Today in coping with existential dread:

"Hmm...a qualified public servant or a
ranting racist, misogynistic, fascist clown..."

You know, this has been bothering me for awhile and--huh? The election? Oh yes, absolutely. I can not fathom why we, as a nation, are even still entertaining this felonious goon who, by all rights, should be serving a life sentence for his role in the attempted coup. I've just not been talking about it because I think my anxiety around it is literally killing me. Instead, I've been avoiding the news and trying to think about anything else while we wait for a bunch undecided voters in Pennsylvania or wherever to decide our fate as a democracy.

"Ahhhhhhh!"

-people beaming

(source: memes)

So instead of dwelling on that, I've been thinking about the transporter on Star Trek and whether or not it kills the people who use it. I bring this up because I've come across a few internet memes lately about how every time a character steps into the transporter, it converts their molecules into energy and then beams that energy to another location where they are reassembled. So in a sense, the person who materializes is not the original, but an exact duplicate created from energy of the original's molecules. 

Chief Miles O'Brian, seen here doing
what he does best: murder.

Real life physics seem to bear this out. I did an internet search of the question: "does the transporter kill people?" and the science-based answer is generally yes: that the act of conversion into energy destroys the original object. Sort of like how someone standing next to an atomic bomb when it detonates is instantly atomized by the explosion. The only difference here is that the atomizee can be put back together. The question then is, are they still the same person? Are we unique instances in space and time or are we essentially molecular NFT's: not bound to a single server, individual, but transferable from place to place as long as the code is intact?

The answer is that any amount of time
thinking about this is too much. Any.

What is the self? Are we a unique assemblage of atoms? If those atoms are rearranged, are we still us? Or are we our memories? If the person who materializes on some planet has all of our memories, are they us? And perhaps the most important question: how much time thinking about the transporter on Star Trek is too much time? I guess for me the answer is one of narrative logic: the transporter works because the script says it works, and if indeed it was essentially a murder machine, no one on the show would step into one. 

Are these important questions? Of course not. But unlike questions about how or why someone could be undecided or God-forbid, enthusiastic about a guy whose first presidency was an objective disaster that ended in a violent insurrection, mulling over the philosophical implications of a TV show's plot contrivances doesn't give me an ulcer. 

Sorry, that's unfair. I should say a violent insurrection he instigated and then supported.