Immortality, teleportation v.s. human consciousness and the soul

I'm not sure if this thread belongs here. It is a purely theoretical discussion with no basis in reality YET.

I have wondered about this question for a long time. In Sci-Fi, there are many instances of reducing a human to digital form or its basic component particles. Sometimes this is for transportation, like in Stargate or Star Trek, other times such as Sixth Day or Altered Carbon it's to achieve immortality. My question is, does the core human being survive the process?

I would never risk teleportation nor would I derive a sense of immortality just because my memories are stored in a "cortical stack" or flash drive.

My biggest worry is the consciousness that makes me me. If during transportation, my consciousness remains alert, it'll be like sending my consciousness (or soul) along with my component particles, I'd be happy with that. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, I die at the point of deconstruction. The new me that's reassembled at the other end may have the same memories, same understanding and the same person as far as the world is concerned, but i'm dead.

With the stored personality, that's even further off the mark. The point is especially brought home when you see there can be more than one copy of a person at one given time. And those people are concerned with their own interests and well being. That's just like a photocopy. Even if there's a copy of a document, it doesn't help the original piece of paper when you tear it up.

 

In current teleportation methods the original is destroyed as the copied state appears at the destination. Not good. In order to teleport the human body you need a capacity of information equal to what you can store on a dvd and then stacked a thrid of the way to the center of the galaxy.

It seems to me that you cannot teleport in the way dexribed by Star Trek but a wormhole has no such stricture. Now all you need is alot of energy and you can use wormholes instead.

 

Why teleport you and seven or eight lonely losers to the surface with nothing beyond what they can carry when you can fly in:

This
[image=http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/thumb/0/05/Theta-class_Shuttle.jpg/180px-Theta-class_Shuttle.jpg]

This
[image=http://www.vegatransports.com.au/starwars/SAGA/EP2_aotc_republic_gunship_wallpaper.jpg]


Or this
[image=http://www.imps101st.de/resources/ch8ships-2.jpg]


About the only benefit of the transporters from Star Trek is that it's sneaky and quick. Unfortunately, you're limited to what you can physically carry as a general rule and you're limited with how many people you can send by how big your transporter room is.




So, yep, speedy, well-armed shuttles are the way to go.

The Marines think so, too:

Dropship