Would you use a teleporter?

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“Scotty, two to beam up” is a well worn piece of dialogue from Star Trek that is always misquoted (Kirk never says “Beam me up Scotty!”). Dutifully Kirk and Spock wait patiently as the Chief Engineer sets the coordinates and takes them back to the Enterprise so that they can be on their way. It’s a testament to their faith in the system that they do not go into a blind panic about the fact they are being transported. It seems to contain a huge amount of risk. One person who hated it was Doctor Leomard “Bones” Mccoy. He was dead against all his molecules being ripped up into very tiny pieces, shot through time and space and then reassembled again. Bearing in mind, he was a medical man. In essence that is what the transporter does.

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In the Star Trek series Enterprise Captain Archer and his crew are less keen on using it. They will happily transport cargo but not themselves even when they are reassured it is “safe”. We still have to use the highly efficient Same Day Courier Reading based service as the closest we have to this technology is 3D printing.

To prove the point there are several episodes where the transporter goes wrong. An evil version of Kirk comes back, 3 crew members are sent to an alternative universe, it turns them into children and in one memorable scene, the signal gets distorted and the two unfortunate crew members end up mangled.