✨“Beam me up, Scotty!” (...but only if you’re okay with dying)
The Teleportation Paradox
🚀 Introduction
Picture this: you're late for a date on Mars. No worries. You step into the teleportation pod, press a button and boom! you're there. Fully intact, fresh and smiling. But… are you really you?
🧠 The nerd dream that physics doesn’t like
Teleportation, ever since Star Trek, has become the ultimate sci-fi fantasy: convenient, futuristic, and ridiculously cool. But here’s the thing no one talks about: teleportation, if ever invented, wouldn't actually “move” anything. It would kill you.
Not metaphorically. We’re talking about atom-by-atom disintegration, followed by a perfect reconstruction elsewhere. What appears on the other side isn’t you. It’s a guy who looks exactly like you, with your memories, your phobias, your taste in music (yes, even your embarrassing love for 2000s pop). But you? You’re gone.
💀 Bye-bye, consciousness: the original is terminated
Think of it this way: you enter machine A. Machine A scans you down to the last molecule, then disassembles you completely. Meanwhile, machine B—hundreds of kilometers away—uses biological 3D printing to recreate a perfect copy. The new “you” looks around, scratches its nose and thinks: “Well, that worked.”
But you—the you-now—are dead.
It’s like someone promised, “Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing.” And indeed. You won’t. Because you’re dead in a flash of blue light.
🧬 But does the copy… feel like it’s you?
Absolutely. And that’s the creepy part. The copy doesn’t think it’s you. It’s convinced it IS you. It remembers your childhood, your first kiss, even your Netflix password. But from the perspective of the original, who was just vaporized? Story over. No continuity. No transfer. Just a fake happy ending.
🕳️ The soul dilemma (even for atheists)
Let’s skip the “soul” and go full neuroscience: your consciousness is an emergent process of your current brain—not a zip file you can beam across the galaxy. Destroying that brain destroys that process. Making a new one? Doesn’t transfer anything. It just creates a new one.
So yes, teleportation is essentially a stylish murder with memory.
🤯 A paradox called “you”
Let’s try a thought experiment.
Suppose teleportation fails to destroy the original. Now you have two of you. One here, one there. Both fully convinced they’re the “real” you. Who gets your job? Your house? Your dog? Your Spotify playlist?
In court, this would be a disaster.
🛑 Still wanna beam up?
Next time a movie sells you teleportation as the answer to modern travel woes, remember this article. It’s not a journey. It’s a copy-paste execution.
If you enjoy being alive, maybe just stick to traffic jams.
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