Why I'd never use a Star Trek transporter

Every fan of Star Trek is familiar with the transporter, which 'beams' people into a new adventure every week.

Gene Rodenberry invented the transporter as a plot device to get the 'away' team down to a planet's surface before the prop makers had delivered any shuttles for filming. He was also concerned at the time needed to show, each week, the crew embarking on a shuttle, traveling, landing and disembarking, before moving the story on.

Gene never intended to explain how the transporter works, in the same way that the warp engines are just so much technobabble. However, program episodes have included enough detail to give some idea of how the technology is supposed to work.

And I, for one, will NEVER step into a transporter. Why?

Well, the machine scans every molecule in your body and uses advanced computer tech to map their 3D locations. It then destroys your body and converts the atoms into an energy beam ("Beam me up, Scotty"). Now, hold on a second... you die when that happens. I know it sends your energy/atoms and instructions to another location to reconstruct your body, BUT YOU HAVE ALREADY DIED. That's enough for me. And Doctor McCoy speculated on exactly this point on more than one occasion. He said he'd died the first time he used a transporter, and only a copy of him had been around ever since.

So what happens at 'your' destination? The energy and instructions reconstruct an exact duplicate of your body with all the molecules, brain synapses, a complete consciousness, etc, all working fine. So you've arrived? Well to my thinking, a COPY of you has arrived. An incredibly detailed copy, but still a copy. It thinks like you did, everyone thinks it's you, but it's a copy.  Do you remember the episode of ST:TNG when they discovered a duplicate Riker? He'd been copied in a transporter malfunction. So there were two of him, both thinking he was the original.

Supposing you had a laser photocopier which produced exact duplicates of any page put in it, but which destroyed the original during the process. To create a copy of, say, a letter, you would actually need two copies as the original is destroyed. Now, would you refer to one of those copies as the original letter, the original piece of paper you started with? Of course not.

It's the same with the transporter. The original object (or person) is destroyed, and a copy produced elsewhere.

You won't get ME using one of these machines!

By the way, I still love Star Trek, even if the tech is impossible.