For over 50 years, from the original Star Trek to the current Star Trek: Picard, the fantastical future articulated by Gene Roddenberry has allowed us to imagine going not just where but how no man has gone before.
Forget the morning commute: being stuck in traffic or in a mechanical delivery tube full of the bacteria and odors of a hundred fellow drones. Step right here, onto the obliteration pad! Feel yourself embraced by a beam of energy that completely immobilizes you, penetrates your skin and, over several seconds, disintegrates every molecule in your body into subatomic dust. Don’t worry, the manufacturer assures that you’ll probably be fine! We can even filter out that nasty cough while we’re at it. In a few seconds, “you” will find yourself standing in your office, or in central Paris; definitely not irretrievably scattered across space and time.
Convenient, right? So why are you sweating?
Not everyone in the Star Trek universe is completely comfortable with “beaming up”, but is transporter phobia really justified? Do they technically die during transport? Are they rematerialized as the same person they always were, or are they somehow fundamentally changed? These are some of the oldest ongoing Trekkie debates; wrestled with for decades across the fan forums of yore without clear or satisfactory conclusions. So today, we’re taking a laser drill to this Gordian knot.
Transporter Phobia
Phobia or general mistrust of transporter technology has plagued officers through every generation of Starfleet — from Captain Archer to Doctor McCoy and Lt. Barclay. Originally employed for exclusively non-biological cargo, once Transporters began to see more extensive use on living subjects in the late 22nd century, problems did materialize. Transporter Psychosis was one such incurable condition caused by neurochemicals being broken down and improperly reconstructed; leading to paranoid delusions, hallucinations, hysteria and no small amount of pain. Transporter efficiency and failsafes have improved over the centuries since its inception, to the point whereby the mid-24th century accidents were almost unheard of.
“Reg, how many transporter accidents have there been in the last ten years? Two? Three? There are millions of people who transport safely every day without a problem.”
– Geordi La Forge, 2369 (“Realm of Fear“)
This is some pretty serious dissonance, though. Despite guarantees to their efficacy, transporter malfunction (and sabotage) serves as one of the most common narrative fulcrums in any given Star Trek series. Maybe Geordi hadn’t been paying attention, but O’Brien could likely list two or three Transporter accidents in an average week — fatalities, reverse-aging, split and merged individuals, time-travel, even interdimensional breaches.
Let’s put these concerns aside for now and embrace La Forge’s optimism. In uncharted space, many strange and unknown phenomena can interfere with ship functions — transportation in more typical, predictable environments is probably as safe as he claims.
Still; even in the best-case scenario, users are literally being obliterated — and then what? Reconstructed? Copied? They must feel some pretty serious existential and ontological concerns.
Are they the same person after transport, or just a copy? Does the transporter not destroy them, then recreate their bodies out of newly collected matter at the destination? Or is their original matter directly transmitted across space? Is there more to man or woman than matter, something that can’t be contained and quantified, something that will inevitably be lost?
To resolve this quandary without needless speculation, we really need to understand how exactly the transporter works. Easier said than done.
Energy, or Matter?
When we blow past the smokescreen of technobabble to the inner workings of Star Trek’s physics, often we find that the actual explanations offered seem a little scrappy. The Transporter is no exception.
Diegetically, transporter technology is usually described as involving matter/energy scrambling or conversion. Characters across every series and generation describe the beaming process in this way. Commander Data explains that the body’s molecules are converted into energy and then reverted at the destination. Picard, too, tells a holographic Moriarty that by the 24th century, mankind has discovered energy and matter to be interchangeable.
Strangely, this kind of dialogue seems to contradict canon established by internal production material — specifically the TNG Season 4 Writers’ Technical Manual. This manual and its externally-published progeny offer a consistent and detailed outline of the transportation process. Prior to dematerialization, the subject’s molecular structure and neural patterns are scanned and stored in the computer’s active memory. Next, the subject is reduced to a cloud of subatomic particles known as a “matter stream” and transferred to a cylindrical tank or “pattern buffer”. The matter stream, neural energy and coded instructions for reassembly are then directed through various subsystems to the emitter array and transmitted to the destination, where they are reconfigured. So in truth, both matter and energy are transferred in packets together.
We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Writers’ Technical Manual was not actually required reading for the TNG writing staff. As a reference material, it was supposed to ensure consistency where technical explanations became necessary; but evidently it was in most cases given only the most cursory skim. Is it a sad consequence that the ostensibly best and brightest Starfleet officers aboard the Federation flagship also failed to study their technical manuals? Or is there some way we can reconcile the inconsistencies?
Like Picard says, energy and matter are interchangeable. Special relativity demonstrates that they’re two sides of the same coin — it must be that at the subatomic scale to which a transporter reduces a person’s atoms, there is no distinction between energy and matter. Some will say “matter stream”, others will say “energy beam”; it’s all the same.
In any case, it’s clear the stuff we were made of at the beginning of our trip is basically the same stuff in the same places at the other end; the post-transport self is not just a copy. If your arms and legs are removed from your torso to better package your body for transport and then successfully reattached, none of the “self” is really lost, right? Being broken down into infinitesimally smaller pieces than this shouldn’t make any difference, assuming (for now) that we didn’t accidentally leave anything behind.
Being alive at the end of the process, however, doesn’t mean we didn’t die somewhere along the way.
What Kind of Death?
Curiously, we humans don’t consider death to be a black-and-white affair. Death occurs in a matter of degrees; you can be “dead” and you can be dead. If your respiration and circulation have ceased, you are clinically dead. When brain activity ceases, you are biologically dead, or “brain dead”. Even when these states are reversed and the patient revived, we still consider some approximation of death to have occurred. Good luck finding a heartbeat or neocortical activity in a cloud of atoms suspended in a transporter’s pattern buffer.
There is a window of approximately six minutes under most conditions following clinical death before brain death begins to occur — a six-minute window where without an EEG, no life-signs can be found but within which declaring the true death of a self would be spurious.
In a transporter cycle, the pattern buffer can hold someone’s matter in suspension for eight minutes until it starts to degrade and soon becomes irreparable; is this not basically the same? In either case, we have a short window during which no life-signs can be confirmed with instruments on hand, during which the subject is kinda-but-not-really dead before we can say for sure one way or the other.
The diagnosis of biological or brain death, in particular, is centered on the belief that electrical activity in the brain constitutes the substance of consciousness — once it is permanently lost (or has departed from the substance and phenomena of the body, depending on your beliefs), so lost is the patient’s life. Yet the body of a brain dead patient on life-support can still continue many biological functions, including carrying a successful pregnancy to term. Furthermore, there is a myriad of what we consider life which exhibits no signs of consciousness whatsoever. Starfleet is even more liberal on what constitutes a life-form.
Consciousness
Consciousness is nevertheless the key. Even if not all life is conscious, the presence of consciousness must be demonstrative of a living mind. To put it simply: not all life is conscious, but all consciousness is alive. Perhaps the one tenet closest to incontrovertible in all of western philosophy is that consciousness affirms the existence of self, of being and of a mind.
Having a conscious person materialise at the conclusion of transport doesn’t preclude the possibility that they have died and been revived, if their consciousness is broken at any point. More disturbing is the thought that their mind or soul is composed of some noumenal substance beyond the “neural activity” which the transporter can’t observe or capture (assuming we believe in souls). If there is a break in consciousness, perhaps a new soul has been created or inhabited this same body. Perhaps this person is made of the same matter but ultimately a copy all the same, with memories reconstructed from the data accompanying the matter stream. Perhaps successful transportees have no soul whatsoever.
How can we be sure?
We can agree by now that consciousness is both the essence of self and the most certain contradiction of death. If a subject maintains consciousness throughout the transport cycle and if that consciousness remains tethered to the constituent matter of the body (i.e. the mind hasn’t been left behind or scattered across space), we should agree that neither a cessation of self nor a non-semantic, actual death could have occurred. Simple, right?
So are we conscious during transport?
Yes! Well, sometimes.
“That original transporter took a full minute and a half to cycle through. Felt like a year. You could actually feel yourself being taken apart and put back together”.
– Emory Erickson, 2154 (“Daedelus”)
Many characters have been able to recount the conscious experience of transportation. Sure, this doesn’t preclude the possibility that this is some kind of false memory or other psychological compensation for a lapse (or annihilation) of consciousness; but there is one case in which we can be quite certain. An episode from season 6 of TNG offers us a rare, real-time first-person perspective of a disassembled Lt. Barclay in the matter stream. Incredibly, he is not only fully conscious but able to exercise will and somehow “grab” another dematerialized person, allowing him to rematerialize with and subsequently rescue a crewmember from the USS Yosemite whom had been trapped in the transporter.
In cases like this, we can say with reasonable certainty that consciousness is not broken at any point of the cycle — the subject has not been killed. That’s reassuring, but we can’t say for sure whether this is a typical transport cycle, or something more extraordinary. All we have demonstrated is that it is at least possible to cycle the entire self intact.
That is the best-case scenario, but we mentioned earlier the apparent incongruence between reported transport accidents and the actual disasters we see in basically every other episode. Ignoring the more pedestrian deaths from incorrect or incomplete rematerialization, coordinate calculation errors or signal loss resulting in one’s atoms being scattered across space; there are some uniquely ontological risks involved in transportation. Sometimes the person that steps off the transport pad is definitely not the same one who first entered the buffer.
Critical Error
An ion storm once caused crewmembers from the Enterprise to switch places with their parallel universe-selves. An Enterprise D transporter suffered a malfunction which caused the deletion of DNA sequences from the patterns of Captain Picard and several of his colleagues. They rematerialized as children and had to be restored with backup data from their previously-scanned patterns.
Members of the Defiant were even transported back in time where Captain Sisko caused the accidental death of a significant historical figure, forced to claim his identity and instigate a revolution in order to preserve the timeline.
In 2266, a transporter accident split Captain Kirk into two distinct bodies possessing different parts of the original’s personality in a kind of physical manifestation of Dissociative Identity Disorder. After their successful reintegration, you could at least argue that no discrete person had been created or destroyed.
In 2361, a similar accident befell then-Lieutenant William Riker whilst attempting to evacuate from a planet’s surface. In this case, however, the subject was not split, but copied. It seems here that the transporter’s computer falsely reported an incomplete cycle — in which case the data packet of Riker’s neural and molecular blueprint was transmitted a second time. This second transmission was reflected back to the planet by the same phenomenon which caused the initial false reading. Ultimately, one Riker successfully boarded the USS Potemkin; another identical man was left behind. Each shared the same memories, personality and physical attributes, unaware of the other’s existence.
Given that both Rikers had the same physical mass as the original, it must be the case that one of them was reconstructed from a supplementary reserve of matter (like a replicator) and the molecular and neural scans in the transporter’s physical memory — not the same stuff as the original. One Riker is completely artificial. Someone may or may not have died here, but someone (and quite unbeknownst to them) had just been born.
Then there’s Tuvix— two members of the USS Voyager spliced together by the catalyst of an alien orchid in transport. Although a melding of the patterns and DNA of Tuvok and Neelix, Tuvix considered himself a distinct person and thought of the original crewmen as something akin to his parents. Once a means to reverse the accident was discovered and proposed, Tuvix fought desperately against what was in essence a plan to murder him. Through one transporter malfunction: one creation of an entirely new individual and two temporary deaths reversed only through one fairly unequivocal murder.
The Verdict
Ultimately, you probably won’t die in a Star Trek transporter. Depending on your standards of death, you might — but with a Starfleet education you’re going to have a pretty broad and flexible definition of what constitutes being alive.
The statistics might show that beaming is safer than driving, but isn’t the irrepressible existential dread of transporter phobia still justified? We’re pretty sure it is. Motor vehicle accidents might be far more common, but they’re relatively predictable. They definitely will not spawn an evil doppelganger to murder your family, leave you forever uncertain that you are not, in fact, a poor simulacrum of your original self, or send you cartwheeling centuries back through time with nothing but your space pajamas.
