[extropy-chat] I keep asking myself...

[Neil H.]

FYI, it turns out I was thinking of James Patrick Kelly's "Think Like a
Dinosaur," which won the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. There's an
audio "Seeing Ear Theatre" version of it here:

http://www.scifi.com/set/playhouse/dinosaur/

On 4/5/06, Neil H. <neuronexmachina at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/5/06, Robert Bradbury <robert.bradbury at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > I agree with Ben (regarding what I do with my information is my
> > business).
> >
> > As an aside with a slight spoiler I'll note that I believe the old SciFi
> > novel "The Saga of the Cuckoo" has an interesting sub-plot involving how
> > uncomfortable a space explorer becomes with the idea of stepping into the
> > self-Xerox machine to make yet another copy of himself after having
> > witnessed a dozen or so of his previous copies fail to return from various
> > exploration missions.  The argument "Don't worry, you'll be the original"
> > only succeeds just so many times...
> >
>
> (There's also some slight spoilers in the message below)
>
> This also reminds me of a sci-fi short story. I don't recall the title,
> but it was in an anthology of hard sci-fi. The gist of it is that there's a
> "teleportation" technology, given to humans by extraterrestrials. This
> technology creates a duplicate copy of a person at some remote location, and
> when a signal is sent back confirming the copy, an operator sends radiation
> through the original's brain, instantly killing them. The extraterrestrials
> refer to the killing of the original as "balancing the equation," and
> consider it of utmost importance. Indeed, they believe that if a species
> doesn't have the "discipline" to kill off the original, they are unworthy of
> the teleportation technology.
>
>
> The plot in the story concerns the moral dilemma which arises when there's
> uncertainty about whether or not the copy was properly sent.
>
> -- Neil
>
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