Scotty, beam me up! Students investigate the feasibility of teleportation

Teleportation is considered to be the transportation method of the future, able to get us from point A to point B in just seconds. However, according to graduate students at the University of Leicester, although the 'point A to point B' part is right, it will take just a little bit longer than we might think.

When it comes to teleporting someone, it's all about information. In Star Trek, the transporter deconstructs your body, puts all your atoms into a beam of matter that gets shot off to the destination, and then it puts you back together when you arrive. In the more realistic version that we'll likely create (if we ever do), the device will scan you at the starting point, destroy your body, and then beam the information to the destination, where a similar device will reconstruct your body, exactly as it was to start. In either case, there definitely has to be matter to form you from, but it's the information about where everything goes that truly important.

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According to a group of four graduate students at the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy, who wrote a paper about this for the university's Journal of Physics Special Topics, once you step into that teleporter, you're going to be in for a long wait.

First, they figured out how much space it would take the store the information about your body. To conserve space, they just dealt with one cell, since that contains the information needed to reconstruct the person, and found that it would equal about 10 billion bits, or 10 gigabits. Current computer storage for a standard desktop computer is around 8 terabits (8 trillion bits), so that doesn't seem like a problem.

Then they hit the snag that slows this whole thing down — it's not just about sending the body, but everything stored in the person's brain. According to their calculations, the contents of the average person's brain would take up 2.6 x 10⁴² bits.

So, that's 2,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 2.6 tredecillion bits. The largest storage capacity created so far is apparently in the petabyte range (10¹⁵), so at the moment we'd have no way to store that much information.

Transmitting it is an even more daunting task. They estimated a transfer rate of about 30 Gigahertz, and found that it would take around 350,000 times the current age of the universe to send one person. Of course, a faster transfer rate will bring that down, but as the transfer rate increases, so does the amount of energy needed.

Maybe we should just stick to more conventional methods of transportation.

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Personally, I'd never step into a teleporter anyway, even if it really did take only seconds to make the journey. This is because the 'scan-destroy-rebuild' type of teleporter we would likely create wouldn't actually send me, but would just create a copy. So, from my perspective, I would step into the teleporter and after it scanned me, I would cease to exist. The system would create a copy of me at the other end, and since it looked like me, acted like me and had all my memories, everyone else could continue on as if it was me. However, I would be gone.

That, in itself, makes teleportation about the worst form of transportation you can come up with.

By the way, as a fun fact, although "Beam me up, Scotty!" has become a popular reference to Star Trek, that line has never been said in any of the television episodes or movies. The closest they got was the version in my headline, which was from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

(Photo courtesy: Memory-Alpha.org/Wikia)

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