Are transporters the fountain of youth?
Are transporters the fountain of youth?
Are transporters the fountain of youth?
This happens in the episode where everyone prematurely ages, and they are sent through the transporter to make them their "normal" ages. There's no reason given why they couldn't do that all the time.
Even more relevant there was that episode where a transporter accident turns Picard, Guinan, Ro and Kiko into twelve year olds and nobody points out they just discovered transporter induced immortality.
What really gets me about that episode is all of the effected characters immediately want to return to their normal age and nobody says "Hold up, I'm very okay with a couple extra decades of life" or centuries in Guinans case I suppose.
Keiko needs to be careful what she wishes for.
"Sir, a Mister Hanson is requesting to beam aboard."
Excellent out of context quote from that episode:
Keiko: "I am your wife".
Miles: "But you're also twelve years old".
Something like that.
But wouldn't that also erase your memories?
If they can selectively remove pathogens during transport, I see no reason they couldn't selectively choose which parts of things to revert to a younger state and what to leave as is for things like memory preservation.
I assume there's some in universe reason why they can't / don't keep copies of the teleportation data, otherwise everyone would be effectively indestructible
"Oh no the captain got eaten by a space tiger"
"No problem, I'll teleport a backup from an hour ago, he'll be there in 5 minutes"
My first thought was wouldn't that reset our memories to that point too?
Granted losing some memories or being dead is a pretty easy choice, but using it to reverse aging or other physical things would be a costly one
(Hope that sounds convincing, cause hell if I know)
That's kind of the premise of the John Scalzi book "Old Man's War". In the book, they take elderly people (aka Wise people), and put their minds/memories into young fit bodies. This, in theory, creates soldiers who are both Wise, and Young/Fit.
Thanks for the new reading suggestion!