Information is easier to move than matter. A good way to travel between the stars would be if you had a matter scanner at one end, an instant information transmitter, and a matter assembler at the other end. Then you could fax yourself across the galaxy. James Patrick Kelly’s award-winning 1995 story “Think Like A Dinosaur” revolves around this idea. More specifically, it’s about what happens to your original once you’ve assembled a copy somewhere else.
I’m re-reading Clifford Simak’s 1963 novel Way Station for the first time since I was a boy. To my surprise I find in ch. 12 that he’s got this interstellar transportation method too. He just notes that your original dies, but doesn’t specify how. I wonder if he was the first to come up with the concept.
Funnily, Simak has a dualistic view of mind and body: “Moments ago the creature in the tank had rested in another tank in another station and the materialiser had built up a pattern of it – not only of its body, but of its very vital force, the thing that gave it life.”