#1267 Could teleportation be possible?

Could teleportation be possible? In theory, teleportation could be possible, but in practice, it isn’t.

When I say that something isn’t possible, I mean with current technology or the technology that is likely to be around in the future. There is obviously no way of knowing what kind of advances might appear in the future, so saying something is impossible is not a good approach. The most likely way that teleportation would be possible would be to copy all of the information from all of the atoms in the body, transmit the information to the destination, and then recreate all of the atoms in exactly the same way as before. In essence, copying and pasting. Teleportation is not impossible, but there are a lot of hurdles that would need to be overcome to make it work. Let’s look at those.

The first problem would be copying all of the information from all of the atoms in the body at once. This is difficult because of the sheer number of atoms in the body and the fact that it is impossible to pin down the exact location of an atom because you can never know both its position and its momentum at the same time. This is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It says that the more you pin down one thing, you lose focus of the other. Think about it as someone riding a bicycle. If you pin down exactly where they are at any one moment, you have made them stationary, and you can’t know their speed. On the other hand, if you measure their speed, they are still moving and you can’t know where they are. That makes it very difficult to copy all of the atoms in the body. At least, that is to say that makes it impossible today. Perhaps people in the future will know how to do it.

And if you can manage to pin down all of the atoms in the body, you have to copy them, and there are a staggeringly large number. We have roughly 30 trillion cells alone in our body, and each cell is made of roughly 100 trillion atoms, depending on the type of cell. That’s 30 quadrillion atoms. And that is just the cells. There are so many other things in our body as well. It is estimated that we have 7 octillion atoms in our bodies. That is 27 zeroes. That means any teleportation device needs to copy a minimum of 7 octillion atoms, and the number is probably even higher than that.

If people in the future can make a machine that can copy 7 octillion atoms exactly, then that is just the first step. The information needs to be sent to wherever the person is going to be teleported to. There does seem to be a way to transmit the data. There is something called quantum entanglement. This is where two photons are connected, and whatever happens to one happens to the other. The information from the first particle is carried to the second particle by a third particle, and scientists have used this to “teleport” a photon. The first proton vanished, and the second proton became the first proton. In theory, this is what would happen if you teleported a person. How you would be able to direct the information to the correct place is not known. And how the information would be sent is also unknown. It could be sent in a form of binary, but it would require stupendous amounts of energy to do that. Arthur C. Clarke said that to teleport Captain Kirk up to the Enterprise would take all of the energy to be found in the whole Milky Way Galaxy.

The next obvious problem is how do you recreate all of the atoms in the right place? Even if you could manage to transfer the information from one set of atoms to another, how can you make sure that you have put the information in the right place? We are more than just a sum of our parts, technically. How many atoms could be out of place before it started to have an effect? Presumably, if a civilization has worked out how to take the information from octillions of atoms instantly, then putting them back won’t be a problem.

And the last problem is a moral one. If all of these problems can be overcome and it becomes possible to teleport a person across vast distances, is that the same person? If you cut text from one place in a word document and paste it in another, is that the same text? No, of course not. Your computer is just recreating the same pixels in a different place. Is that the same with teleportation? If the person is being deleted from the first place and recreated in the second, are they the same person? Has the first version of them been killed? If everything is exactly the same, does it matter? These are not questions we will have to deal with for a very long time, but they might be a problem for people in the future. And this is what I learned today.

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Sources

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/teleportation-possible

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_cell_types

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle