Napsterisation of Matter or “I downloaded this great phone yesterday”

It is an interesting, (though I’m sure no surprise to you) that the Teleporter as featured in Star Trek works by scanning, then disassembling a person down to basic particles and re-assembling them at the destination.

 

The implication is that Captain James T. Kirk has been legally murdered and then almost simultaneously reincarnated, many times over - essentially copied, destroyed, rendered - not actually transported.

 

So Captain James T Kirk is not actually Captain James T Kirk once transported, it his facsimile. So what would happen in the event of an ‘accident’, say where the original was not destroyed? Which Captain of the two would have the legitimate authority over the Enterprise? The not-destroyed copy because he is the ‘most original’, or the latterly-rendered copy because he was the ‘most intended’? Who would his mother love most?

 

Luckily this ‘what is self’ teleportation problem is not really an issue today…teleportation, generally speaking, is only restricted to the teleportation of information. I say ‘generally speaking’ – researchers have been sending and rendering Digital Michaelangelos for a while and manufacturing designers use these techniques to share (send) work with teams on the other side of the world (who 3D render a copy at their end), and now physicists in the United States and Austria for the first time have teleported "quantum states" between separate atoms.

 

Yet once nanolevel 3D printers (an expensive item to start of with, but potentially free as anyone could make a copy of one...) become a reality then we would have a ‘napsterisation of matter effect’ (or napsterization):

 

“Hey, I downloaded this great phone yesterday”...no doubt the manufacturing industry would have to call in the PRM (Physical Rights Management) experts to save the day...

 

Anyway, enough, I've got a flat tyre to replace.