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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