Is This a Good Idea? Teleportation

May 02, 2009

Beam me up, Scotty! What if life was actually like Star Trek, and we actually had a device like the Starship Enterprise’s Transporter  that could de-materialize our bodies, beam information about our exact atomic configuration to a distant location, and then instantly reassemble us there?

Keep reading...There's more!!

    Obviously, teleportation would have some awesome benefits as a form of transportation. You’d always have plenty of time for that second cup of coffee in the morning, since your commuting time to work would be reduced to, well, some imperceptibly small fraction of a second. For lunch, you could eat a salad made from vegetables harvested on another continent an hour before.

We could convert airports into solar farms, as we wouldn’t have any need for jetliners anymore. You might spend less time Web surfing, too, since in the time it would take to gaze enviously at someone else’s Hawaii vacation photos, you could actually just beam yourself to Waikiki Beach and dip your toes in the water.

But enough with the silly stuff.

Even with the assumption that the technology would have some distance limitations — that is, that we couldn’t beam ourselves from Earth to the surface of the moon or another planet — teleportation might dramatically advance space travel.

Transporting materials into space via teleportation would be even easier than it would be with a space elevator, so we could build gigantic interplanetary or even interstellar spacecraft in orbit. And to take a leaf from Star Trek, they wouldn’t have to land on distant planets, because it would be possible to beam astronauts and equipment down to the surface.

Teleportation could have some glaring disadvantages, too. What if it turns out to require an enormous amount of energy? And how safe would the teleportation process be? You wouldn’t want to end up like the scientist in the 1958 horror movie The Fly, who emerges from his experimental teleportation device with an insect’s head and limbs. Or like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, who in a TV episode was accidentally split into good and evil versions of himself. But the biggest problem with teleportation, of course, is that a practical means of teleporting isn’t even close to being invented yet, though some scientists assert that it is at least theoretically possible.

Teleportation has been around for a long time in the world of science fiction. Edward Page Mitchell’s 1877 short story “The Man Without a Body” describes how an inventor used a machine called the “teleprop” to transmit a cat through telegraph lines. (Unfortunately, when he tries it on himself, his power runs out, leaving him as a disembodied head.) Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1928 story “The Disintegration Machine” explores teleportation’s world-changing potential:

There is a Latvian gentleman named Theodore Nemor living at White Friars Mansions, Hampstead, who claims to have invented a machine of a most extraordinary character which is capable of disintegrating any object placed within its sphere of influence. Matter dissolves and returns to its molecular or atomic condition. By reversing the process it can be reassembled. The claim seems to be an extravagant one, and yet there is solid evidence that there is some basis for it and that the man has stumbled upon some remarkable discovery. I need not enlarge upon the revolutionary character of such an invention, nor of its extreme importance as a potential weapon of war. A force which could disintegrate a battleship, or turn a battalion, if it were only for a time, into a collection of atoms, would dominate the world.

Teleportation also figures in Alfred Bester’s classic 1956 sci-fi novel The Stars My Destination, in which people have an ability to “jaunte,” or transport themselves without special equipment, simply by tapping into an obscure structure in their nerve cells. (Stephen Gould’s 1993 novel Jumper, the basis for a 2008 movie, also envisions teleportation by mind power. 

For a long time, however, scientists believed that teleportation would never make the jump from fiction to reality, because it was thought to violate the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. By that view, it would be impossible to extract enough information from an object to make a perfect copy, because the more accurately an object is scanned, the more it is disturbed by the scanning process, until it reaches a point where the object’s original state has been completely disrupted.

In the 1990s, however, physicist Charles H. Bennett and a team of IBM researchers figured out a theoretical means of getting around this problem, by utilizing something known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. As an article on IBM’s Web site explains:

In brief, they found a way to scan out part of the information from an object A, which one wishes to teleport, while causing the remaining, unscanned, part of the information to pass, via the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, into another object C which has never been in contact with A. Later, by applying to C a treatment depending on the scanned-out information, it is possible to maneuver C into exactly the same state as A was in before it was scanned. A itself is no longer in that state, having been thoroughly disrupted by the scanning, so what has been achieved is teleportation, not replication.

A few years after that, in 1998, Caltech physicists used quantum entanglement to scan a photon, an energy particle, and replicate it in another location a meter away, while the original was destroyed.  Since then, other physicists have managed to teleport photons as far as 89 miles. In 2004, two independent teams of researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology each successfully teleported atoms.

However, teleporting an entire human being is a vastly more difficult challenge. As Edward H. Farhi, director of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics, explained in a 2008 article in New Scientist:

"That really is pretty far down the line," he said. "A living creature probably has 1030 [1 followed by 30 zeros] particles in it, and to get all the information about that to some distant location looks really pretty formidable. I cannot see that as something in the reasonable future."

    That said, Farhi went on to note that if it was someday possible to teleport a person down to the quantum state of each of their atoms from point A to point B, the teleported person at point B should have exactly the same thoughts and memories as the person whose quantum state had ceased to exist at point A.

    So there you have it. Is teleportation our future mode of transportation? Or will it always remain just another sci-fi plot device? Express your opinion below.

And if you love reading about the science behind your favorite TV shows, check out Science Channel's new blog Remote Possibilities.

Comments

[Astroboy]

The thing I really like about Star Trek are those doors in the Enterprise that slide open automatically as they walk through.

[Skeptic]

It's hard to imagine them perfecting this to the point where it would become a practical form of transportation.

[Caffeine Driven Stress Magnet]

I don't want to end up like the guy in "The Fly."

[Sheila]

Personally...I'd love this. Could cut the commute down to seconds.

[afisher]

it's always been a dream

[Mr. Roboto]

miliseconds, you mean!

[Jim Rock]

Is this even possible?

[Patrick Kiger]

At least theoretically, yes. The trick would be to find a way to scan an reassemble something as big as a human being (10 to the 30th power worth of particles). That may seem daunting, but if you described a laptop computer with a dual processor and 4 gigs of memory to somebody in 1970, they would have thought the same thing.

[Travis F.]

If you could go back to 1970, it would be more amazing than teleportation.

[Edward Martin III]

I think, if any sort of teleportation ever comes about, there's going to have to be some huge energy change issues with which to contend. Even on a single planet, at the most extreme, consider what happens if you teleport from the equator, where you are revolving around 900 miles an hour, to Antarctica, where you are revolving at a much, much lower speed.

Momentum's conserved.

So, you'll either slam into the chamber walls at 900 mph (that's gonna leave a mark), or the system converts that energy into something else -- and usually that something else is heat. How much heat does a 100 kilo human traveling at 900 mph contain?

Quite a lot.

SO, these problems will have to be solved, and I suspect they won't be trivial.

A more philosophical question that will have to be solved is the difference between TRANSPORTING and COPYING. If you make an identical COPY somewhere, is it cricket to destroy the "original" to make it a TRANSPORT, or should you just be cool with having an extra person identical to you running around on another planet, or on Hawaii. Sending you his photos.

I guess if the teleportation booths or chambers or whatever, kept a supply of "raw materials" they could always build a human being, and then the "transmitter" would reduce the existing human being back to raw materials for the next time someone is sent.

That can get creepy.

[Patrick Kiger]

hey, Edward. Thanks for raising some really insightful points. I wonder about the energy requirements as well.

[SuperNova186k]

I have actually considered this issue quite extensively and have come to the following conclusions: First of all, the prospect of teleportation is rather daunting. Scariest of all is the fact that you would be disassembled for the ride. Forget the power requirements and potential (“The Fly”) hazards, the fact that for a fraction of a second the original “you” would be disintegrated and an exact replica of “you” would be created leads to a whole host of questions and problems.

The solution is relatively simple. Rather than teleportation, why not transportation? Any advanced technology that can “warp” space-time to move a large ship from place to place, should be able to “warp” people and objects as well. Consider that warp drive is simply (again, relatively) a matter of folding space. You elongate the space behind the ship and contract the space in front of the ship. Easy, right?

Then why couldn’t we simply warp the space that a human occupies until it is small enough to travel on a beam of energy? Once the beam reaches the destination, simply unfold the space and the human has arrived. With advances in imaging and computation, it should be a matter of scanning the human in real time and folding only the space they occupy. Certain concessions will have to be made for the air they’re breathing and the vacuum created when they are folded as well as the increase in pressure wherever they arrive, but these are petty if we could actually warp fold space.

The beauty of such a solution is that A) it would still be the original “you” when you arrive and B) on the odd chance a fly tagged along, you’d still arrive as separate organisms.

[Patrick Kiger]

Thanks for a fascinating and insightful post. I'm going to do another blog on the idea of a warp drive at some point soon.

[Becky Peeling]

Think of the possibilities of teleporting food or medicine to the starving and ill. But I expect that the acceptance curve will be huge.

[Patrick Kiger]

hey Becky! Nice to hear from you...

[Brian]

Ok, so with the whole disintegration of your body and recopying it in another area, the major problem here: you would die. This is a machine that tears you to atomic pieces and then makes a "new you" somewhere else. The "new you" would act, talk, think, and behave exactly like you. They'd have the same memories. However, it would be a carbon copy of you, not you.
But, if you follow the Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consiousness, techniquely it would be possible to take your mind (a.k.a. you) and store it on a computer while your first body is ripped apart and a new one is created. Then, you could just be downloaded into the new brain.

[Patrick Kiger]

Interesting comment, Brian. For those who aren't familiar with it, the elecromagnetic field theory of consciousness is a concept proposed by British molecular geneticist Johnjoe McFadden and others. It holds that the electromagnetic field generated by the brain is the carrier of consciousness. http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/cemi.htm

[Brandon]

I wonder what the environmental effect of teleportation would be. Would it reduce carbon emissions? This could be the way to save our planet!

[Cindy]

What if the teleportation machine at one end doesn't destroy your old self? Would there be two competing versions of you? Maybe this is the explanation for Hannah Montana/ Miley Cyrus!

[Wayne Lambro]

Teleportation may seem like a crazy idea, but remember that to our parents' generation, something as basic as photocopying was a radical notion. I don't doubt that teleportation--or some even more amazing form of transportation--will be available within the lifetimes of young people today.

[sophie]

i think we need to realize the potential drawbacks of teleportation, especially for countries that's economies depend on travel/transportation services for a good part of their economy. this would mean planes, cars, gas station, trains, cruises, boats, transportation buses, buses, subways,air hostesses, pilots, all these things would be wiped out and not to mention even more unemployed people

[Nick James]

What a great conversation, ha! I love the idea of teleportation for use by NASA for large scale exploration projects but not necessarily for commercial use. I think it's pretty obvious why the public and or corporations should not be allowed to roam around the world in a split second, this could lead to obvious cases of thievery, espionage, and other problems. I think it's a good point to make to mention traveling back to the 1970's to explain computers, however, I honestly feel like time travel is much more realistic as something that I might see in my lifetime (at least in an electronic transmission sense-I picture it much like the internet with some serious lag due to lasers and lots of energy). Sorry to slide off topic.

[Patrick Kiger]

hey Nick: thanks for the suggestion....I'll probably do a blog on time travel at some point.

[Canadian]

Hey, was that you I heard on the CBC radio this morning?

[Bob Barcley]

BAH! I THINK IT"S IM___________________________________________________
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