Life is bigger

Kirk never actually said "Beam me up, Scotty" did he? One of those great television and movie misquotes, like "Me Tarzan, You Jane".

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On the Star Trek transporter technology:

let's not forget that Dr. McCoy was opposed in principle to the thing

Good point! But then again he was 100 Bones points and 0 Spock points, that mentality could keep one in the dark ages for sure :-)

Would the incidence of adultery skyrocket as people saw a loophole and could have sex with someone else who wasn't really someone else?

Of course, but then again I believe that marriage will become a dead institution, no-one will get married anymore so by definition there will be no adultery. I was talking to the young girls about marriage at the weekend, they were asking why people did it. I was very careful in my answer, I want to minimalize the passing on of any prejudices. I said that people have a tendency to "couple up". I also said that when I first got married I did it because that was the "done thing". Societal pressure. I never really thought about what I was doing, I just went along with the expectations of the world. I asked them to try to consider everything before taking such a step. I warned them not to get attached to the idea that you'll be with one person all of your life. I guess I want to show them the danger of all Bones and no Spock points, which is one of the reasons "we fall in love". Then we discussed "what is love" and we got back to your putting someone else's desires in front of your own in the pecking order. I just made it clear to them that things always change in this world so don't get attached to any one thing.

Between you and me I don't know why humans have a desire to couple up, if only at least for a while. I suspect it's driven out of the procreation cycle if I am honest, although I see a dependency between many men and women that I find odd, like "I couldn't live without him (or her), she/he is my soul mate" or "It's us against the world". I think that one of the reasons I never stayed married was I never thought that, or even wanted that. To me it's not natural, to me it's natural to have a lot of different "friends" let's not even call them partners, but that is not how the world or people are wired. As a parent you want your children to be happy, and -- speaking from experience -- it seems to me that the ultimate root of happiness is to not get attached to things or ideas, but don't forget to experience and enjoy life along the way, the two are not mutually exclusive.

Could people be transported and stored

This might be ultimately connected to the question of "do we live in an analog or a digital Universe?" If the former then I would say "no", like when you make a recording of a live concert to an mp3, if the Universe is analog in nature then there is always something lost in the recording, no bit rate is high enough to capture the event. On the other hand, if the Universe is digital -- quantized -- then you can make an exact recording with a high enough bit rate. Then again, is there a "good enough" bit rate where the facsimile of the person still feels like a person? But what about "you"? If you were asleep and made a copy of yourself, which one would be "you" when they both woke up? The original or the copy or both? And who would go to Heaven? :-)

I wonder, would people spread out or come together?

Well - even if it turns out that the Universe is analog and the disassembly and reassembly of a human is impossible then there is still a way that instant transportation could happen and that is through "wormholes" -- or 4D shortcuts across 3D space. If you take the 2 and 3D analogy of a table napkin, if you live on the napkin in 2D and want to go from corner to corner you trek all the way across the napkin. If suddenly you have knowledge of 3D space you can curve the napkin so that the corners are touching and just hop across "the gap". To a 2D napkin dweller you would have instantly travelled from corner to corner. If you take that analogy to 3 and 4D space (the latter which we have physical evidence for) you get a transportation device that you can travel through, which has the same effect as a Star Trek transporter, but without the disassembly of your personage.

So imagine a house where each of the rooms is in a different country, I think that would happen. Each doorway would be a 4D portal - so the living room in Texas perhaps, one of the bedrooms in Paris, a toilet in Msocow, I don't know. So people would be spread out by physical distance but we would think of physical distance in a different way, because we would all be within immediate reach of eachother, so the question might be a non-starter.

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I've been able to articulate my distress about what I see the local church doing to the kids, it's this .... "Don't trust any religion that gets most of it's converts before their brains have fully developed"