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From: wmartin@BRL-TGR.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Matter Transmission
Message-ID: <717@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 31-Jul-84 16:54:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.717
Posted: Tue Jul 31 16:54:49 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 6-Aug-84 03:31:37 EDT
Lines: 64

From:      Will Martin 

We had a long discussion involving matter tranmission a few years back on 
the SF-Lovers Digest, inspired mainly by a posting I made about possible
forms of transportation in future societies. Not to rehash that, but 
because I happened to be thinking a bit more on the subject, I thought
I'd send in this submission for what it is worth...

I think that few SF authors who happen to use matter transmission as
an ingredient or background in their work recognize all the implications
of the technology. I speak here of electro-mechanical methods, not of
psi powers like teleportation. I contend that, if you have matter
transmission, you also have matter duplication. People offer arguments
against that, speculating that it might be impossible to store the
information necessary to reconstruct complex things like living
organisms or the like, but it seems doubtful that such restrictions 
would last long if they existed at all. 

Matter duplication has profound implications for every aspect of life
and social structure. The idea that you feed dirt, garbage, radioactive
waste, or whatever in one end of the device, and at the other end take 
out diamonds, steak dinners, the Mona Lisa, more matter duplicators,
pets, or people destroys all concepts of "wealth", "status", or
"value", and not only grants immortality but also simultaneously
makes life, human or otherwise, value-less. (What difference does it
make if you kill somebody if he can be re-created from the last
recorded pattern? You maybe made him lose an hour or a day of time;
nothing more.)

It grants immortality by "editing in the mix", as it were -- when you
pass through the matter transmitter to go out for dinner, at the same
time as it zips you to the restaurant on Tahiti or on Cygnus 4, it
recreates you without crud in your arteries, stones in your kidneys,
excess fat cells, cancer cells, dirt on your skin, or waste in your
intestines or bladder; it can even bring you out with your hair combed
(and more or less of it, as you wish!) and dressed in a tuxedo. We have
just eliminated the need for clothes closets and bathrooms, among
other facilities, like hospitals.

Would you like to make a ringworld or a Dyson sphere? Just feed in
dust, plasma, or gas giants into one end of a BIG matter duplicator,
and get out a stream of ringworld material at the other end. Or get
out Earth-like planets in an endless row -- could our orbit hold a
few hundred Earths, equidistantly spaced far enough to minimze excess
tides on each? Churn out as many as you want -- you could create them
with the proper motion necessary to slip right into orbit as desired.

Is your universe dying down? Feed in old, feeble stars and put out
bright young main-sequence stars, chock-full of unburned hydrogen,
complete with fresh planetary systems. To hell with entropy!

Talk about science indistinguishable from magic!

Anyway, what I am getting at, besides all the purple prose (*),
is that a writer who throws in matter transport but leaves the
rest of the fictional society exactly like ours, or medieval
Europe, or whatever, is being inconsistent. Anyone like to nominate
writers and works where the implications of the technology are
taken to the fullest (at least as far as a book or series can go)?

Will

(*) If you poured a bottle of Burgundy over several members of
the SFWA, would they be "purple pro's"? [Evil chuckle....]