Teleportation: will it ever be a possibility?

[Soph0571]

Star Trek has a lot to answer for. Not content to tease us with unreasonable expectations of phasers and warp drive, it also thrust into the popular imagination the idea of teleportation, in which we step into a giant scanner of some sort and instantaneously find ourselves somewhere else, mind, body and soul intact (and hopefully, unlike Jeff Goldblum, untainted).

Theoretically, there are really only two ways this can(’t) be done – physical deconstruction at x and reconstitution at y, or the translation of one’s person into data to be transmitted, then reconverted into matter, like some organic fax machine.

Impossible? In 1993 an international group of six scientists, showed that perfect teleportation is possible in principle, or at least not against the laws of physics. More recently scientists both in the US and China have been trying. Just last year, Chinese scientists were able to “teleport” photons to a satellite 300 miles away, using a phenomenon called “quantum entanglement”. Simply put this “spooky action at a distance” (as Einstein dubbed it) is where a pair of photons are able to simultaneously share the same state, even when separated by vast distances. Change the state of one particle, and weirdly, the other changes too, with no detectable connection.

[link:https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/12/teleportation-will-it-ever-be-a-possibility|

Beam me up Scotty

[exboyfil]

1. What can be done at the quantum level

may not necessarily be possible on a macroscopic level. The old analogy of the probability of a car passing through a wall comes to mind. It has a probability, it is just vanishingly low.

You would have to hold the nature and position of every atom in a human body in memory and reconstitute it using the available elements at the transportation location. That is 7*10^27 atoms. I doubt we will ever have imaging technology sufficient to even construct such a map, let alone the storage capacity to hold it.

[DetlefK]

2. Even if it were theoretically possible, it wouldn't be technologically feasible:

Let' say, you want to teleport 1 kg of meat. Meat consists of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, sulphur, chloride... If we take an average atomic weight of 12g per mol, that's about 80 mol of atoms.

1 mol is 6.022*10^23 atoms, so your piece of meat would consist of roughly 5*10^25 atoms.

And to rebuild that piece of meat after teleport you have to make sure that each atom lands at exactly the right coordinates.
* That's about 1.5*10^26 bytes of information. That's 15,000,000,000,000 TB of data.
* With an accuracy of at least 10^-11 m in space and 10^-12 s in time.
* In the right order, or else the atoms that are already there will chemically react with other atoms before the rest of the body arrives.

If you fail, you have reconstructed a piece of meat that's toxic or contains prions or contains cancer.





And that's just for the case if we can teleport atoms wholesale. If we have to transport electrons separately, it gets even worse.

And if we have to teleport nucleons separately, mishaps would lead to nuclear hijinks.

[Kilgore]

3. Forget about teleportation

I want a food replicator,

Hot pastrami on rye, brown mustard, a dab of horseradish, and a frosty mug of IPA.

[Cicada]

4. Light speed, not just a good idea, it's the law

We can immediately influence something in some other place, forcing it to reify from a state of uncertainty, but we can’t instantly move it from here to there.