Coronavirus Pandemic Effect on Movie Plots in the Future?

[Marcel Birgelen]

Frank,
I think you might have seen a movie as the story you describe was in a film. The magician did kill the original and therefore kept the duplicate. He was found out when he duplicated a hat and the original was found in a nearby field. Ran that film but can't remember the title.

This movie:

Also, the plot of the Prestige contains a transportation device that duplicates people, invented by a fictional Nikola Tesla.

Well... If Star Trek's transporters were real it would be possible to use their "bio-filter" feature to eliminate this virus pandemic. Wouldn't it?

Let's call Scotty and ask if he can run the entire population of Earth through a transporter.

In regards to Star Trek, I have bigger problem with the food replicators than the transporter. If it is possible to create something, including complex organics like food, from essentially nothing, that changes the whole dynamic of a civilization. Most employment will disappear and everything that drives our economy would disappear. Not everybody can be a scientist, explorer, etc. Knowledge for knowledge sake only goes so far.

If I remember correctly, the idea is that it comes from energy. Energy and matter, are, to some extend, interchangeable. It's not that it's easy to do so, but it's what happens in an atomic bomb for example. The idea is somewhat comparable to a transporter, simply replaying a "program". Only the input energy isn't humans sequenced into photons... or whatever happens in such a transporter-thingy.

Also, if we're living in a society where we don't need humans to do actual work to provide for all basic needs, do we need something like our current economy? You could even say that our own economy is a particular fragile construct, as we've managed to crash it pretty badly at least twice within less than 20 years...

[Randy Stankey]

Let's call Scotty and ask if he can run the entire population of Earth through a transporter.

But, if people were getting from one country to another using transporters instead of airplanes, the virus would not have been able to spread in the first place. There might have been a few isolated cases but the disease wouldn't have spread from country to country so quickly. Those who did get sick could have used transporters to neutralize the virus when their numbers were just a handful.

Some people would have gotten sick but there wouldn't have been a worldwide pandemic.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Call the President! Everybody should go to work using a transporter only from now on.

Honestly, even if you have something like a working transporter, something actively messing with the "stream of energy" that represents essentially your entire body... scary stuff.

[Randy Stankey]

You and Bones should get together for a couple of drinks.

But, yeah, seriously scary stuff!

[Marcel Birgelen]

I think Bones was a pretty well-written character and I'd love to have a chat with him sometime... hopefully quite far in the future though.