You have been chosen to go on a very important mission to Mars. You have no choice in this matter, you must go. But you can choose your means of transport. One method is teletransportation. You will step into a scanner here on earth which will destroy your brain and body, while recording the exact states of all your cells. This information will then be transmitted to a replicator on Mars. Travelling at the speed of light, the message will take three minutes to reach its destination. The replicator will create, out of new matter, a brain and body exactly like yours. The person on Mars will look like you, think like you, in fact be indistinguishable from you. He or she will certainly feel as though they have merely fallen asleep on Earth and then woken up on Mars. This method is 100 per cent reliable. The other choice is to go by spaceship. This is very risky and there is 50 per cent chance that the ship will not complete the journey and you will die in transit. But if you do successfully take the spaceship, then your body and brain won't at any stage have been destroyed. You must make the choice which you think will give yourself the biggest chance of surviving.
Which option would you choose: the teletransporter or the spaceship? Explain why. Which of the four criteria of personal identity discussed in class are you using in defending your choice? Why is your choice better than the alternative option?