6 Realities of Teleportation Star Trek Didn't Warn Us About
With most technologies, we can only guess what they will look like 1,000 years from now. We don't really even know what the "ultimate" video game or cellphone would even look like. We're waiting for the technology to show us. But everybody knows what the end point of transportation technology is: instantly being able to go anywhere, at any time. Just like Star Trek's transporters, where you can send a person from Point A to Point B just like sending an email.
So how far away are we from that? Well, it turns out that there are a few complications ...
#6. You're Carrying Trillions of Life Forms That Also Have to Be Transported
Of all the different types of teleportation that have been thought up in science fiction, they basically all involve disintegrating a human body, shooting it to another location as some kind of data signal and reintegrating it on the other side.
So that would imply that The Fly was onto something when it warned against stepping into a teleporter while something else is in there with you. Jeff Goldblum wound up in the pod with a single fly, but that was enough to confuse the machine, because it was only expecting Goldblum. Having to deal with two life forms instead of one, the system combined them, creating the horrifying human/fly monster.
Life finds a way.
But The Fly was playing it pretty conservative. If Goldblum tried out his machine in the real world, he would find his transporter trying to separate him not just from the fly, but from around 90 trillion other organisms. That's right, trillion. We don't even know how much that is.
Blauerauerhahn, Wikipedia Commons
These little guys have some prime real estate on your eyebrows.
That's because no matter how often you shower, your body is host to a ridiculous number of foreign organisms, from fungus that lives on your toes to viruses that live dormant in your system to mites that live on your eyelashes to the 300-cell-thick coat of bacteria on your teeth. And if you're thinking that all you need to do is develop some kind of better decontamination procedure, think again -- a lot of those microorganisms are your friends. You have bacteria in your gut that helps digest your meals. If you're a lady, your vagina is packed with little elves called vaginal flora that help protect you against yeast infections and other ladyborne diseases. All of that shit needs to make the teleporter trip with you, if you don't want to be extremely sick when you come out the other end.
Somehow, we expected vaginal flora to look more ... Smurfy.
We don't think it's a bad thing that The Fly didn't address these issues -- God knows we don't want to watch a film in which Jeff Goldblum turns into a giant vaginal flora or tinia fungus. The point is, a real process for breaking down a human and reassembling it at another location is way more complicated than it looks. Which brings us to the next problem ...
#5. The Computational Power Needed Is Mind-Boggling
If your transporter is going to break you down, beam you and reassemble you, then that means at the heart of the machine is a big computer that stores all that data, the exact arrangement of all of your molecules. So it's just like faxing someone across the country a picture of your naked ass, except that on this occasion you are faxing your actual ass.
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"There has got to be a better way to perform a colonoscopy."
Of course, faxing (or emailing, or texting) a two-dimensional image is pretty simple. The data you're sending only needs to keep track of every pixel in the image and where it's located. Teleporting your actual body would work on basically the same principle, but with atoms instead of pixels. And that's where things start to bog down, because actual material objects in reality exist in much higher "resolution" than your typical iPhone camera.
According to Wired, if we can assume that all the data we need to record the location of a single atom in your body, along with all the relevant information about that atom, can all fit on a single page of a document, then the amount of data required to catalog your entire body would be around 909 petabytes (one petabyte = one million gigabytes). Most new computers come with hard drives around 500 GB, so it'd take two million of your hard drives to store you. If you used every single gigabyte on every one of the 15 million iPads that Apple sold last year, you still wouldn't have enough capacity to store one dumb ass.
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We really need to stop signing off on all that mescaline for the Image Department.
Or, think of it this way. Facebook has 800 million users, and all of their billions of photos, videos and status updates take up about 30 petabytes on their servers, which are housed in multiple massive million-square-foot data centers. The storage needed to transport one human would take all of Facebook's corporate resources ... 30 times over. You'd need something akin to the cooling system of a nuclear power plant to run it.
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But on the plus side, inviting people to parties is way easier now.
But, hey, storage technology is always getting smaller, so maybe we're just a couple of decades away from that kind of storage being doable. But then we get down to the actual task of breaking you down, which becomes problematic when you consider ...
#4. The Energy in Your Body Can Blow Up the World
It's all well and dandy if you can record a blueprint of where all your body parts go, but you have to actually get your body over there, too, unless you want to spend the rest of your life on a computer (although, let's face it, you were probably going to do that anyway).
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That guy is totally copping a feel.
Your typical Star Trek-style transporter will zap your body into energy, teleport it to its location and then put it back together again, hopefully in the right order. That seems like the easy part after we fix the data storage problem, right? The problem is, when you convert a human body into energy, what pops out is the equivalent of 1,000 hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time.
To make sense of that, consider the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. How much material inside that bomb do you think actually exploded? The answer is less than a gram. The amount of energy locked up inside solid matter is incomprehensibly enormous. If you converted the mass of an entire adult human directly into energy, your biggest problem would be how to avoid leveling an entire continent. Never mind teleportation -- if we found a way to convert matter into energy like that, we'd probably sooner use it to build a bomb that would blow up the solar system.
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This is the human race. We weaponized dolphins. Doomsday devices are our specialty.
But let's continue to be optimistic. Let's say we find some way to safely harness and transport an apocalyptic amount of energy from one place to another. This task is far from finished, because you still have the problem of ...
Two words: Heisenberg Compensators.
Replywhoa wait a minute you think human will blow up like a nuclear bomb when use the teleportation? human have the energy but not that MUCH energy because if so human can lift the tank and throw it to your face and everyone can be a superman matter not same with energy because solid matter like 1 ton of iron or steel cannot turn on the generator to made electricity matter can change into an energy like gasoline to start the engine matter=energy just a theory
Replygo go reading comprehension failure!
To quote Seanbaby, "If the English language had a rape whistle, it would be blowing it right now."
Welp, that was the first of the very few times I'll ever hear vaginal flora referred to as "little elves."
ReplyI always thought teleportation by way of being turned into energy and blasted accross space with a huge-ass beam sounded kind of... unelegant.
ReplyBy the way, since the energy of thousands of suns is needed to teleport a single human -doesn`t that mean a single targeting failure would blow up the entire solar system you are teleporting around in?
A tiny bit of energy can be saved by leaving out viruses, fat cells, toxins, and unnecessary bacteria, dead skin cells, and the contents of the digestive systems. Though you'll come out healthier (albeit hungry), of course, the savings in resources will barely put a dent in the requirements. And the possibilities of errors. (computer thought one of my brain cells was a bacterium, so I couldn't remember how to swing a hammer)
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesAnd some people like their tubby tummies.
Aperture Science has the better idea: Think with portals. Once you've opened one, it's just a matter of keeping/leaving it open long enough to walk through. Or drive a car through. Or let a housemover tow your house through it, if you're 'moving house' to another country, or even another planet.
You shouldn't try to modify/remove the bacteria already inside your body, because a lot of them are beneficial bacteria that help you life processes, and also there is that problem of accidentally removing your cells if you try. Also, the skin cells on your skin are pretty much dead all the time.
A thought on the possibility of errors:
Mitochondria are almost like bacteria, since they may have had ancestors that actually were bacteria (before they got stranded inside of cells, tooling around as some kind of energy plant) so a single, little error could leave your reassembled self without them. Which would kill every single one of your cells horribly, leaving your body a lifeless husk shortly after teleporting. And as soon as new bacteria and stuff enter it, it will be a rotting husk.
So yeah, better leave those bacteria in there.
Actually, an error that leaves out a large amount of organelles is going to be a HUGE one. Not like huge consequences, but "holy s**t I couldn't believe you guys screwed up so bad in such a large scale and with such uniformity" huge.
Who needs to go through all this s**t when we could just improve and perfect teleportation via quantum entanglement. Herp derp. Also, if you own technology badass enough to scan over every atom on a human body, why not PROGRAM YOUR GODDAMN COMPUTERS TO TELL A HUMAN FROM THE SURROUNDING INORGANIC AIR PLUS THOSE TOO-SMALL-TO-BE-HUMAN ORGANIC BLOBS. I also facepalm at the assumption of a system of computers programmed to scan, relay and reconstruct the molecular structure of living organisms being able to somehow mutate said organisms in some horrible hybrid-ish way without human intervention. Hurr durr.
ReplyGetting sick of Apple product placement...
ReplyEveryone knows the way we'll get to teleport is by mastering the mysterious power of whatever the hell it is wormholes do.
ReplyOf course, we could just get our bodies to incredibly high energy levels that would allow us to achieve a quantum nature in our bodies. This way, as long as we were fired through a vacuum tube we could travel as waves to another point. Not an infinite range and there's the difficulty in y'know, surviving it... but theoretically possible!
Replylalalalala stargate!
I met Jonathan Frakes, once. Yes, I am bragging.
ReplyMy friends told me about---onenightcupid.c/o/m--. She told me it is the best place to seek casual fun and short-term relationship. I have tried. It is fantastic. There are tens of thousands cute guys and pretty girls. You wanna get laid tonight? Come in and give it a shot, you will find someone you like there. Have fun! LOL
ReplyMy friends told me about---onenightcupid.c/o/m--. She told me it is the best place to get viruses that will eventually wipe out your entire hard drive. I have tried. It is horrible. There are tens of thousands of dollars I spent on a new computer. You wanna do something stupid tonight? Come in and give it a shot, you will find out what it's like to live in the 19th century when computers are unheard of. Have fun! LOL
I liked the voyager episode when Tuvak and Neelix's molecules accidentally got mixed together in the transporter, Tuvix! a bit sad though
ReplyNot just sad. I thought Tuvix was right.
You cannot have the information of a position and momentum of an atomic particle due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, once you get some info from the particle, you change that particle and you cannot get the exact quantum state of the original particle. And that's a fundamental property of quantum systems, and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology, so sorry for the teletransporters...
Reply Hide All See All 6 RepliesHowever, you may only need to know the position of each atom to, say, the nearest angstrom, and you may not need to know the exact energy/quantum state.
The degreee of accuracy of measurement of each side of Heisenberg's equation that is required for teleportation *may* not exceed what is allowed by the uncertainty.
In other words, you have to copy yourself pretty accurately, but it doesn't matter if your DNA coils are a nanometre out of place for example.
On the other hand, it is possible that you are completely right and teleportation of humans is impossible in this universe.
It's also possible that by the time we've created technology capable of teleportation, we'll also have created technology capable of measuring particles without affecting their state.
You're talking about hundreds or even thousands of years into the future. Think about it, five hundred years ago we thought diseases were caused by "bad blood." I think it's fair to say that we're not capable of making those kinds of predictions.
The uncertainty principle might stop us from determining the exact state of a particle now, but give it a few centuries and it might be completely irrelevant.
*clears throat*
NEEEEERDS!!!
*clears throat*
Yes, Mr Nnoitra, we are nerds, so we have that going on.
Nerdy people are indeed, nerds. You on the other hand have no applicable descriptors, what shall we call you? Some guy? Random nobody? Turns out there isn’t a word for people who have had absolutely no impact on anything.
You have my permission to return to your empty life now to shout at pre-teens down your xbox headset whilst supressing dreams of being someone else.
@p1t10
Post of the Year.
In summation: SCIENCE RULES!
"...the amount of data required to catalog your entire body would be around 909 petabytes."
ReplyIt's simple, we just pack the data inside a .rar folder.
BOOM! Problem solved.
beautiful, although technically you don't need to convert the matter into energy - you just need to convert it into information.
Replyand the same backwards -> information into matter.
we already have something sort of like this, its called a '3d printer'. we can already print plastic copies of people's bodies. if you stick in 3d-tomography, you can print plastic copies of people's innards too.
if you combine that some folks are trying to 'print' actual biological chemicals, like proteins etc, then you are in the same ballpark.
no nuclear fusion required. in theory.
I think what he's saying is that you would be converted into information, and that information would be sent via energy.
Right now all our wireless technology functions by sending and receiving various types of waves, and waves are just oscillations caused by the transmission of energy.
Thus reinforcing the theory that it would'n be you on the other side...
You could have saved all that just by linking to the book "The Physics of Star Trek."
ReplyClearly the best way of teleportation is to use Xen as something of a dimensional slingshot. We've recently figured out how to use Xen as an unexpressed axis so we can swing around the borderworld and come back to local space without having to pass through. Something the Combine still hasn't mastered, but we've taken into account the dark energy equations and applied them to our Calabi-Yau model and that, well, that puts us one step ahead of the Combine in teleportation technology now doesn't it?
ReplyFinally, a truly realistic approach on teleportation.
Replyre #1: it'll also make everyone immortal.
Replythink about it. why do you have to destroy the original? in fact, why do you have to get rid of the data?
every time you die, just get someone to fire up the receiving end of a teleportation machine and reassemble a younger, back-up copy of yourself. done.
and the richest, most ruthless bastards (dictators, bank CEOs, etc) will probably be the first to be able to afford one.
who cares about having immortal clones? you're dead either way
For #1, think of the possibilities for murder. I can murder someone, jump into a teleporter and argue in court that the real murderer has already been destroyed while I'm a completely new and innocent human being.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesWHOA
*bong noise*
except you have all your memories and the same brain so you are the same person. philosophy doesn't matter in court.
You'd still be a perfect copy of a killer. You'd still be dangerous in the eyes of society.
Could be solved by passing legislation that teleported you is still legally you.