minute, I thought, what won't I remember? Why wouldn't I want to remember it? That's fine for later, but right now this experience I wouldn't want to remember is in the future, and I am going to experience it, whether I remember it or not.
Of course I went through with it, because it was necessary, and we learned useful things from it; and sure enough, I can't remember a thing about the experience, except maybe when I called up my wife afterward with a lewd proposition (that was a good sedative!) - but I still have trouble believing that editing out bad memories is as good as not having bad experiences in the first place.
Let me segue from Star Trek to Star Wars. If countless millions of people (human and other) are, at any given moment, dying in screaming agony as their "old" body is dismantled in preparation for beaming via transporter, wouldn't that constitute a pretty huge "disturbance in the Force"? Well, I have learned never to mix religion with reason, so let's leave that alone. Still, the Ethics gang ought to have a field day with this one. Maybe a whole new branch of scholarly pondering will be named after me. You think? I hope not!
