Sci-Fi Resurrections
- Thread starter Admiral Jean-Luc Picard
- Start date
Riverworld. the ultimate resurrection series, really. the idea of everyone who ever lived in the history of human beings being resurrected all at once on the shores of a single river was a pretty awesome concept. The first two books are good.
As for Superman, you are correct; but remember that his spirit actually left his body and had to return in the Action Comics issue prior to Reign of the Supermen. It is certainly up for debate.
There are a couple of Trek characters who have the Gamora thing happen to them. I think it was Harry Kim in an episode of Voyager, and at one point O'Brien was switched out too but I can't remember the details.
dying in riverworld meant you would wake up the next morning with your lunch pail, and a fresh set of towels (everyone was provided with towels with magnetic couplings to use as clothes or, well, towells), but in a new random place on the millions of miles long river. Most people were settled within a few miles region of people from a time and locality they knew, with others thrown in, mostly late 20th century since that had the bulk of humanity. But as people started to die those randomized events did start to dis-homogenize the population.
Since iron and other necessities were not available, humanity could not really rebuild technology. Food was provided, but tech was otherwise on a stone age level initially. Sir Richard Burton, being that he was Richard Burton and finding the source of long rivers was kind of his thing, eventually developed the "Suicide express" where he could continually kill himself trying to find the headwaters, but he did find there was a maximum extent on rebirths. It's been some time since I read the books, but I believe there was a new religion that sent its missionaries abroad by having them murdered by unbelievers, in the same manner.
Zhaan resurrecting Aeryn in Farscape worked for me. I think it has to do was the fact that they developed Zhaan as religious, and we already knew what Unity did. Also, Aeryn's death was so shocking and so sad that I was left wondering if it was permanent or if she was going to be brought back. I'm glad she was brought back, even if it killed Zhaan in the process.
Is anyone familiar with Roswell? It has the most absurd resurrection I've seen on TV. lol
Nah, since they're not getting new matter, they're just converting the matter to energy and transmitting that energy and then reassembling them to matter. Same matter, same person. We're all just atoms and chemicals.
Which is...no small feat, to say the least. For a human, that's like, converting them to a atomic bomb and maintaining it. And then the systems involved can keep a pattern buffer for decades, or the energy can be 'wrapped up' and maintain some coherency for years as seen in ENT with the Transport Genuis' son. That, um, that really throws the transporter into some miracle level tech, mostly the energy thing, especially for the 22nd century. I liked the little tidbits that even the 23rd century guys don't like getting in it willy nilly, though that's gone by S2? when they even did a internal ship transporting.
Star Trek has never been very good at thinking through the full implications of the technology it introduces. For example, transporters can move massive amounts of mass over thousands of kilometres...and yet it also has actual people (and anthropomorphic holograms) working in mines with laser pickaxes or whatever, when the whole thing could be done remotely. Hell, if the biofilters are precise enough that it can *remove pathogens* from a living subject, then extracting specific elements from an ore medium should be a doable, making refinement downright trivial. Seriously, Federation mining facilities should just be mobile space stations that are mostly made up of transporters and cargo bays. Populated systems should be swarming with transporter relay satellites so shuttle hops between planets are unnecessary.
But getting back on topic; yeah they're also a means of "resurrections" since they can flat-out duplicate someone (don't ask where all that extra mass came from!) But then that's transporters; they're essentially magic.
But getting back on topic; yeah they're also a means of "resurrections" since they can flat-out duplicate someone (don't ask where all that extra mass came from!) But then that's transporters; they're essentially magic.
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The key is finding some way to reanimate the cells of the dead, and of course restoring that person's soul. A clone isn't the same person. The only way that could work is if you can truly establish that the resurrected version is an equal or original version, kind of like the duplication process of Crichton on Farscape.
Another way perhaps could be with Kirk, if you use the nexus to bring him out a second time. There is a version of Kirk in the nexus, as real and original as the one that exited. Not an echo. Actually Kirk. That would work.
Superman, Spock are two cases. The resurrection of Kirk in THE RETURN works. There are many ways to make a legit resurrection, but the key is that the character IS the character that died, whether you prevent the death, or fix the death.
Another way perhaps could be with Kirk, if you use the nexus to bring him out a second time. There is a version of Kirk in the nexus, as real and original as the one that exited. Not an echo. Actually Kirk. That would work.
Superman, Spock are two cases. The resurrection of Kirk in THE RETURN works. There are many ways to make a legit resurrection, but the key is that the character IS the character that died, whether you prevent the death, or fix the death.
Even the idea of a clone as a copy is erroneous, a conceit of fiction that I wish would go away. A clone is an offspring. It's not your identical twin or your perfect Xerox duplicate -- it's your child, just reproduced asexually with no genetic material besides your own. A clone won't come out of some machine at exactly your age, but will have to gestate in a mother's womb (or artificial equivalent) and be born and grow up at the same rate as any other child. Also, a clone wouldn't be an exact duplicate of the progenitor, because epigenetic and environmental factors shape development in the womb and afterward. So there could be physical differences in things like height and build, as well as neurological and psychological differences. And of course their life experience would be different from yours, so they wouldn't be you, they'd be your son or daughter.
Orphan Black got this pretty much right. The clones looked alike, due to all being played by the same actress or actor, but they had totally distinct personalities and some biological and behavioral differences due to different developmental factors -- e.g. the Leda clones spanned the whole range of sexualities and genders from hetero to bi to lesbian to trans male. And they had different intellectual development too -- one was a genius, others more average in intelligence, and I think at least one was on the autistic spectrum or otherwise neurodivergent. It was a really good depiction of how epigenetics are as important to identity as the raw DNA code, and a good refutation of the myth of cloning as mere copying.
Granted, in sci-fi there are a variety of ways to create an exact physical duplicate of an adult in a short time, often including the mind as well as the body. But calling such things "clones" is inaccurate and misleading, so I wish we had a different term for those.
Here's my blog essay on the subject:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpre...quantum-teleportation-and-continuity-of-self/
It's not the body that matters, of course, but the mind. The question is whether the entity that steps out of the transporter is the same continuous entity as the one who stepped in rather than an exact duplicate. My essay offers a quantum-mechanical argument for why it is indeed the same continuous person, as it's always been portrayed within the franchise.
In general, that's the only thing I'd count as a genuine resurrection -- something that maintains quantum-entanglement continuity with the original mind, whether it's through a teleportation process or an upload of the mind into a computer or a robot's brain. If that continuity isn't there, then it's not the original person, just a copy that believes it is. The original person's existence would still have ended.
And the bonus of quantum entanglement is that it maintains that continuity even if a person's existence is discontinuous in time. If the quantum data is transmitted at lightspeed and takes years to arrive at the destination, or if it's stored on some kind of drive and then reconstituted years or centuries later, it's still the same continuous individual as long as the entanglement persists.
In a Trek context, I think this can work for telepathic mind transfers as well, since I tend to assume that Trek telepathy is also based in quantum entanglement.
Tom Riker.
The extra matter came from the nebula. Either he's not real or Will isn't, depending who got the fill-in atoms. Or both aren't.
Of course, you could just go further and admit the source of the matter doesn't make a blind bit of difference. Nor does the mind, if the neurons and their firing can be reproduced.
The only way it matters is if you believe in something that CAN'T be replicated technologically. A soul, perchance. But even then Tom and Will pose a problem - unlike Kirk's split transport, they aren't "one soul in two bodies" but exact duplicates (which then diverged but that's not down to the transporter).
The webcomic Schlock Mercenary deals with these existential issues quite well - first with the idea that "gate" tech replicates you each time, and the duplicate is killed but you have continuity (later causing issues when it's revealed one party is keeping gate duplicates to interrogate them for intel). Then with the idea of nanites in the body that routinely back up your mind to the cloud and thus you can be brought back even from total bodily destruction but might lose any experiences you had since your last backup.
Which leads to a poignant quote from one character about her dead husband being resurrected after they'd argued:
"He'll be my husband from yesterday - I want the one who apologized to me".
Identity isn't about what atoms make up your body. That changes all the time as you take in food, water, and air, as your cells metabolize what you take in and expel waste, as cells die and get replaced in most of the body. Identity is about your consciousness. It's about the organization of your neural network and the continuity of its ongoing processes. Identity is about information, not matter.
Look at it this way: If you beam up the matter of someone's body but their pattern is disrupted or erased in an accident, then what would materialize on the platform would be a dead lump of protoplasm. It would have the matter that made up the person but not the information defining how that matter was put together into a living, thinking being. So it's the information that makes them who they are. It follows, therefore, that if the same information, the transporter pattern, is used to assemble a different quantity of matter into the person being transported, then their identity is preserved even while the matter making them up has changed. (This is the principle behind quantum teleportation in physics. You're imposing one particle's information onto a different particle, but since information is identity, the second particle essentially becomes the first particle.)
Granted, quantum information can't be copied like classical information; it has to be destroyed in the original object in order to be transferred to a different object. So it shouldn't really work for creating two living copies of the same person. But we can assume some kind of Treknobabble weirdness going on.
Meh. The whole reason I wrote my blog essay was to find a way to address the question of identity that didn't rely on the cheat of invoking untestable, unprovable rhetorical constructs like "souls," but that relied strictly on testable, measurable things like quantum physics and continuity of information patterns.
Tom would simply be a mere imitation; one has to consider that Will--unlike Tom--was conceived, born and grew into adulthood at the point of the incident which created Tom. Conception takes precedence over initiation, so Will would always be the genuine article.
Then one could argue that while Kirk and his duplicate were the same soul occupying split matter, Tom was no better than the imitations seen in Carpenter's The Thing--in that film, there was no doubt the alien was duplicating human victims almost perfectly (including personality and memories--at least where relationships to companions were concerned), but that's where it ended. The Thing cannot reproduce the soul--the actual core of all that makes you...you--a human being. Its similar to Spock's regenerated body in Star Trek III - The Search for Spock: the Genesis effect may have resurrected his body, but without his katra, he was just a shell who was Spock in image only. Just a copy--like Tom Riker.
Really? Did the episode ever establish if it was the "original" or the "copy" that made it back to the ship?
The whole point was that there was no way to define that -- TG1 is simply wrong there. The single transporter pattern of Will Riker was doubled, with one copy being reflected by the barrier and the other copy getting through it. There was no meaningful way to define which one "came first," any more than you can define an "original" after a cell undergoes mitosis. They're both equally the original, or neither one is.
That was the crux of the drama in the episode -- the idea that the difference between them was arbitrary, that it was purely a flip of the coin which one got stranded on the planet and which one got the cushy life and career success. The entire thematic, philosophical, and emotional core of "Second Chances," the entire character arc of Tom Riker and his resentment of Will, was predicated on the fact that he had exactly as much claim to Will's life as Will had, and thus had every right to feel entitled to the life that Will got instead by the luck of the draw. So dismissing him as a mere copy is fundamentally missing the point of the narrative and of the character's motivation.
We were supposed to believe that the man named Will Riker from that point forward was the same one introduced in "Encounter at Farpoint", and that he was never the result of a transporter incident. The episode--and more importantly every episode to follow in the TNG part of the franchise never sold or confirmed the idea that the Riker audiences followed was what would become to be known as Tom Riker, and not the character introduced in TNG's pilot, unless someone can come up with some hard evidence that there was some in-universe confusion (among his companions) or confirmation going forward.
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None of this is apparent from the episode, or any statement by the writers of the episode.
Of course the Will we met in EAF is the one who made it back to the ship. That's not in debate. The question is whether that man was the original, or a copy, or neither AT THE TIME THE INCIDENT OCCURRED, which we only learn about AFTER Farpoint.
At the time the incident occurred, the transporter beam split into two utterly identical parts. The only difference is that one got out and one didn't. As I said, that was the whole narrative and emotional point of the story -- that they were both equally entitled to claim to be the original. If there were some simple, unambiguous way to say that one was the original and one wasn't, then the conflict wouldn't have existed. The question you ask was meant to have no answer. They are both equally the original, both equally entitled to the life that only one of them was lucky enough to get.
Indeed, the producers seriously considered killing off Commander Riker and having Frakes play Lieutenant (Tom) Riker from then on. The whole idea was that he was the same Riker, just having taken a different turn in life 8 years before.
