Beam Me Up, Fw:Thinking

do it like twenty minutes in. So this episode is about uh, yeah, we're talking specifically about the the concept of teleportation. Obviously, if you've been a fan of any sort of science fiction, you've probably seen some implementation of this idea, Star Trek of course, being probably the best known out of all the the uh sci fi stories

out there that use this this device. Yeah. So we've talked about plenty of science fiction technologies in the past where we often, you know, look at something from a movie or from a futuristic TV show or book and we say, how plausible is that? Will we ever actually get there? And teleportation, I think is trickier than some of the ones that we've looked at in the past to come up with a way of saying, yeah, here's

how that could work. Yeah, this one requires a lot of flexible thinking for you to get to a point where you could say, this is obviously not the same implementation that we see in these books and movies, but here's how it would work in the real world. And even in this case, we're like, here's how maybe sort of kind of it could possibly sort of work if you've got a lot of time on your hands. But

but we're gonna do our best. So so what is the concept in its most basic definition, and how does that apply to to the science we're gonna bring in. I think we should go basically with the Star Trek model. I agree. So the idea is that you're going to take a collection of matter, and that could be a stapler, Freddy Krueger doll, a cuddlefish, a sopping wet Japanese vengeance goes red shirt, Yeah, a red shirt perfectly. You take that from one place, cause it to disappear from that place,

and make it appear in another place. So this rules out from the beginning things that make a copy of a thing, but keep the original where it is. Unless you're talking about that one Star Trek the Next Generation episode where the transporter created a secondary riker, he said, and shares the normal way. I didn't make it. There's no such thing as a secondary riker. They're all number one. Nice.

That was an excellent joke, you know, But in in ordinal number theory, you could maybe say that number one really is the second number, because of course the card is number zero. Well he's number one, and then there was number one prime. But of course, yes, teleportation taking a thing make it disappear from where it is, making it appear somewhere else. The old magician presto chango. Now I'm on the other side of the stage type deal. Is that even remotely possible via science? And that's the

question we're going to imagine today. Now. I think the first thing we should do more before we get into anything else, is clear up what is actually meant by a phrase you've probably seen in science journalism before, and that phrase is quantum teleportation. Now, before we jump into this, the first thing I want to mention is that there's there are very few words out there that cause researchers and scientists familiar with material to shutter more than the

word quantum when it appears in the mass media. Yeah, because quantum states are where in stuff does the weird stuff to begin with, And it's all on on sub atomic particle level, right, We're talking on the super tiny level. And the issue I see more often than not is people trying to extrapolate that behavior to the macro world, and that's not where quantum effects really come into play. Yeah, it is intrinsically stuff that we only see on this

very tiny level. Yeah. So, uh, when we first start talking about quantum teleportation, the word quantum should already put you aware that you know something is going to be different from from what we're used to in classical physics. Sure, but of course quantum teleportation is not something that you should be like, oh, that doesn't really happen. That this is referring to a real phenomenon that has been observed

in the lab, it has been created. Yeah, and uh, this is also where we have to the second word in quantum teleportation causes a bit of a problem as well, right, because the way we established teleportation at the beginning of this show, we're talking we were talking about the transportation of matter, which is the sci fi concept of it, which doesn't actually have that much to do with quantum teleportation. No, because quantum teleportation is about information, not matter. It's it's

a essentially it's a form of communication. What you are doing is you are transporting a quantum state from one point to another, but not necessarily the quantum particle. So let's use electrons as an example, because that's easy to imagine. Most of us have you know, at least a passing familiarity with one electron. Is that's the negatively charged sub

atomic particle that you find in atoms. So electrons have a spin that you can describe as a direction, and let's say that the spin is down for this particular electron. What quantum teleportation would allow you to do is to take the quantum state of that electron. In this case,

we're talking about the specific state of the spin. It would be able to take the spin, the downward spin, and transport the downward spin to a distant location, and then you can actually transfer the state of that electron

to that location. So you're not moving the electron itself, your having a property of that electron to a different electron essentially, um, which is a different you know, a totally different concept than taking a cup and using a transporter to dematerialize the cup and re materialize in a different location. Just a random object that I decided to pick. Why not a hatchet? We couldn't just as easily be a hatchet joke. Okay, let's say it's a hatchet sitting

in a large cup. All right, So there's a hatchet and a cup. And if you were to use this this approach, it would not work on that level because you're not talking about quantum states. You're talking about physical objects. At that point. However, we have physically moved these states. Uh. In two thousand and fourteen, in fact, a team of researchers broke records when teleporting the quantum state of a

photon fifteen and a half miles or kilometers away. Now, the other thing we have to keep in mind is that this teleportation doesn't mean that they magically made the quantum state of a particle jump instantaneously right fifteen and a half miles away. Did not happen like that. They actually used an optical cable to transmit the information of that quantum state across this distance, and then they were able to quote unquote teleport it. Now, some of you

might think that's kind of cheating. Well, I mean what comes to my mind as a lay person is in what sense does the word teleportation convey useful information? Then? Well, and and it's the same thing like if you were to use a people write good headline. They they're talking about the movement of a quality of a subtype particle, but not the particle itself, so they needed a word

for it, and teleportation was a cool word. Uh. They're also you know, this could be really useful when developing something like a quantum computer network, if you wanted to have quantum computers communicate across distances. That's why the record breaking was such a big deal, was because it was a proof of concept that you could actually transmit these uh, these quantum states that kind of distance. Now, of course, fifteen and a half miles on the solar scale, like

the outer space scale is nothing at all. Right, it's not at all useful in any way to get your space ships real close to each other, right close enough where you know, you could probably flash lights and communicate through morse code. Uh. But yeah, this is the this is the the the limitations of where the science and technology are right now, and in fact, a lot of a lot of researchers believe that there are fundamental limits on how far apart we can put computer systems to

communicate through on a quantum level. And it's not a whole lot further away than than what they've achieved so far. Uh. That being said, you know, there always could be some other discovery breakthrough that would allow us to extend this further. Maybe it's a different means of actually communicating the information, but we are still communicating information. It's again not magically

disappearing in one spot and instantaneously appearing in another. Okay, so quantum teleportation, at least so far, has nothing to do with you being able to teleport your body from one place to another for a hatchet or Cuba or wrecker or record or record number two. I'm sorry number one,

number one too. I'm so confused, number one. Let's discuss some hypotheses about how teleportation could work and some of the different branches of thinking that you could go down when you're you're imagining this, and I think there's one big question we need to address right at the beginning, and that question is are your original atoms going somewhere

or not. Well, that that sounds real messy. Yeah, I mean when when you think about that, wouldn't it, you know, be more energy conservative to just send yourself without breaking yourself down atomically? Well, then in that case, that's not very much teleportation, is it. So you're saying just putting your body in a thing and it somewhere. In fact, this is okay. So this this kind of reminded me,

like the question like is that your original atoms? I was thinking like, well, this kind of teleportation only works in the sense if the world worked in on Willy Wonka logic where Mike TV gets broken down by the camera and is turned into millions of tiny pieces that fly across the air and then reassemble themselves on a television screen. In real life, I don't think that would

be as as successful. Well, there's no I mean, there's no method of transporting the atoms, right, even if you were able to somehow breaking yeah, I know, right, Like, how would how would you get the atoms from point A to point be? Assuming that you could break the atoms down and reassemble them perfectly. On the other side, how do you get them from point A to point B. Well, I think there are a couple of schools of thought here in the at least in the Star Trek writer's imagination.

One is the transporter. Teleporter device dissolves your body, puts your atoms into some kind of I don't know what it does. It sends your atoms somewhere and then the atoms reassemble themselves into you in that place. So if you were somehow able to totally scan something, convert those atoms into energy, and then send the energy to a receiving station that could then take the energy and reincorporate it as physical atoms and then rebuild the thing you

needed on an atomic level. Maybe that's how they would do it. Well, that was the other thing I was going to say, was that it converts your atoms into energy, because, as we know from relativity, matter is in a way just kind of frozen energy. Matter, energy is all the same stuff. Yeah, well, we'll get into a little bit later exactly how much energy a human body would represent on average. It's a lot, which is not a big

surprise if you know how atomic bombs work. So uh now, otherwise, the only other thing we could think of is what Lauren was saying that you disassemble a body into its constituent atoms, and then I don't know, pour him into a container, than pack those containers onto a spaceship, perhaps to save space, and then when you get to your location, you just pour the goo out into a recompiler of some sort to rebuild all the stuff that it used to be. Doesn't seem that much more practical than just

I don't know, climbing onto a spaceship and going someplace. Right, So, in order for it to be more teleportation in the way that we imagine it, it seems like the thing you'd have to do is dissolved the body, translate that material reality into information, transfer the information, and then use that information to rebuild the body at the destination, kind of atomically three D print from the ground up, right.

That that's a perfect analogy. Yeah, So there, you don't have a model, you don't have the thing you're printing, you know, emailing back and forth between computers. You just have information that represents how to do it. Yeah. So, uh, there. There are arguments about whether or not this would be possible to make a copy of something, in which case you would have a replicator, right, it's essentially additive manufacturing at that point, or if you're actually using quantum teleprotation.

The argument is that quantum teleprotation does not allow for the um the original item to remain intact. You have to break it down to scan all the information the quantum states that are involved in whatever that thing is. Uh. Specifically they've been you know, the experience that have been done have been on single sub atomic particles. Keep in mind that any physical object would be made up of

huge number of atoms, let alone sub atomic particles. Okay, so you're saying that this is where quantum teleportation might actually come into the picture of teleportation is in the scanning of the material makeup of your body. Yeah, this is like you have to project yourself forward decades and decades and decades where we'd have sophisticated equipment to be able to do this. But if we did have to

project yourself decades forward into science fiction. Yeah, I say decades forward where we would have technology capable of doing this, But I say that as someone who doesn't believe that we're ever going to have technology capable of doing this. It's more like if we ever could, if we could this is this is likely what would happen based upon our understanding of quantum teleportation, which still has some pretty

big limitations to it. So first, uh, you would break down the body and and scan that quantum state of all the particles, or at least most of them, to determine the information about that body. That's important because you need to have that information that's part of the teleportation process. Uh. Now, there's actually a way to do this on the quantum level without measuring everything, and it's actually kind of bizarre and interesting, and the reason why you need it is

because of Heisenberg's uncertain d principle. Ah yeah, well, I mean, if I recall correctly, that's the principle that says you can't know everything about a sub atomic particle exactly. Usually

we think of it in terms of complementary states. So, for example, you can know a lot about the momentum of a sub atomic particle or the position at a given time of a sub atomic particle, but not both, right, And as you increase your knowledge about one aspect of it, you destabilize the system so that your knowledge becomes less and less relevant. Yeah. Right, And Star Trek actually knew about this or well Star Trek, Yes, the giant unit

known as Star Trek. The makers of Star Trek knew about this and kind of cheekily dealt with it in the show by including a little gidget in its transporter systems called the Heisenberg compensator. Yeah, which they just never explained. Maybe maybe the Heisenberg compensators just like no, I'm sure so, yeah, they totally totally just dismisses the uncertainty principle. I'm positive I know how this works, but but researchers have figured out how to deal with this on a quantum state

in real life. Yeah, it's it's kind of crazy. They did, like, uh, they did a runner round, a workaround of Heisenberg's uncertainty principles. So this is sort of what quantum teleportation is, right, like the using the pr Yeah, this is this is exactly the way that that quantum tell reportation works on on a general scale. So I'm gonna be using kind of a high level way of explaining this because honestly, to get any further into it would require an understanding

of quantum physics that I simply do not possess. That's when the cells and Jonathan's brain start dissolving all on their own. Yeah, just start, you know, my ears go all quantum at any rate. Here's how it works. You measure a quantum particle to a certain extent, but not so much that your measurements are going to mess things up. The idea that you know, by observing something, you affect

that which is observed. That's unavoidable. But you if the you can get enough of an idea of a quantum state without going so far as to try and get every single bit of information about it, without completely ruining the whole process. So you've got a little bit of information about the quantum state of this particular particle. You then allow that quantum particle to interact with a second

quantum particle. And for the purposes of this in order, instead of saying one and two and three, I thought it would make it easier and name each of the quantum particles. So quantum particle one is particle man. Quantum particle two is triangle man. Triangle man hates particle man, so uh. So particle man is uh is the one that you've partially observed, so you've got some information about

its quantum quantum state. Triangle man has previously for the relationship with universe Man, says particle number three subatomic particle number three. So universe man and triangle man have become entangled quantum entanglement. That is where you have uh complementary but different um states of each of these subatomic particles,

and as one changes, the other one changes to reflect it. Right, So in effect, if you know something about one of them, you know something about the other one, at least at that very moment. Yes, And it doesn't matter how far apart these subatomic particles are in space, if they are on the other opposite sides of the galaxy, it's still

the same. So if we go with that electron spin that I was mentioning earlier, if one is spinning up, the other one spinning down, and it doesn't matter if they are next to each other or on the opposite side of the galaxy, that relationship remains the same until you disturb the system, all right, So triangle man and universe man are quantumly entangled. Triangle Man then goes on

to encounter particle Man, the one that you measured. Now this changes particle man, but it also changes triangle man and extension changes universe Man because universe Man and triangle Man were entangled. You then send the information that you gleaned about particle Man to universe Man. Universe Man then becomes particle Man. So particle Man itself is no longer really particle man after it encounters triangle Man. That that encounter changes the very nature of particle Man. Universe Man

now becomes the new particle Man. However, this process requires that you send that information across traditional communication channels so it can get to universe Man to complete that transformation into particle man. Yeah, they might be giants. Explains it better than I do, and and like in like a minute less to uh and that's with a repeated chorus.

But uh, this is this is really interesting to me because the idea of using entanglement to create this interaction and then send information onto a third particle that was part of that entanglement and essentially transform it into the

first particle you started with is bizarre. There's something very admirable about smart people trying to find loopholes in the laws of physics, the way that I don't know, you're you know, your sketchy accountant might find loopholes in the tax code, or gamers might find little cheats that they can they can enact in a video, right, right, it is really funny. And the of course, the amazing thing is it works, right like, this is not theory, This

isn't a hypothesis. This actually does work um and it works on that sub atomic quantum level. It's it is really kind of strange. It also, like I said, relies on traditional communication. You can't instantaneously have this happen. That scanning that you do at the beginning of the first quantum particle, that is that is a fundamental part of this process. And then you have to you know, scanning

isn't enough. You have to send that information on. So again, without the optical cable or some other means of transmission, you could not actually make this transformation happen. Universe man would just be different universe man, it wouldn't be particle man.

But this in theory is how we could know what's going on in every single particle in your body if we needed to, If if you had a sufficient way of breaking everything down and observing just enough the quantum state of all the particles, then maybe like even then it's a maybe. But the important thing to note is that scientists have said there's nothing fundamentally against the laws of physics for this to not work on the macro level. In other words, there's nothing that we know that says

it's impossible to do this beyond the quantum level. It may still be impossible to do beyond the quantum level, but there's nothing we know right now that specifically states that, and we haven't tried it yet. So yeah, hey, Bob, I got something I want you to give a go. You know, let's hop into this pot here. Don't worry about the fly um. I mean, it's kind of like saying that there's nothing in the laws of physics that says you can't make a factory in space that builds stars. Yeah,

I mean, it's not against the laws of physics. But could we really imagine doing that? Could it ever be be practical at all? Or even plausible? Like it, It may be possible, but not plausible. Right. So the other big downside of this, besides the fact that you're still relying on at least some means of traditional communication to get information to its destination, is that you have to destroy the original thing and we'll get to that in a bit. Yeah, that's a big downside in general for

a lot of these telebritation ideas. Well, it's not that bad if if you're using a hatchet hatchet cup, Yeah, I mean, unless you're very unless unless it's a mystical hatchet. Well, we may get into a ship of THESEUS kind of problem with this hatchet. So I think we should start with a few definite limb stations that are coming up whenever we're talking about about any potential teleportation system. And yeah, yeah, one of them is going to be speed of travel.

Right now in Star Trek, it's instantaneous. It doesn't matter how far away the enterprise is from a planet's surface. That as long as they're within teleportation range, which is vaguely defined for the purposes of plot, you can totally beam them up and beam them down and it takes no time at all. Yeah, so I will vene. Sometimes it fuzzes a little bit excent there's at range, there's

like ion cloud cloud. So I'm going to say that I feel pretty confident we will never ever have instantaneous teleportation of any kind, or at least as it seems to be depicted in movies and TV shows. You can't disappear in one place and appear in another place instantly because that violates relativity. It has you travel faster than the speed of light, and the speed of light as the universal speed limit. This applies whether you're taking the original atoms with you, which we seem to think was

a pretty ridiculous concept, or not. Even if you're just translating your body into a information signal and then having a machine build it somewhere else, the transfer of that information is going to be limited by the speed of light. I just realized that if you sent all the actual atoms, you would be sending space jam. That's true. That makes Joe so happy, and it fills me with with gloom.

You don't want to come on and slam. So one of the things we wanted to mention here is that that quantum teleportation, like we've already said, doesn't involve instantaneous transmission of information either. There's some there's some people who think that entanglement I think mistakenly believe that entanglement is able to give you some instant information across the galaxy. Because if you have two particles that are separated by an entire galaxy, and you observe one immediately know what

the state of the other one was. That they say, oh, well, then that means you have transmitted information across a galaxy in no time. Therefore you go faster than the speed of light. That's not exactly true. You could argue that the entanglement is actually the basis of the information was h was created when the two particles were close to one another, and it's just now you know what that relationship was. It doesn't mean that the information traveled anywhere.

And in fact, we wouldn't be able to use quantum entanglement to do instantaneous communication across an entire galaxy, let alone teleportation. So that is uh, that's a that's a non starter as far as that's concerned. And uh, it does mean that that we would still be limited by that speed of light. That's the if we had a way of breaking down an object into information and then beaming that information to some distant location, probably be using

radio waves or something which travel at the speed of light. Yeah, that's it. That's as fast as you could go. I could teleport to Mars in some number of minutes. Yeah, depending on how far apart Earth and Mars are at that time. Exactly. Yeah, although this all explains to me perfectly why Miles O'Brien always looked so bored hanging out in the teleporter room of the you know, Star Trek,

the next generation, the Enterprise. He's just sitting there for days at a time waiting for people that I think, like, oh, curse the day we got that shuttle. Um. There there are some other limitations I think we should bring up. One of them is if you're talking about this process where you break down a body and just turn it completely into energy, and then zapped that across the Solar system. Yeah,

that sounds super great. Why don't we do that? According to the Arizona State physicist Lawrence Krauss, who wrote a book called The Physics of Star Trek we referenced on this podcast before, when talking about replicators, he says that in order to quote de materialize a human body and turn it into energy, and I think he just means to like to break all the binding energy between all the atoms and your body, as if you were using your body as the payload of a nuclear bomb, it

would release the energy of about a thousand, one hundred megaton nuclear weapon detonation. That sounds like a lot. The largest nuclear weapon ever tested, czar BOMBA, which was tested up in the you know that archipelago above Russia, had a fifty or fifty seven megaton yield. I've seen sources saying both. Some might just be rounding down to fifty. I don't know, but around a fifty megaton yield, And that's the largest weapon we've ever tested. So so double

that and then a thousand of those. That's a lot of energy holding matter together as we as we've known from the consequences of relativity. Sure, humans have a lot of atoms. You know, some of us more than others. I put on a few this past weekend, for example. Uh, maybe teleporters could be like the weight loss plan. You get there and you do you have one fewer leg

I lost several pounds on that last trip. Um. Well, there's also the let's say that somehow we managed to figure out the energy problem, like we we figured out how to convert physical items into that massive amount of energy and still managed to to handle it. Then we'd have to figure out how to reincorporate from energy back to matter. Right, so that's an issue. Now let's let's say that. Okay, let's say that that doesn't that's not the way we're gonna go. We're not going to convert

a body into pure energy. Let's say in spend the planet every time gets old. Yeah, so so let'st's say instead we do the quantum entanglement version or the quantum teleportation version, just sending data. Yeah, so we already know human body represents a massive amount of energy. What about information? Well, I looked into this. Uh, this is one of those questions that I guess if you were to ask certain scientists, they look at you and don't you have something better

to do? No, seriously, I asked this question, and I didn't know the answer. But Jonathan came up. I found and I found some people who tried to answer, how much data would it take in I don't know, kill a bites to represent all of the matter energy content in a human body. I'm not going to convert it to kill a bites because I don't have that kind of time. All right, Well, first of all, we don't know.

That's the first thing is, we don't really know. We've we've never scanned the quantum state of every particle in a human body, which would be such a massive amount of information that's impossible to even guess at this point. But but what about a relatively simple conversion like like

your like your DNA and the contents of your brain. Well, fortunately, some students at the University of Leicester made some of those assumptions for us on on our you know, they decided to take on that burden as a thought experiment. So they actually thought they would use DNA as the means of figuring out the amount of information that humans have.

They made some assumptions. They assumed that the DNA found in any given cell would have all the information needed to replicate all the cells in the body, which technically simplification. But yeah, so and then they decided, all right, we also need to figure out what is the equivalent to the amount of information that would be encapsulated in the

typical human brain. Hold on, hold on, hold on. So this sounds to me less like teleportation and more like beaming instructions on how to clone you and re teach you everything you've ever learned. That's about as close as I can get, you know. But they were trying to figure out like, how could they potentially make this happen? So they their calculations, however, unfortunately, don't make it any

more likely. Like you, you might think, well, that's not the same as teleporting, but I know that another me will be at the destination and therefore we'll be able to do whatever needs to get done. Hang onto your horses, folks, because you don't have that kind of time, trust me. Their calculations came to two point six times ten to the forty second power in bits, ten to the forty two is a rather large number. If that's a trade to sillion, that's two point six trade to sillion bits,

which is three twenty five duo to sillion bites. What hold on? Somebody's just coming up with names for numbers like ten to the power. Oh yeah, oh yeah. There's no prefix for that number of bites, however, because our prefixes for naming large numbers of bites stops at ten to the eighteen, which is a YadA bite or Yoda bite, as we have previously discussed on the show. And I think settled on Yoda because because like, alright, I'm more

of a YadA fan. But yes, I do or do not there is and and for general reference, because this is a truly unimaginable amount of data that we're talking about the last time we talked about big data in depth way back, I think in humanity was creating a mirror two point five exhibites of data every day. Yeah, so that means a human being is represents more information than the amount of information all human beings are creating every single day. Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot

of info. But you know, there is another problem with the speed of transmission. That's not just the speed the information travel. Right, So let's say that you're talking. You know, you've already resigned yourself that this approach is going to rely upon transmitting the information over the speed of light. And uh that that the destination you're aiming as a hundred light years away. So you're already you already resigned to the fact that's going to take a hundred years

for it to get there. You really don't even know the beginning of this because there's also the issue of bandwidth or throughput. Right, information gets to your fifty six K modem pretty quick, yeah, but the mode, the modum itself has to process the information, and it has a limit to the amount of information can transmit or receive at any given time. So let's say that you have a device with a bandwidth of around thirty giga hurts and you use that to transmit this massive amount of data.

That would mean that you would need to take four point eight five times ten to the fifteen power years to transmit one human being worth of data using this thirty giga hurt system that, by the way, is longer than the age of the universe. Well, so we need to work on our modems, is what we're saying. Yeah, No, that that needs to that needs to be fixed to sweet And of course, like we said, this was just using d n A as the means of the the

information you would send. If you were to actually do the quantum states, it would be monumentally more information that you would have to transmit, and I don't know how you would do it, but at any rate, it would be one of those things where you might actually make the determination that taking a physical spaceship would mean you would use less time getting from point A to point B than teleprotation, which it's not kind of defeats the

purpose really, aside from making it cooler. Yeah, right, it could you know, it does sound kind of like a Futurama kind of thing, right, where people use a technology mainly because it's cool, but not it's totally impractical. It doesn't make any sense. But that doesn't really matter. So the other question we had, the other big roadblock is assuming that you have a version of teleprotation that does break down the original, doesn't that mean the original ain't

around anymore? You know? Yeah. The first thing I thought about when we decided we were going to do this episode topic was I can't wait to talk about how every time you teleport yourself, you make a copy of yourself that lives in your house and eats the food in your refrigerator and sleeps in a bed with your spouse and doesn't realize you are dead. Yeah, it's not

it's not you. It's not you. Yeah. That The philosophical discu and that comes into this is that a teleprotation is, as I O. Nine once called it, a suicide machine that you would go in. If you use it for a living thing, that living thing gets broken down. Therefore it goes from living to not living anymore status, and then a copy of that thing is reassembled, perhaps even with the same memories and emotions, and so the copy of you might be unaware that the original you die,

which is a strange thought. There could be a copy of you that, for all you know, has experienced continuous consciousness and that it's doing for what appears to be continuous well simulation of such. It only be technically aware that You that itself had died. Prodhounds get really tricky

in this. I mean, if if it knows how, if it knows how teleprotation works, then it would be aware that the version that stepped into the teleporter back at point A is not technically the same one that stepped out at point although the one that's at Point B still has all the memories and experiences of Point A. I have a question, have y'all ever seen a Star Trek episode, If there is one, I'm not aware of it, where they deal with this. Bones would not take a

teleporter because this was his argument. His argument was that, well, two things. One that teleports teleporters sometimes you have a hand growing out of your stomach or something. Uh. And then the other reason was that he essentially said no, it just breaks you down. And then a copy of you is remade. So you know, the copy of you is unaware that the you know it doesn't have an experience of not existing anymore. But the version of you that was you, that that's not, That part's over, that

part's dead. Can you imagine just living in a world where people accept to this. You just accept the fact that you are going to die when you get into the transporter, but a perfect copy of you will be able to go about your business. For you, I cannot like for me. It's hard to imagine. I wrote in our notes, I said, if I know me, the copy me will be both sad and a little smug about the whole thing. But but Mimi wouldn't care at all,

because I'd be dead. So here's another complication. Okay. Star Trek often shows beaming to a place where there's no receiving technology, just beams you down to a jungle of potted plants somewhere on the surface of a planet. Right, some some vaguely red colored hills in the back. YEA, yeah, beam into a sound stage at Burbank, California, but there's no transporter receiver. It just beams you down, right. I thought that was an advancement in transporter technology. I believe

that didn't happen until CIRCUA next generation. No, it happened because it would beam down to the surface of planets. Oh that's right, that's right. Now they could, but but for for tricky situations, for like larger loads or something, they had to set up the little triangulation. Well, yes, yes, they did have to do they'd have to do that for some of them. Yeah, in the original series, you're right, and by the time they got to the movies that

was no longer. They were ignoring that anyway, even in original series. But but yeah, you are correct in that. I think they were trying to plan for that early in original series, but at any rate, they eventually abandon it. They could also remotely beam you up, so you wouldn't have to be in the transporter to get beamed up to the ship. They just have to get a lock

on you. Sometimes the teller, the transport operator would have to press like a lot of buttons, like really furious, which is weird, right, because there are certain times where someone will walk up to a panel and they will pull up something that seems really random, like I don't know the text to Midsummer Night's Dream and they do it with the push of one button on the bridge, like there's a button on the bridge dedicated to Midsummer Night's Dream. But if you would lock onto somebody, you're

typing for a good twenty seconds. Captain Picard has shortcut needs in macros all seconds. I imagine what they're doing with the buttons on the when they're trying to lock onto someone on the planet is furiously emailing tech support. I want to see. I know this is a tangent, but I want to see a version of Star Trek where they completely abandon all touch interfaces and it's all voice recognition. But the voice recognition is just slightly off, so we always have to keep repeating what it is

they want in order to get it to do. Shields up, Like here, here's your breakfast. No, I said shields up like that would be great. I would love to see that. Well. At any rate, this seems like a very obvious problem. In addition to all of the other things we've said so far. If you're starting to get the impression that teleportation is likely impossible, you're probably right. But here's the

other thing. If it's possible at all, it seems like you would definitely have to have machines at both ends, right, Yeah, you have to have a place to send that that communication too that can receive that information and then reassemble. We don't have a magic way of being able to create a space in a remote location that can reassemble something spontaneously. You would have to have some other means to do that. So I can't imagine a technology that

would allow us to do that without some receiver. And even with a receiver, I can't really imagine technology capable of doing it. Yeah, because it's not only a receiver, but like a molecular three D printer. Yeah. Yeah, And you know, we actually have talked about replicators before, which are very much related to transporters in the Star Trek lore, and I think I think, I don't think replicators are likely,

but I think they're more likely than teleporters. I don't think that replicators are in any way close to being a real thing, at least not for a general replicator that can make anything we've got. We've got certain certain substances that we can create a kind of an automatic system to generate a whole bunch of it. But you know, we can have like self assemblers for things like polymer chains. But that's a lot different than all right, I've got a chain of polymers than I've got a table or

a person. When what you're really talking about, I think is just further miniaturization of three D printing. Yeah, like that, what is the smallest part you can print with your three D prints? So instead of printing in a material like plastic, you would be printing in individual atoms or molecules, which would then be assembled on that layer and then put into the right configuration to make whatever it was

he wanted to make. Right, because we can. We're working on technology to be able to three D print organs and skin and stuff like that. Not that skin is not an organ, but but that's a lot different than putting together mirror atoms. Yeah, compared to atoms, those cellular materials that we're printing when we make three D printed organs are gigantic. Yes, I am very skeptical about the

idea of molecular assemblers and atoms. I think to as of some of the some of the things that have been pointed out about this, or once you get down on that scale, you enter you leave the realm of mechanical action, and you enter the realm of chemistry where when you're trying to place molecules and atoms, you're you're having to form and break chemical bonds to move them and put them in places, and so like, how do you pick up a molecule, get it to stick to

your finger and then put it somewhere and get it to stay there? Yeah, and then you know when I did ah, I did an article. I wrote an article for How Stuff Works years ago about nano robots, and even as I was writing it, most of the robots I was looking at were really micro robots because obviously nano. Getting something to the nano size and having it be you know, having having it have sufficient moving parts to really call it a robot is something that we're not

really able to do yet. And in order for us to have a molecular assembler that would actually be able to just put together whatever it was you wanted, um, it would be incredibly difficult to create such a sophisticated tiny device. I'm not saying that's going to always be impossible. It maybe that one day we get to a level sophistication where we can do that, but it's gonna take a lot of time. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, people have have submitted the gray

Goose scenario as a disaster scenario. The idea that these replicators would just start converting everything into the base units that they would use to make stuff out of that seems pretty unlikely, seeing how far away we are from anything that would be capable of doing that in the

first place. So it's almost like, yeah, it feels like you're you like, if you want to be worried about some sort of existential crisis, perhaps an asteroid collision with the Earth would be more appropriate, or even or yeah, things that are things that are not only possible but will happen. Right, So both of those things are happening, what climate change is happening, and the Earth will at some point be hit by an asteroid, just a question

of time. Yeah, I I would hazard that at the scale that we're going, like a tornado full of sharks is more president to worry about. Someone should make a trilogy of movies about that. Yeah, I agree with you about the the molecular and atomic level precision engineering and the molecular symbolers and everything that that seems very far off to me, and for the same reasons pretty much and more. The teleportation Adam by Adam reassembly idea seems

pretty just off the map in terms of possibilities. But I can see something that could approximate teleportation. Probably not for living organisms, because again it would probably kill you, but for inanimate objects. I could see something that is able to look at inanimate objects and break them, not down to an atomic level, but say, Okay, here's a chain of polymers that I can recognize as a chain

of polymers, and that's easy to reproduce. Here's a piece of organic material of ex kind that we've got sitting in the hopper at the destination location. Here's a piece of metal that we've got sitting in the hopper, and so you've essentially got very fine precision three D printing. So you're thinking about like teleporting a leather chair. Sure, that's what I'm hearing. Yeah, yeah, so you you would be able to have it break, not atom by atom,

but but at a larger scale. Sain. Okay, here's the here's a basic type of object we've seen before that's

very tiny, and we can reproduce a fiber like this. Yeah, so again it would be more of an additive manufacturing three D printing style where you just figure out what the the ingredients and the orientation of all these different elements are in relation to one another, send that information off to the destination and it builds that if you can scan something well enough, and then you can hypothetically yeah, I mean the scanning I think would still present a problem.

You you would have to be able to look at an object and and recognize large enough scale structures that wouldn't have to do this atom by atom breakdown that we've pointed out the impossibility spectroscope. Yeah, you do something

like that, I would imagine. Yeah, and even then, even then you're talking about communication, right, You're still it's still the limit of the speed of light, and I would think it would still be easier to to just be like, hey, Bob, this is how you build a chair, right right exactly, I'll send you some raw materials. Yeah, yeah, I think, um or hell, we'll send you a chair. This is

a thing that comes up there. I'm currently reading Dune for the first time, and there's there's a scene in Dune where they're walking around their new palace on you know, on do on the planet Iraqus and and I believe Lady Jessica is commenting on the wood in which obviously is not native to the planet, So somebody had to ship in wood to the planet Iracus. And that's just ridiculous. Transporting would across space and time. Yeah, I don't know when you factor in how how expensive it is to

get stuff into space and how much work it takes. Yeah, that's yeah, I totally you know understand, it is fun to talk about this kind of stuff because you know, it's just it's that speculative science fiction that draws us to this this sort of stuff. Yeah, it's a bummer to kind of say, like, all right, well, this particular implementation looks, if not impossible, certainly very implausible to the point where there would be no reason to to pursue it.

But um, it was fun to to look into that and to see how people had tried to uh put quantitative values to stuff like the amount of energy contained in the human or how much data a human represents. So if you guys have suggestions for future topics, whether they are science fiction related or otherwise, I recommend you right in. Our email address is f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot Com, or you can drop us a line on Twitter or Google Plus or Facebook. Twitter

and Google Plus we are FW thinking. Just search FW thinking and Facebook and we'll pop right up. You can leave us a message. We read all of them. We really enjoy the stuff you guys have been sending us. Keep it up and we'll talk to you against really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology. This is forward sinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,