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."

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.

3

Signal Interference

You know how, when a storm blows over, your television gets a little fuzzy and your cellphone reception isn't quite as good? It turns out that beaming a signal from one place to another isn't an exact science. For your television, it means the sound might stutter on one out of every seven jokes on The Big Bang Theory. For teleportation, it might mean that you reach your destination with your arms growing out of your eye sockets.

Or your unitard gets left floating in subspace.

Geo-orbit.org describes many of the myriad problems we have in trying to get a good signal from one point to another. The aforementioned problem is known as "rain fade," or what happens when you try to fire a signal horizontally through a bunch of shitty weather. It doesn't work out so well.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Even if you're teleporting through open space, the sun might decide to kick your ass thanks to solar flares, which is what happens when the sun gets drunk and vomits a wave of energy through the solar system, disrupting radio signals and ruining the day of anyone who is unwittingly teleporting through it.

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Aaaaaand there goes the Class of 2498.

2

Reassembly Costs a Ridiculous Amount of Energy

You made it! The last step is to take your disintegrated form and reassemble it into a healthy human being. The only thing you need to do now is find more energy than you can possibly imagine.

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This might be enough juice to move a kneecap.

1

What Comes Out Isn't You

We'll have to get a little philosophical here, but a movie analogy might help. In The Prestige, where Batman and Wolverine fought over a teleportation device invented by David Bowie, Wolverine wound up using it to perform magic tricks. But really, he was committing suicide every time and just creating a clone of himself, because magic is that important. Our transporter is going to do the same.

If someone has to die for our entertainment, we want it to be a magician.

Think of the fax machine analogy we used earlier. Our teleportation device is a fax machine that spits out a three-dimensional "document." But it is still a copy (or a facsimile -- that's what "fax" is short for, after all) of the original.

The original got destroyed.

Ta-da!

So the question becomes, is what steps out the other end you, or just an exact copy of a now-dead you? How do you transport human consciousness from one point to another, and how do you know you're not just stepping into a murder machine so that some other jerk with your DNA and memories can take over your life? It's a difficult question to answer, because science doesn't really know what consciousness is yet.

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"Alright, we've conclusively determined it isn't a Jell-O."

Some scientists think it will be possible someday to transfer your mind from one place to another, but even they admit that "consciousness" is a nebulous and ill-defined experience. If you're the religious type or just otherwise believe in the soul, at what stage is the soul getting transported? Is your ghost screaming through space along the beam of your disintegrated body? If you don't believe in the soul, then how are we keeping intact the chain of consciousness that links the person you are when you go to bed tonight with the person you will be when you wake up tomorrow? As common knowledge will tell you, when the brain stops, consciousness ends. So unless you find a way to keep that part of you on life support while you step into a machine that melts your brain into a ribbon of energy, then you're dead the moment you hit the switch.

If you say that it doesn't really matter, that this is all philosophical navel-gazing that can never have an answer ("Where IS human consciousness, anyway, man?" *bong noises*), then ask yourself what happens if they simply provide the machine with enough raw material to spit two of you out the other end (you know, like in that Star Trek: TNG episode with two Rikers). Or, what if the reassembly end of the transporter grabs the wrong instructions out of the database, like it accidentally grabs the blueprints of some other dude with a similar name, and accidentally puts you together as him (complete with his personality, his memories, etc.)? Or, what if a few brain cells get misplaced and suddenly you came out the other end an intolerable asshole?

To be honest, none of those other possibilities are as terrifying as the thought of two Rikers.

All we're saying is that the very first person who ever steps into one of these machines had better have some serious balls.

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