You are technically correct, the best kind of correct :-) The Culture uses displacers for "teleportation" and sentient beings usually don't use them to travel.

You are technically correct, the best kind of correct :-) The Culture uses displacers for "teleportation" and sentient beings usually don't use them to travel. I agree that the stories could have gone into a lot more depth about the consequences of backups. Surely there are Orbitals out there populated with 10 million copies of the same backup original. Those were never written about. (Other SF authors have written stories in that vein.) The pervasive embrace of death-proofing is still a notable part of the Culture. Star Trek was very small-c conservative about showing radical changes to the human condition -- even changes that seemed to easily follow from their available technologies. That could be because radically changed conditions don't offer as much opportunity for commenting on the realities of the present. Or perhaps because the writers didn't want to lose the audience. Or because it's more difficult (though possible!) to write dramatically gripping stories when death itself is only a temporary inconvenience for the protagonists. I feel like the Culture series is a joyful rebuke to the common SF theme that there are some things man was not meant to know or tamper with. They'll meddle with everything and only rarely does it backfire. There are a few spectacular failures along the way, as with the Chelgrians. Even employing post-scarcity everything and the best of intentions, the outcomes aren't always good. But on balance the Culture does far more good than a default policy of non-intervention. Readers might inappropriately translate the ethos of the Culture into real life. The New Atlantis article touches on this. If the Culture uses secret agents and a judicious touch of firepower to improve lives across the galaxy, why can't citizens of prosperous democratic nations also liberate people living in dictatorships/theocracies/other bad circumstances? (Because we are only human, not Minds, would be my answer. So our forceful interventions are much less likely to avert more suffering than they cause.)