The Tech of Star Trek

starship Enterprise as they explored the galaxy. So their mission was to be one of science and discovery, although they frequently found themselves drawn into various conflicts throughout the series. Star Trek has been called a space opera, and while it's in the realm of science fiction, the science bit

of that wasn't always absolutely least solid. However, over time, various writers, editors, and others have fleshed out the world of Star Trek and attempted to ground as much of that technology to the real world as possible, and at least a few cases inventors have actually turned out to uh create stuff based on things they were inspired by from the show itself, so it became sort of a

self fulfilling prophecy. It wasn't that the technology was necessarily based in reality, but rather that inventors in reality began to base their ideas off the Star Trek. So today I want to take take a look at some of that technology, not all of it. We're just gonna look at a few different technologies that were very prominent in Star Trek and see how they relate to the real world, how realistic or unrealistic they may be, given what we can do today. And I should say I was inspired

to do this episode from a few different sources. First of all, interest a full disclosure, my parents wrote for the Star Trek book series for young adults. They wrote several books in that series, and so I grew up watching a lot of Star Trek, both the original series, the next generation series D Space nine, never got into Voyager, never really watched Enterprise, so okay, so I kind of left off after D Space nine. But that was one

of the reasons. And the other was that I received a an advanced copy of a book called Star Trek Treknology by Dr Ethan's Seagull, and it's a pretty cool book. It goes into a lot of this stuff, like the various technologies that were shown in the series, and how do they relate back to stuff that you can find

in the real world. So a lot of the information I'm covering today is information that's also in that book, although I should also point out some of it is from a series of podcast that I used to do called Forward Thinking. You may remember if you had ever subscribed Forward Thinking, that I would appear on there with Joe McCormick and Lauren Voge Obama and together the three

of us, we'll try and suss out the future. And we talked about Star Trek technologies on more than one occasion because the the series introduced a lot of interesting ideas over the course of its run and the course of its various spinoffs, so it's tough to figure out where you should actually start. There's so many different technologies

that were featured in Star Trek. It's filled with amazing technology and gadgets, from the mass of starships in the series to the personal tech that was carried around by away teams. But I figure one neat place is with warp drives. So the Star Trek series had a big problem. They needed warp drives to get around because space, as it turns out, is big, you know, like like I said, and Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guy into the galaxy. You might think it's a long trip to the chemist down the corner,

but that's just peanuts compared to space. The enormity of space means that would take us generations to travel between some stars. So if you hear that a star is four light years away, what that actually means is that it takes light four years to travel from that star to us on Earth. So the light we are looking

at is technically four years old from that star. So in a way, you could say that whenever we look up into the night sky, we're actually staring into the past, and everything we're looking at has already happened, and in some cases it happened thousands or millions of years ago,

which is pretty crazy when you think about it. We're looking at light that might come from stars that no longer technically exist, but it's because it takes so many years for the light to travel across the universe to get to us that we don't know that that star died out maybe half a million years ago. Well that's really cool to think about here on Earth. But if you're talking about a science fiction series, where people are traveling through interstellar space, it creates a huge problem. How

do you get from point A to point B? I mean light? It turns out it's the fastest stuff in the universe. According to Einstein, nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Light is the upper speed limit. Now, to be more specific, I should say that light traveling through the vacuum of space hits that speed limit. As lights speed is somewhat dependent upon the medium through which it travels. So if light is passing through water, it's traveling at a slightly different speed than if it were

through the vacuum of space. But unrestricted in empty space, light runs wild and sets that upper level of how fast we can go. So, for the record, that speed is two million, seven thousand, four hundred fifty eight meters per second, or if you prefer about six hundred seventy one million miles per hour, which is pretty darn fast. But as fast as that is, it's still way too slow to make the journey between distant stars in a reasonable amount of time. So Alpha Centauri is a great example.

It's the closest star to Earth outside of our own son, obviously, and it is four point three six seven light years away. Now, that means if your ship could travel at light speed, and it couldn't, but we'll talk about that in a second, it would still take you nearly four and a half years to get to Alpha Centauri. That would be a

very long episode of Star Trek, the original series. You don't want to spend four years just to get from Earth to Alpha Centauri only to find out there's nothing there and that you've got to turn around, come back

and there'll be four more years. Now, you may have heard that there have been some people who have been thinking about sending satellites to do a fly by of a planet that's that's that's actually an orbit around Proxima Centauri Proxima B specifically, it is an Earth size planet in the Goldilocks zone around Proximus Centauri, and that it would take us about twenty years to get those satellites there if we use the methodology that has been uh suggested.

And how's that work if it's four light years away and we can't travel the speed of light. Well, the idea is that we would launch these very tiny satellites up into orbit and we would use lasers to act as the propulsion for those satellites. So we would speed them up by shooting lasers from Earth toward these satellites

that would provide the propulsion. They would accelerate gradually, but they would accelerate continuously, so you would just keep giving them little boosts and they would keep getting faster and faster. And while the rate of acceleration would initially be fairly slow, it would also be steady, and after a while you'd be traveling at a pretty good clip, and ultimately you'll be traveling at about the speed of light, which doesn't sound like it's very fast, you're thinking, but it's that's

wicked fast. And it means that we would get those satellites to proxima B at around the twenty year mark, a little bit more than that actually, So that is the way that would work. But like I said, you wouldn't be able to get your spaceship up the light speed. That's because your spaceship typically has mass. Mass is going to be the thing that keeps you from achieving that same speed. As light. Light does not have mass has relativistic mass, which which means that the at a relativistic equation,

you would factor in mass with light. It can actually impart momentum, and momentum is something that only mass can really do really uh transfer. But it's because we're talking about relativistic speeds. We're not talking about actual mass. Like, you can't take a particle of light and measure it to say how much mass it has. So you can get pretty close to the speed of light even if you have mass, at least close to the speed of

light according to our view of things. But you're not actually gonna match lights speed as long as you're using something that has mass. So how the heck do you get around that? If you can't travel at light speed much less faster than light speed, how do you make a series where you can explore the galaxy? It would be a ship where you would have to have generations of people carrying on the same mission so that you could finally get to wherever you're going and do whatever

it was you were hoping to do. How does Star Trek get around it? Well, that's where the warp drive comes in. The warp drive is supposed to warp the fabric of spacetime itself. Now, this helps you travel through between distant points at a speed that seems to be faster than the speed of light, but it's not really if you're really technical about it, you aren't actually moving faster than light. You're just decreasing the distance between two points. That's easier to explain this if I take a kind

of fanciful example. So let's say you're looking at a paper map and you're planning a trip between Atlanta, Georgia, and I don't know Edinburgh, Scotland. So you've decided you want to go in a straight line. You use a ruler and you line up Atlanta and Edinburgh and you draw a line from Atlanta to Edinburgh with a very steady uh rate. So you're you're just drawing this line. You're moving at a at a decent clip, but you

know you're just you're just drawing the line there. Now, Normally such a trip would also involve a track out over the ocean, longboat ride, followed by a lot more overland travel once you hit the UK. But what if you just folded the map. So you fold it so that Edinburgh and Atlanta are right next to each other, and then you draw a line that connects the two of them in this folded over shape. So you're not

drawing the line faster than you were before. You're still using that same rate of speed, but you actually connect the two cities much faster because you have less distance to travel. Well, that's how warp drive is supposed to work.

So simply put, a warp drive shrinks the physical distance in front of it and extends the distance or stretches spacetime behind it, so you'd still travel at near light speed, but you use the warp coils to manipulate the fabric of space itself wrinkly get up, so you effectively travel less distance to get to where you're going. The warp numbers in the show indicated how severe that warping would be.

In Star Trek the next generation, the Federation would actually learn that all of that warping of space time continuum had some unintended and dangerous side effects, pretty typical for stuff that we humans tend to do, and at that point the Federation would put a limit on warp speeds except in case of real emergency. I specifically remember watching that episode when it came out, because everyone in my group thought it was ridiculous. We all said, oh, come on.

As the Federation instituted a galaxy wide speed limit. But how realistic is this idea of a warp drive. Well, from a theoretical standpoint, there's actually a lot of support for it. There's the this idea of the Einstein Rosen bridge, which is a hypothetical structure that could link two separate points in spacetime together, and that describes a very similar phenomenon.

It's also known as wormholes. Right, You've got a wormhole in one part of spacetime that connects to a totally different part of space time, And normally you would have to travel perhaps millions of light years to get between those two points. But the wormhole, it's kind of a shortcut. It allows you to pop over from one side to the other. Now, this structure is completely hypothetical. We've never observed such a thing, but it is consistent with the

rules of general relativity. So, in other words, there's nothing that we know about the universe that flat out says this thing is not possible. Right, we don't have any proof here that says, oh, this could never happen because of X, Y and z. But traveling through such a wormhole, even if it is in fact something that exists and not just a hypothesis, it would require some stuff that we're not entirely sure is actually possible or real, like some form of exotic matter or additional physics as yet

unsupported by our model of the universe. So it's not like the hypothothetical nature of this warp or these wormholes is enough. You have to even go a step further and say, well, even if they do exist, there's no way we could travel through one unless we were to completely reform physics as we understand it today. As for actively warping spacetime, so not using a wormhole, but just creating that warp yourself, it's a well, it's in theory,

it could work within our understanding of the universe. Anyway, there's nothing that we know about the universe that says this would be impossible, so it's hypothetical. But in other words, there there could be practical limitations keeping us from ever building such a divi ice. From a purely scientific standpoint, nothing we know of says it's completely impossible, but from

a practical standpoint it may very well be. In a theoretical physicist named Miguel al Qubair was able to work out the math showing that it could be possible to warp space time in such a way that would be equivalent to warp speed. You could shrink the space in front of you while along the space behind you, giving the effect of traveling much faster than light from the point of view of an outside observer, although from your

perspective you'd be traveling at normal speeds. And within the realms of science, there are those who hypothesize about a type of interstellar drive called an al Qubier drive. But such a drive would require a pretty hefty dose of energy. And by hefty, well, I mean that the amount of energy needed to deform space to create such a warp bubble would require the equivalent of twenty thousand mega tons of TNT, or if you pre for a an entire

ton of mass converted into energy. According to Einstein's famous E equals MC squared. Remember that C squared is the speed of light squared, and speed of light is super fast, So it only takes a little bit of mass to create an entirely huge amount of energy. Right. Because you take the mass and whatever whatever metric you're using, and you multiply at times the speed of light squared, you're gonna get a really big number. So a very small

amount of mass equals a huge amount of energy. This is, of course the basis not just of nuclear power, but of the atomic bomb. It only takes a little bit of matter for this to become an enormous release. So an al QB air drive would also require negative mass to work, So you would need negative mass plus you would need an enormous amount of energy in order to get the drive working. These are some really big limitations. It's it's entirely possible that those alone will mean that

will never actually develop one. Now, one thing that might provide that energetic boost we would need would be an antimatter drive. Star Trek actually uses antimatter. In fact, they have an antimatter containment system, and in one notable instance, the antimatter containment system lead to the destruction of one of the enterprises. There was a failure in the antimatter containment system and then the enterprise was no more. This

would be the next generation version of the enterprise. Next generation. They treated the enterprise like it was Klean X. You know, you just pull one out, destroy it, throw it away, you get another one. I'm a little bitter about this. In the original series, they lost the Enterprise one time, and that would be in Star Trek three, the Search for Spock, when they destroyed the Enterprise in an effort

to defeat the Klingons. And it was a huge, emotionally powerful moment because the ship itself was seen as sort of a character. And then in the next generation it became so casual that Picard and I am not making this up once said, we still have a lot more letters in the alphabet, because they would always add another letter at the end of Enterprise. They have Enterprise B, Enterprise C, Enterprise D, Enterprise E. And when he made that comment, I turned off and wanted to throw something

at something else. That's a tangent. That's just Jonathan going crazy about people casually treating this destruction of this enormous spaceship as being not a big deal. Back to antimatter. So one thing that could provide that energy boost would be this antimatter drive. So when matter and antimatter encounter one another, they annihilate each other. And I don't mean like in the W W E Way where you got

these two guys talking about how they're gonna ruin each other. No, they literally annihilate one another, and in the process produced an enormous amount of energy at a efficient conversion rate according to that calculation of equals mc squared or that equation I should say, So, if you collide to particles together at high enough energy levels, there's a chance that you will spontaneously create new particle antiparticle pairs. So antiparticles

are the counterparts to actual particles. So, for an example, you've got electrons. That's a negatively charged sub atomic particle. The antiparticle to an electron is a positron. It has the exact same mass, but it has a positive charge rather than a negative charge. If an electron an oppositron meet up, they annihilate one another. So that means if you actually create these antiparticles, you then have the huge challenge of keeping them from coming into contact with any

kind of regular matter. If they do, then the antimatter and the matter will annihilate each other and you'll end up with some energy. But that's it. You You can't keep that antimatter a round. To store antimatter, you would have to come up with a really clever way to isolate the antimatter from any physical matter. That happens to be in the area. Uh, here's a fun fact too. When the universe first formed is fun fact. Hey, next

time you're at a party. When the universe first formed shortly after the Big Bang, we had just a touch more matter than we had antimatter. There was both during the Big Bang, but we had more matter than antimatter. And the reason that's important is because if they had been exactly equal, we wouldn't have a universe. All the matter in any matter would have just annihilated each other. But for some reason, we had more matter than we

had antimatter. Why no, we don't really know. We've actually produced antimatter in high speed particle accelerator experiments like over at the Large Hadron Collider. That is something that has happened. It's we've observed it, so it's not like it's just

it's not just hypothetical. We've act actually seen this. We've created antiparticles, and in fact, over its cern there were teams that even figured out how to keep those antiparticles uh completely safe for about twenty minutes, which sounds like a pretty short time, but typically in these collisions where you generate antiparticles, they exist for less than a fraction of a fraction of a second. Within within an instant

they have annihilated with a particle. So while you can measure their appearance and disappearance, it tends to happen instantaneously. From our perspective, there's no way you would ever be able to observe it directly, So being able to actually preserve anti matter for up to twenty minutes is a an enormous deal. In the anti hydrogen laser physics Apparatus or alpha over at CERN created anti hydrogen, which is

pretty cool. I think now they're still mass of engineering challenges in the way of harnessing antimatter as an energy source, and it may never be practical, but if it is, that would be amazing. We would have the capability of harnessing more energy than ever before, and it would be relatively easy to generate enough power for all the needs of everybody on the planet with these antimatter engines, which

is kind of cool. But you'd have to reconcile yourself with the possibility that in the event of a cast trophic failure, everything goes poof, So like the warp drive, there's nothing in the laws of physics standing in our way when it comes to antimatter engines. But at this point it's literally a case of engineering. We may discover that trapping and harnessing antimatter is beyond our capabilities. It's not against the laws of physics, it just might be

beyond what we can physically be capable of doing. So perhaps our warp drives of the future will be fueled by people shoveling more antimatter into a giant anti coal furnace or something. And there's probably the lithium crystal involved in there somewhere too, all right. So that's the warp drive, and that's the antimatter engine dealt with. But there's still a lot to talk about when it comes to Star Trek. So when we come back, we'll take a look at

tractor beams and transporters. But first a word from our sponsor. All right, let's talk about trek your beams for a second. So in Star Trek, also in other science fiction shows, there are these beams of energy that various vehicles spaceships typically can use that will help lock other objects into a position and either tow them toward you or push them away, or otherwise keep them in the same spot that you want them to be in. So you can actually use beams of this energy to isolate and then

manipulate other objects. Depending upon the nature of the tractor beam, it could be for boarding purposes, it could be it could be to help a vessel that is in danger. In the case of the Borg, it's so that you can hold it steady, but so as you can send all your little Borg soldiers over and start borgafying. Everybody left and right becomes a Smorges Borg. Ramsey's judging me and anyway, it's this idea that you could use this energy to hold things in place and pull them closer.

But here's a tricky part. If you're using a beam of something, if you're beaming energy out at a target, you're you're sending something outward. How do you pull that thing in towards you? I mean, you're sending energy out that's a push. So how do you pull something with a pushing force? Clearly, there are some forces that are attractive, such as the electromagnetic force or dracar noir Colonne just kidding, this stuff's awful, But how do you how do you

end up pulling that thing towards you? By the way, Ramsey thought that joke was funny. Ramsey used to wear it. So how do you use how do you pull something towards you using energy? Assuming you're not just using electromagnetic force, where the object that you're looking at has an electromagnetic charge and you're using the opposite one, and obviously opposite

charges attract you would pull the thing towards you. That's one way, But the way we see tractor beams used in science fiction, that's not That's not what we're seeing, right. We're not seeing something just being pulled until it makes contact with the enterprise. The enterprise doesn't use a tractor beam, and then suddenly, next thing you know, all the shuttles in the area are slammed up against the side of the enterprise. That wouldn't be terribly useful, to actually be

incredibly dangerous. Instead, they're able to very precisely manipulate and move these things. And it doesn't appear to be electromagnetic in nature. So could you use some other energy to beam something out at an object and yet pull it toward you. The answer, by the way, happens to be yes. It's a counterintuitive effect, so it's kind of like imagining a sailboat and you're blowing wind at directly at the sailboat,

and yet it's moving toward the source of wind. That seems very counterintuitive, but it turns out scientists and engineers discovered a couple of ways to make it happen on a very small scale. And one of those ways, I'm not going to go into all of them, but I'll do this. One one of those ways is using something called a Bessel beam vessel being b E S S E L. Now, this is a particular type of laser or laser, as my old listeners like to hear me say, imagine a beam of light that is in the form

of a series of concentric circles. All right, So you've got circles within circles within circles, and in the very center there's a dot. That dot represents an empty spot of this beam. The beam maintains that shape over vast distances and can even hit an object and reform on the other side of the object as long as some of the outer concentric circles are larger than the object itself.

So as long as those concentric circles are of a greater diameter than whatever the object is, you can actually shoot a beam at that object and instead of it just breaking the path of that beam. You know, when we think of light, if you put an object in front of light, it just blocks the light, right unless it's translucent or transparent, in which case some light goes through.

I'm talking about solid object and opaque object. Well, in this case, if it's small enough and that beam hits it, the beam will actually reform on the other side, as if there's nothing in the way. So it's almost like it's ignoring the presence of that object as long as that object is small enough. So some physicists discovered that by using two Bessel beams, they could draw tiny particles toward the source of light. And here's what's happening. The

lasers hit this tiny little particle from different angles. The beams then reform on the other side of the object. So this object, let's say it's a let's say it's just an atom, a hydrogen atom. So it's a proton and an electron, and you've got these two beams hitting this proton and electron, this this hydrogen atom, and they're hitting it at an angle where on the opposite side of this the energy is formed, and it's greater than the energy of each individual beam hitting from the front

of the particle. It's because of that converging angle where you've got a greater concentration on the opposite side, that you then have the ability to push this atom closer to the source of the light. So you can think of two lights, two flashlights, if you will, converging as

they are about to hit an object. Let's say it's a bowling ball, so we can easily imagine it on a macro scale, and you've got these two flashlights where they're they're converging so that the the two beams would cross just on the other side of the bowling ball. So the beams hit one surface of the bowling ball at an angle where if the beams were to be able to continue to the other side, they would converge right on the other end of the bowling ball together.

That's what's happening with Bessel beams. Using uh these laser techniques to move very very small objects we're talking like on the molecular scale. You can then use that to combine and when when the beams reform on the other side, it creates more energy on the far side that it does on the near side, and it starts to push

the object closer to the source of light. People call these laser tweezers or light tweezers because you're using two different sources of lasers on the same little object, almost as if you were using a pair of tweezers to manipulate some small piece of whatever. And it's fascinating. Over at the University of St. Andrew's, researchers have discovered how to create negative force using light to manipulate microscopic objects.

So it's a special optical field that does the pulling and it's all due to that geometry of light, and the technology is astounding. However, it is still a very far cry from the world of science fiction because those are tractor beams that are really only useful for extremely tiny objects, stuff that's in that microscopic range. It's not really possible to scale that up so you could tow

a vehicle or even move a small object around. To do that, you have to pour a lot more energy into your lasers, which would turn them into thermal weapons, so you would end up either melting or setting fire to whatever it was you wanted to pull toward you. Generally speaking, I try to spend as much time away from things that are on fire as I possibly can, with the possible exception of marshmallows, but tractor beams are

at least in theory possible on the microscopic scale. On the macro scale, maybe not, at least not in the way we understand energy to work right now. It could be that we discover something in the future that allows us to have this kind of incredible ability to manipulate distant objects using energy, but for the time being, that's

not really the case. Now, I want to talk about another piece of technology that is ubiquitous in all the different versions of Star Trek, something that, in fact, for some people it's synonymous with Star Trek because of a a apocryphal quote, the beat me Up Scotty quote, and that's the transporter. So if you're not familiar with Star Trek, you're probably pretty lost in this episode by now. But one of the things they have are transporters. They're essentially teleporters.

This was a way to get around some of the more mundane problem that you would encounter with a science fiction based series, largely, how do you get people from a spaceship that's meant to be in space onto other places like the surface of a planet or a moon,

or maybe into another ship. And how do you do it in such a way where you're saving your budget so you don't have to have a giant shuttle built and then have animation of that shuttle leaving the Enterprise and then flying down to a planet and then landing over and over and over again. Well, one way you could do it is you create a magic teleporter, which is exactly what they did in Star Trek. And um this creates all sorts of problems, both technological and philosophical.

So you might say, well, what's actually going on with these transporters? Keeping in mind that you know, in the early days of Star Trek, no one was bothering to explain how the technology was supposed to work. It just did, So it depends upon the explanation. Now, one thing you could say is it could be like the way it's

depicted in say, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. You watch that movie and you have Mike TV who gets blasted into a million tiny pieces and his broadcast from one point to another and then reassembled on the other side, that would be difficult. I mean, obviously that requires transporting the atoms across a distance anyway, So why would you do that? Why would you break someone up into all their constituent atoms, then transport those atoms to where they

needed to go, and then put them back together. It doesn't sound particularly efficient or pleasant to be divided up into your tiny atoms and then sent to your destination for reassembly. Even assuming you could get this technology to work, it doesn't seem like a practical approach. So maybe that's not it. Maybe it's not that the transporter is breaking you down to the atomic level and then somehow magically sending those atoms to a different place. Maybe something else

is happening. Maybe it breaks down the body, scans all of your body's constituent atoms for information, so it learns how all the different atoms and molecules in your body are connected to one another, and how what their relationship is and and how they fit, and then sends that information to your destination, which then builds essentially a copy of you out of raw material following that blueprint that

was created through the scanning process. So you're really just taking a full inventory of a living organism and all the stuff that makes it what it is, sending that information to a destination and building it again. Even if you were able to transfer the memories of the old person, that instance of the old person is gone, though, right I mean, So let's say it's me. I'll consider myself

Jonathan A Jonathan Alpha. So Jonathan Alpha, I step into a transporter and I'm gonna beam myself to Walt Disney World, Florida. So Jonathan Alpha gets into the transporter and says engage, and then I get blasted by energy which splits up all of my atoms and scans everything and sends that information over to Walt Disney World, Florida. And then Jonathan Beta, who possesses all the memories and all the traits of Jonathan Alpha, is brought into existence and begins life anew,

but still Jonathan Alpha is dead. Transporters essentially would become suicide machines because the person who stepped onto the transporter base would no longer have any continuity of consciousness. That person is gone. The thing that's created on the other side would be an exact duplicate of that person and have all the memories of that person, including the memory of stepping on the transporter, but it would be essentially a new person, so you have an interruption in consciousness.

That's what a lot of people have objected to, this idea of the transporter. In fact, Bones, you know, the uh, the character of Bones, the doctor in the original series of Star Trek had an objection to using transporters, and at least some versions that objection was voiced as I don't want to have all my Adams blasted apart and be dead and have some copy of me walking around. I'm not really crazy about that. Didn't mean that, you know, sometimes it happened anyway, So we had some grouchy copies

of Bones walking around in the original series. But you might say, let's say this, this is how this works, that the transporter does in fact essentially kill a person and then reconstruct them on the other side. Why would you kill Jonathan Alpha at all? I mean, first of all, he's a nice guy, he likes you. What what's your beef with Jonathan Alpha? Why not just let Jonathan Alpha survive back at the launch site and Jonathan Beta, a

perfect clone, can putter about at the destination. So Jonathan Beta is over at Walt Disney World, Florida having a great old time, and Jonathan Alpha is still alive over in Atlanta, Georgia, without having to be blasted into tiny little bits. In fact, assuming we have this technology in the first place, there's no real reason this couldn't happen unless the transport technology absolutely required breaking down the transported person into their component bits to get a full scan.

If the scan was non invasive, you could end up with a whole bunch of copies of yourself all over the galaxy. Just think of all the podcasts I can

make now. According to Arizona State physicist Lawrence Krauss, who wrote a book called The Physics of Star Trek, he says that in order to de materialize a human body and turn it into energy, which we assume means breaking down all that binding energy between all the different atoms in your body, essentially you're using your body as fuel for a nuclear uh series of reactions, essentially a nuclear bomb.

This would release the energy of about a thousand, one hundred megaton nuclear weapon detonations for a single person, depending upon your weight, really depending upon your mass. The largest nuclear weapon ever tested, by the way, was the tsar bomba which had a fifty or fifty seven megaton yield, So having a thousand hundred megaton nuclear weapon detonations, that's pretty big deal just to get yourself down to Walt Disney World, Floria Jonathan Alpha. You should think more now.

You might also ask how much information would a human body represent if you were to scan a human body and try to recreate it on the other side, how much data is that? And we don't really know, but that hasn't stopped some people from having some thought experiments.

Students at the University of Lester made some pretty big assumptions when they were working out how much time and energy would be needed to teleport a human being, and they settled on using the amount of information contained within d NA and the amount of information encapsulated by human brain. Their calculations came to two point six times ten to the forty second power bits, which is two point six

tredicillian bits or five duo decillian bytes. There's no prefix for that number of bites because our prefixes for naming large numbers of bites stops at when the ten to the eighteenth power or a yata byte. So for reference, the last time that you know, you i've ever talked about big data. We were talking about creating two point

five exabytes of data every day. What we're saying is that a human being represents way more than that just one human being, which would then mean that teleporting that person by sending the data to its destination would take a really long time because data can only travel at the speed of light, and you're depending on what method you're using to send the data. You know, in order for you to to actually have that received properly, you're not receiving it all at once. You have to receive

it in chunks, right. It's kind of similar to WiFi or why gig or any of those technologies. You have to figure out what's the data throughput? How much data can we send out any one time. When you're talking about that much data, obviously that increases the amount of time it takes you to send it. Plus you still limited by the distance between point and point B, so you can't just instantaneously transport from one spot to another. There would actually be quite a delay depending on how

far away you were. So a little complicated, and unfortunately there's no real answer to that. So you might ask well, is telebrotation even possible at all? Well, there's there's quantum telebrotation. It's not exactly the same thing. In fact, it's not the same thing at all, but at least has the name telebrotation in it, right. Quantum telebrotation refers to the transmission of information, not even really full information, but it's

not the transmission of matter. You can transmit the state of a quantum particle, such as an electron spin, without transporting the particle itself, and it can travel over a distance. Because in two thousand and fourteen, a team of researchers broke records when telebrating the quantum state of a photon fifteen and a half miles or twenty five kilometers from the destination to the or from the origin to the destination.

I should say they used an optical cable to transmit the state, which might sound like cheating because we're talking about teleprotation. I'd argue the term teleprotation as part of the real reason people misinterpret what this is all about. But that's because it does not mean instantaneous travel. Here's what's actually going on. You measure a quantum particle to a certain extent UH and you have well, first you have to entangle two particles. Entangling means that they have

this relationship with one another. Typically it means that the spin of some element is UH is reverse. So if you have an electron and you're entangling the second elector on, the spin of one electron might be up, the spin of the other electron is down. As long as you don't measure either of the two electrons, they will remain entangled,

and it doesn't matter how far apart they are. You could move one electron all the way across the universe, and as long as you haven't disrupted the system or observed it in any way, then the two electrons will be entangled, and as one is spinning up, the other will spin down. Whenever one changes, the other one will change likewise, and this will continue until you observe the system.

When you do it decoheres, you break coherence, but you will know that at the instant when you measured the electron that was on your side, you'll know what the state of the other electron was at that same moment. So if we've moved to electrons all the way across the universe, and then I observe the electron that's in front of me, and I see how it's spinning down. I know that the electron across the universe at that

moment it was spinning up. I don't know what it's doing now, because the decoherence means that you have broken entanglement. They are no longer entangled together. However, you can go a different, slightly different way and transport a quantum state sort of, and it's a little confusing. Let me see if I can give you kind of a high level

approach as to how it would work. We're getting into quantum physics, which gets pretty hairy, and my expertise in quantum physics is at at an enthusiast level, so take it for what you will. So here's how it would work. You would measure a quantum particle to a certain extent, but not so much that your measurements are actually gonna mess things up and make the system go deco here. So then you would have that quantum particle interact with

a second quantum particle um. Let's let's give these guys names. So we're gonna call your first quantum particle particle Man, and the second quantum particle is triangle Man. So you've got particle Man and triangle Man, and earlier before you did this, triangle Man actually hung out with a third particle we'll call it universe Man. So triangle Man and universe Man go along really well, and they became entangled at a quantum level, so that means they're quantum states

are complementing one another. As one changes, the other one changes. So let's we're gonna talk about particle spin here. Triangle Man's spin is up, universe Man's spin is down. Both will change simultaneously to continue complementing one another as long as they are entangled. But then you have particle Man and triangle Man interact as anyone who has heard the song Nose. They have a fight, triangle wins. This actually changes things for both particles. Moreover, since universe Man and

triangle Man were entangled, universe Man is also affected. You send this scan data from particle Man over the universe Man's position, and through some process I don't actually understand, universe Man essentially becomes particle Man. The effect is that particle Man has teleported to universe Man's position, all because

of quantum entanglement. But this transformation. While it seems instantaneous, still requires you to actually send that scan data to the destination, so you're still limited by whatever medium you're communicating through. It's not truly instantaneous. If your brain is not broken yet, stay tuned because in a little bit we're gonna start talking about replicators. But first, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, let's talk

about Star Trek replicators. Uh. There. These would replications would be the next generation version of the food synthesizers that were in the original series. Eventually in Star Trek there was the implication at least that they could replicate pretty much anything unless it was necessary for them not to

be able to replicate it for purposes of the plot. So, for example, as far as you could tell, they could replicate most any normal matter, but not stuff like latinum, which was a a precious metal that was used in galactic trading, particularly among the Ferenghi. So you couldn't just replicate latinum because if you could, you could just flood the market and mess with inflation and totally make it an entire economy collapse. This was necessary for multiple reasons,

one of the big ones being that. You know, when Rottenberry was envisioning Star Trek, part of at least some of the visions had it where it was a post scarcity society with no need for money. If you can make everything you need with a replicator, you don't really need cash anymore. Right, there's no scarcity everyone. There's plenty to go around for everybody. The only thing that would

be a requirement is energy. You would need energy to run whatever the technology was that was providing that post scarcity uh source of resources. So as long as you had plentiful energy, there's no need for money. Now, if energy is not plentiful, then you would need money because you would have to pay for whatever the equivalent amount of energy was, so that there'd be some way of

divvying that up. But at least in parts of Star Trek lore, there was no money in the Federation space area, but there were still other places like the Fringy Empire where money was very important. And so you had replicators that could theory theoretically replicate just about anything, but not certain things or else it would have broken broken the story, that's what would have happened. So plot is always more important than science. I guess is the lesson there. So replicators,

how would they work in star trek? Well, presumably they were working on a very similar principle as the transporter. So the transport, of course converts bodies into energy and sends it somewhere and then converts that energy back into matter. But with a replicator, you would have to do something else. Right, you might convert pure energy produced by the ship's power plant into matter, so equals mc squared. That you know that can work both ways, right? Uh? So could you

take energy and make matter from it? Well, theoretically, yeah, you know, you can convert matter into energy via nuclear reactions. It's also physically possible to conduct a phase transition from energy to matter, but it's really hard. I mean, practically it's probably not possible even in space. You would probably just have more luck going about getting your resources the old fashioned way as opposed to trying to make pure

energy turn into matter. Another thing you could do is maybe recycle waste material down to the molecular or atomic level and then reassemble that, but you would be limited by whatever materials you had to work with. Similar to that, instead of recycling waste material, maybe you just have a whole bunch of vats of raw materials, so raw atoms. Uh. Or you might recycle waste material down to the sub atomic level, not the atomic level, and then reassemble that.

That would give you a lot more chemical versatility than just the individual atoms. Uh. That might be what the Star Trek replicators are actually doing. But that requires splitting atoms, so you'd have to figure out how to do that, Like how much energy are you using to split the atoms, how are you containing the energy that is generated by splitting the atoms, And is that in fact a more efficient way of producing things like food than just storing

food on a spaceship. Now, a lot of these approaches seem to be predicated upon the concept of molecular assemblers. So a molecular assembler is a specific kind of of nanotechnology. Really, just think of it as some sort of device or nanobot or object or process that can take individual atoms and form them together to make specific molecules, and then take those molecules and put them together and then put them in a structure that is that you know, resembles

something else already. So you can build say a steak atom by atom and molecule by molecule, a cooked steak at that you could do that. Uh, it would be completely synthetic. And we have talked a little bit about synthetic foods in the past on tech stuff, But synthetic foods, UH, don't take this very granular approach. We're not putting them together atom by atom and molecule by molecule. That's not really an efficient way for us to do things. We don't have that assimilar built. And if we wanted to

do it, you could do it in the lab. You could manipulate individual atoms and slowly move them into position and make them form bonds with one another, but it would take a really long time and a huge amount of energy comparatively speaking, and so it would be an incredibly inefficient way of making anything, let alone food. So you would need to have some sort of automated approach that would work at an incredible speed, and these molecular

assemblers would potentially be that. And you may have heard some interesting doomsday theories about such stuff like nanobots that could take matter, break it down, and build it into something else. There is a a hypothetical situation called the

gray goose scenario. And gray goo is where you get molecular assemblers that build more molecular are assemblers by breaking down matter, so they The idea is that these could malfunction and instead of ever making anything else, they just continuously start breaking down all the matter around them and turning them into more molecular assemblers, and that as a result, they would just completely take over the entire surface of the planet and eventually more of it and turn it

into just more molecular assemblers. So we would all get devoured by these little nanotechnology things. Here's the good news. We don't have those, so there's no worry about it happening. But it is one of those kind of doomsday scenarios that science fiction authors have proposed after hearing about the concept of a molecular assembler. We do have three D printed foods, there are some examples out there. Typically, the three D printed foods are fairly primitive compared to this.

I mean, we're not building them molecule by molly fuel. Instead, you're printing out layers of ingredients until you have a finished product. In some cases, it's it's not that different from like putting icing on top of a cake. You're just laying down a layer and another layer on top

of that, another layer on top of that. UM. In fact, a lot of people have said that three D printers are about as close to replicators as we can get right now, of course, the three D printers not replicating anything, not not in the sense of star Trek. You could have a single digital model, send it to a three D printer and have the three D printer printed out, and it might be using plastic, it might be using metal, it might be using glass, it could be using organic material.

We've seen some interesting experiments using three D printers to create artificial organs, for example, or at least artificial tissue. UM that's sort of potential, is phenomenal, but again it's not quite the same thing as a replicator. It doesn't get down on that level. Eric Drexler is probably one of the more famous figures out there who has suggested this idea of the nano factories of molecular assimilars approach. But it's it's really difficult to say whether or not

this will ever come about as an actual thing. Uh. There are a lot of different mechanical and chemical manipulation approaches we would have to master in order for this to work, and there's no guarantee yet that we will ever actually reach that point, or if we do that it will be any more efficient than other methodologies. So again, kind of like some of the other Star Trek technologies,

it's not necessarily that they're impossible. It may be that they become impractical, that there are other ways of addressing the problem that maybe aren't as science fiction. Ee, maybe they're not as magical in the long run, but they are less inefficient and therefore more practical on a day to day basis. So we're probably not even close to creating any kind of nanotechnology or molecular assembler um. It's it's a tall order. We have gotten to the point

where we can manipulate individual atoms. You may remember that IBM researchers were able to take atoms and and position them with a I believe it was a scanning electron microscope where they were able to position them one at a time to spell out IBM, which is kind of clever, but that's a far far cry of using atoms to spell out a word and using atoms to make a nice pastrami sandwich and some hot Earl gray tea but

this is the sort of technology that we find inspirational. Uh. There have been plenty of examples of tech in Star Trek that either directly or indirectly influenced people to try and create tech in the real world that approaches that same use. Try quarters are a great example, And in a future episode I will definitely cover those. Other things I'll have to cover will include things like phasers and shields and cloaking devices. The list is enormous, but I

can't possibly tackle all of that in one episode. It would take ages and ages, and honestly, I I want to make sure I get to other stuff. So at some point in the future I will revisit this topic and I will cover some of the other technologies found in Star Trek, and we will explore those possibilities, like impulse drive. What exactly is impulse drive and how does it work? You know, what are the uh? What does

it mean if you reverse the polarity? Apparently it's important because it happens in like half the episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation? But and why does Riker sitting at chair or by swinging his leg over the back of the chair before sitting down? Some of these questions may in fact be impossible for us to answer, but we will take a close look at them in the future.

In the meantime, if any of you have suggestions for topics I should cover in tech stuff, whether it's the tech of fictional universe is, maybe it's a specific type of technology and you've always wanted to know how it works. Maybe it's a company you want to hear more about its history and how it how it came to be, or a specific person in the world of technology you would like me to cover. Or maybe there's someone I should interview and talk to about their expertise in whichever

field of tech they happen to be focused in. You should let me know because otherwise I'm just I'm just casting out into the void, or depending heavily upon my producer Ramsey, who is amazing at coming up with really cool ideas and it's a it's a huge load off my mind. If you want to be like Ramsey, and trust me you do. He looks good in a denim jacket. You gotta make sure you get in touch with me. You send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line

on Twitter or Facebook. The handle for the show at both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Remember I often will live stream my recording sessions. It happens on Wednesdays and Friday's. Just go to twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. You'll see the schedule there. You can join in. You can log into the chat room. I'm happy to chat with you guys and have a great discussion. Sometimes I get phenomenal suggestions in there, sometimes I get silly ones and guess what, I like both of those things,

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