• @cynar@lemmy.world
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      371 year ago

      Further to the link. Tuvix is a character in star trek voyager. There is a transporter accident that ends up welding 2 other characters (Lieutenant Tuvok, Neelix) into 1 individual. The episode is spent trying to resolve this issue.

      By the end, Captain Janeway is given a solution. They can reverse the process and recover Tuvok and Neelix. Unfortunately this will destroy Tuvix. Tuvix, meanwhile has developed on his own. He doesn’t want to die and makes that clear. Janeway has the dilemma. She can do nothing, and let Tuvix live, or kill him to bring Tuvok and Neelix back.

      Basically, it’s the trolley problem. Do nothing, and 2 people die, or kill 1 yourself, to save them.

      • Semi-Hemi-Demigod
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        221 year ago

        What I don’t get is why they didn’t do some technofoolery with the transporters to make a copy of Tuvix and then just split that one. In a universe where there’s two William Rikers there’s gotta be a way to use transporters to clone.

        • Alien Nathan Edward
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          331 year ago

          You kinda have to accept the bounds of the problem as stated in order for it to be worth thinking about. It undercuts the value of the experiment if you just say “I find a solution other than those presented which denied the central conflict entirely”.

        • @Kahlenar@lemmy.world
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          101 year ago

          Then you’d have two Tuvixes that both don’t want to die. Actually I had an entire day of one philosophy class to discuss this, however it was very specific that “teletransportation” absolutely kills you and replicates you. My professor specifically said that having an understanding of star trek was necessary that day.

          • Semi-Hemi-Demigod
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            31 year ago

            Just keep one in the transporter buffer and repolarize the Heisenberg compensator to split it apart before materialization. It wouldn’t ever know it existed. Like unzipping a file in a temporary directory.

        • Osa-Eris-Xero512
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          61 year ago

          There’s not supposed to be. Every time a transporter clone happens it’s due to external and uncontrollable factors.

            • Doug [he/him]
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              31 year ago

              Not really. The Doctor wasn’t really as advanced as chat gpt. Just an emergency tool. Voyager was stranded without a doctor so they used it full time and he grew sentience along the way.

        • @CeruleanRuin
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          41 year ago

          My personal headcanon is that they would have had they had the full resources of Starfleet at their disposal. The Riker incident was, as far as we know, non-reproducible, or someone somewhere would have found a way to weaponize it.

        • @HairHeel@programming.dev
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          31 year ago

          Terrible idea. Any time a transporter duplicates somebody, one of them turns evil. (See the DS9 episode where Tom Riker pretends to be Will Riker and hijacks the Defiant, or the reason Harry Kim, who was replaced by his own duplicate early on in the series, never got a promotion).

          So now you have to decide to kill Good Tuvix, or kill the other one, which will just give you Evil Tuvok and Evil Neelix.