freelance paradigm

It is amazing what goes trough one's mind when one finds it difficult to sleep. One thing that buggs me lately is teleportation. Of course this is more or less a fictional thing (in my opinion because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, by which it becomes impossible to locate particles).
But let's just say it is possible. In most of the sci-fi cases, the person being teleported is usually disintegrated in the process. Perhaps that is not necessary. Imagine a 30 years old scientist beging sent to a planet that is 15 light years away. His body is being scaned here on Earth and the information then travels 15 years to that planet, presumably that there alredy is a technology in place to reproduce his body based on the information that is sent. As he is being "printed" there, his original is already 45. For the copy it was only a split of a second.
The copy then conducts some research and starts sending the data back to Earth. When the first data arrives, the original is already 60! Let's say that after 5 years of research, the copy wants to "go back" and train some future copys for this planet. He is being scaned again and the signal is sent back to Earth. Now while the original copy stays and lives there, the signal carying information about his body travels 15 years back to Earth. When the copy of the copy is printed on Earth, the original is already 65 (30+15+5+15) and the first copy is 50 (30+5+15), while for the copy of the copy it was again only 5 years since departure from Earth and therefore he feels 35. Imagine the conversation between those two who are then on Earth (65 & 35 version).

Now; there is a hard question of whether or not the copy is the same person. The atoms used to make the copy are "not the same" as the atoms creating the original. Well; it turns out, that our body completly changes ALL of it's atoms every 7 years as we eat food, go to toilet and also reproduce our cells. You can think about an event that happened 7 or more years ago and try to picture yourself there... Well, none of the atoms in your current body were acutally there, but your identity and it's continuity remains valid. We are more or less like waves on the sea surface that travel trough space and time, but the watter of which they consist always changes (from the wave's perspective). From the perspective of the watter, each wave is just a temporary state... The same might be said for our body which is just a temporary state of the matter, while from our perspective we carry an individual identity, whatever the matter is building us. So yes; the reproduced copy is exactly the same person and if you were sent there (and perhaps even disintegrated here on Earth), you wouldn't suffer. You are doing it all the time. But after that, a copy finds him self in the new environment with new experiences which define him in a completly new way. So at the end we have 3 scientists with the same memory utill their 30's but different future.

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