Teleportation

I've read this thing where teleportation is less transport and more breaking down the original body for re-printing elsewhere. It's a bit disconcerting tbh, knowing that your original body has been destroyed and you are essentially a literal carbon copy.

 

the idea is disconcerting, yes, but i think that it will happen in the future, since it’s so convenient! it might even become something common after some time~

 

Regarding @OzoneFruit 's criticizm of the person's survival in deconstruction-reconstruction teleportation (which seems the most practical), I've thought about this a lot, and here is my conclusion: you will die. Your stream of conciousness will end, you will be dead. However, for everyone else in the world, there won't be a functional difference. The copy of you that came out the other end of the teleporter will have the same personality, memories, and relationships as you; and is effectively the same person. But you will die when the teleporter activates, your final memory will be of the machine activating. Out of the exit of the teleporter will emerge a different assemblage of carbon and water whose first actual experience will be exiting a teleporter, but will pretty much just have implanted memories of everything you had previously. You were vaporized/atomized/destroyed, and those things kill you; there's just a copy of you that was made at the same time and is indistinguishable from you.

Here's something else that convinces me that anyone who steps into the teleporter dies: what if the receiving end doesn't make its copy of you until a few seconds or minutes after the original you is destroyed. The universe didn't have you in it at all for a time, how could you be alive if you didn't exist for those moments? And what's stranger, what if the receiving end built its copy of you before the sending teleporter destroyed you? The universe has two of you. If you're the same surviving person on both sides of the teleporter, where were you during that overlap? In the sending or receiving teleporter? And when one of those is destroyed (so that we're teleporting instead of cloning), are you suggesting you didn't die?

All of this just gets stickier if you believe in people having individual souls (which I don't know how I feel about). Did only the original you have a soul? Is your soul destroyed and rebuilt every time? Does every iteration of you have a soul, and will the afterlife get super over-populated because of teleporters?

Uhh. This all is wild. I don't think I would want to use a teleporter, but if I ever did use one (like if I was forced to in a survival situation), then I wouldn't care any more, and would afterwards use it whenever I felt like. If I died the first time, then I won't care about dying again and again.

 

Honestly doubt it will happen beyond the molecular level anytime soon. Just too much can go wrong. And ethically it is completely invalid. Not enough people would be willing to use it if it means they are disintegrated and rebuilt somewhere else. Also, how on Earth would that work? It's easy to cause a few atoms in the atmosphere to react the way you want, but what if the body has atoms that the atmosphere of the environment they are in can't reliably replicate? And even if the body is fully formed, how would the machine be able to transfer your personality, thoughts and memories? There are simply far too many variables. I honestly hope teleportation stays in the realm of science fiction.

 

Physics major here. I actually did a presentation on a topic related to this last week, and unfortunately, I have to burst the quantum entanglement bubble. If a pair of particles are entangled, then some property of those particles (usually spin) are directly related to each other. The particles can be described (measured) independently, and in doing so, you automatically know what the property of the other particle is. For example, if you had a pair of entangled electrons and measured one to be spin-up along a given axis, by conservation of angular momentum, you automatically know the other must be spin-down along that axis.

While there are some issues with the technicalities of entanglement, there's one important thing to note: quantum teleportation does not involve matter physically moving from one place to another instantaneously; it involves the instantaneous movement of information between 2 points in space. Measuring the spin of one of those entangled electrons tells you what the other electron's spin should be at that moment in time, but the other electron doesn't actually lock into that spin state. You'd still need to measure the other electron's spin to verify your assumption. There's the additional caveat that measuring the system changes the state of the system, so to verify the entanglement, you'd need to measure each electron independently, then compare measurements.

As for what OzoneFruit said, it's impractical at best and outright impossible at worst. If you wanted to deconstruct an object and reassemble it at some distant location, you'd need to map every single atom in that object, then be able to reconstruct the object exactly according to that mapping. To map those atoms accurately, you'd need to cool them to absolute 0 to ensure that they aren't moving... but due to the uncertainty principle, there will always be some quantum fluctuations in temperature (or more precisely, energy). Even if that were possible, there are too many ways the reassembling process could go wrong. As it stands right now, we simply don't have the technology, and it's unlikely that we ever will unless we discover new physics to utilize.

TL;DR: Quantum teleportation is the instantaneous transmission of information, not matter, across space. Teleportation by deconstruction-and-reassembly is too error-ridden to be possible (at least right now).

 

I could see it being used to transmit information across great distances, a la Mass Effect 2, but it would be impossible, not to mention unethical, to attempt to transmit humans via this method.

 

To be honest, it would be freaky, knowing that the original you dies and you basically live in a clone.

Also, there's that chance something could go wrong...

 

I don't think this is very likely. Sure, there's the science behind it, but like Zero was saying, the original would die and the copy would just have a copy of the original's consciousness. It wouldn't still be the same person. If there was some way to actually transfer a person's consciousness from the original to the copy, then fine, but it doesn't seem like much more than a glorified clone. (Also, if anyone hear hasn't heard it, I would highly recommend playing Soma. Great game) Ethically, I don't see this ever being allowed.

It would probably make more sense not to have a person physically "teleport" but to use gateways that act as shortcuts from one place to another, which is also theoretically possible. Instead of moving a person (or destroying the person and reconstructing them somewhere else) it would actually be shortening the distance from one location to another by warping space, which I vaguely know the theory behind but not well enough to explain.

 

@ID Zeta summed up everything wrong with teleportation via quantum entanglement pretty well. At the moment, quantum entanglement just can't teleport humans. What they are trying to do right now is get it to teleport information with the spins. This however, would require a different style of computer...a quantum computer. A computer that reads up and down spins of atoms as ones and zeros of binary. These styles of computers have been built and functional since 1970. The reason you don't see any of them is because they cost a fortune and even today, a regular computer is much better. They say that once tech increases, quantum computers will be more efficient than regular computers but really, I see that the only reason to have a quantum computer in the first place is to send quantum entanglement messages long distances.