concrete_babyWhy the galactic barrier and transporters don’t match real science, and why warp drive might
killall-qBecause teleportation is murder. Whatever comes out on the other side may look and act like you, but isn't you, because you're now dead for having been disassembled by the teleporter.
zalackTeleporters are interesting because when you think about it long enough, you realize the person on departure end died.
Then you think about it more, and if the person that comes out the arrival end is an exact replica, down to the atom, and has continuity of thought... if you accept that they died then you kind of also have to accept that the "you" of any given instant is constantly dying and giving way to the "you" of the next instant. That person living that experience at that exact moment will never exist again.
So then you're kinda back to transporters being business as usual again, but with a fun new existential crisis on the side.
Star Trek's transporters and Stargate's Stargates are cloning devices
The real question is why they wouldn't use the transporter buffers effectively as backups for away teams. Have an away team member killed? No problem, rematerialize them from the buffer.
Bear the Dad@taladar @dustojnikhummer Why not just let the crew member stay on the ship and just send dozens of copies of them to the planet to overwhelm any danger with sheer numbers?
Well, it makes sense to me to want to have the away mission in the memory of the crew member you retain long term unless something happened to them on the away mission.
The simplest answer would be because it doesn't ordinarily work that way.
Well, Thomas Riker proves you can create duplicates and the doctor's daughter in Strange New Worlds as well as some other episodes prove that the patterns can be stored in the buffer for extended periods of time.
Here's the thing: Does Tom Riker actually prove that? That's the explanation suggested in the episode, but the preponderance of information about the mechanisms of transporter technology, as given both before and after, conflicts with it. But there's another hypothesis, a simpler one, and one that we know for a fact transporters are capable of, because it's a recurring element in Star Trek: Thomas Riker is from another universe, brought to the Prime universe by similar means as many of the various visits to and from the Mirror universe.