One of the Star Trek franchise’s darkest questions gets a hilarious response in a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic. Star Trek is full of amazing, high-tech gadgets, such as warp drives and replicators. Perhaps the best known are transporters, allowing the crew to “beam” down to the surface of planets. This amazing device comes with a host of ethical questions, and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has provided a darkly comic answer.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal debuted the comic in a post on Instagram. A Starfleet crew member is preparing to transport somewhere. He asks the transporter chief if the device (here called a “teleporter”) will kill him when he beams down. The unfazed chief replies that it does. The crew member then tries to tease out the moral implications of this. The chief dismisses them, saying they skirt any ethical issues by asking the crew to beam down with a puppy. This makes them “puppy murderers” and they can “kill” the crew with no qualms.
The crew member is then asked to choose a puppy and step into the teleporter.
The Transporter Was a Necessary Evil
The transporter is one of the coolest technological advancements of Star Trek’s future. When Gene Roddenberry created Trek in the 1960s, he was faced with a dilemma: how to “land” the Enterprise. Lacking the budget needed to land the ship each week, the transporters were invented. These devices break a person down at the subatomic level, converting it into energy and information. Then this matter stream is sent to a location where the person is reassembled as they were before they stepped into the transporter. Some of the franchise’s best episodes have revolved around the transporter and the many potential mishaps that can arise.
In addition to these mishaps, the transporter’s existence has raised a number of scientific and philosophical questions. From a scientific perspective, the transporter is impossible, thanks to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. While the show has created a work around for this, they have never conclusively settled the transporter’s ethical questions. The transporter disassembles people into nothingness, effectively “killing” them. This means that a person “dies” every time they transport. While Star Trek has shown transporter accidents many times, it has shied away from the deeper ramifications of the transporter.
Star Trek’s Transporter is Cool—But Will It Kill You?
But Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has tackled this issue in a hilarious way. The hapless crew member beaming down asks the question that nearly all Star Trek fans have asked about the transporter. The nonplussed transporter chief adds another humorous layer to the cartoon, as does the puppy joke. The transporter is a potentially dark innovation, with a host of accompanying dilemmas. While Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is taking fans’ questions and jokes about the transporter to its logical (and dark) extreme, it nevertheless addresses the deeper, more metaphysical side of the Star Trek universe.
