Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site rdin.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!mgnetp!ihnp4!zehntel!dual!amd!decwrl!decvax!mcnc!philabs!rdin!perl From: perl@rdin.UUCP (Robert Perlberg) Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers Subject: Re: Matter Transmission Message-ID: <442@rdin.UUCP> Date: Thu, 2-Aug-84 13:41:22 EDT Article-I.D.: rdin.442 Posted: Thu Aug 2 13:41:22 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 5-Aug-84 06:25:01 EDT Organization: Resource Dynamics Inc., New York Lines: 57 <> I disagree that authors who use matter transmission should adjust their worlds to take all of the implications into account. Most science fiction stories are meant to make you think about current day issues. Matter transmission is used only as a way of speeding up the story so the author can get to the point without boring you with 200 pages of the characters sitting on an intergalactic bus. As far as the matter duplication/modification issue, I don't think the problems of wealth/poverty are problems at all. The fact that we do have poverty at this time is a problem. If matter duplication/modification could solve this problem, what's wrong with that? As for death becoming meaningless, there are two possibilities: 1) The current concept of life and death is based on the fact that, at this time, death is a permanant condition. If the future brought about a change in that fact, people's attitudes about it would change too. In ancient times, having appendicitus could have been fatal. Now, people don't even worry about it. 2) Producing a duplicate of oneself whenever one dies is not really immortality any more than having a child. While the duplicate would be the same in every external respect, would it really have the same "being"? Consider that, if the duplicate were to exist at the same time you did, would you experience the same things it did? If not, then once you die, you can no longer experience anything, but your duplicate would, as a separate being. It would also take a very, very long time before the kinds of capabilities you suggested would be in wide enough use to phase the philosophers. What I'm talking about is good old fasioned bugs. You know as well as I do how unreliable hi-tech can be. Would you risk you life on the reliability record of any computer around today, running anybody's software? While it's true that the basic technology of matter transmission would open the door for matter modification, each type of modification would require a separate program, each program having to go through a debugging phase before most people would risk their lives, for example, to take a 2 second haircut. All of the talk about changing the shape of the world reminded me of an issue that was dealt with on "I Dream of Jeannie" (I know, but please keep reading). Tony wanted to use Jeannie's powers to do great things, like stop wars and hunger. Jeannie told him that this was too tricky, because, for example, creating rain in one place could cause a drought somewhere else. Are you sure that changing the shape of the Earth and installing new planets into orbit around the sun would not cause this kind of side-effect? Robert Perlberg Resource Dynamics Inc. New York philabs!rdin!perl