Why you should back up your state vector
Imagine, if you will, the streets of $UNNAMED_LARGE_CITY at 9 AM.
You're walking along the sidewalk, oblivious to what is about to happen. Businessmen and women walk along, doing what they usually do.
Suddenly, a large black sedan pulls up on the other side of the street. A window scrolls down. Then, a hail of bullets blast outwards from a stolen assault rifle.
Your chest is in the middle of it. You die.
Let's see how that would have worked had you backed up the
state vector of your mind. This
state vector contains every piece of
information about your mind at any given time. In fact, let's go further. Let's say that you have a device on you capable of taking the state vector of your mind and
uploading it to a
remote server via
Wi-Fi, instantly.
Imagine, if you will, the streets of $UNNAMED_LARGE_CITY at 9 AM.
You're walking along the sidewalk, oblivious to what is about to happen. Businessmen and women walk along, doing what they usually do.
Suddenly, a large black sedan pulls up on the other side of the street. A window scrolls down. Then, a hail of bullets blast outwards from a stolen assault rifle.
When the first bullet hits you, the device detects the rupturing of, say, your right lung. It instantly takes a 'snapshot' of your mind, stores it as a quantum state vector, and then beams it off to the nearest Wi-Fi mast. From there it is sent to a remote server. Meanwhile, you've just had 250 rounds of supersonic gunfire emptied into you. You die.
A week later, the state vector of your mind is retrieved from the server and downloaded into a body cloned from some cells they found on the remains of your foot. You live.
Backing up your state vector is imperative if you are a quantum mechanic, seeing as that job will require you to (among other things) actually perform the Schrodinger's Cat experiment, and of course test the Wigner's Friend hypothesis.