August 28, 2015 • 49 mins
It's time to look at a science fiction technology: teleporters. Could teleportation ever work? Will it allow for faster-than-light travel?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Be there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says I will
be there and everywhere, here, there, and everywhere. I'm Jonathan
(00:21):
Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're not going
to mess around at the beginning. We're gonna get right
to business because we're talking about teleportation and no burying
the lead in this episode like we've been known to
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
(00:45):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:30):
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.
(01:53):
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,
(02:15):
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.
(02:41):
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
(03:02):
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
(03:25):
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
(03:47):
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
(04:09):
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
(04:30):
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,
(04:54):
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.
(05:18):
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
(05:38):
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,
(05:59):
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
(06:22):
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.
(06:43):
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
(07:08):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:50):
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,
(08:13):
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
(08:37):
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
(08:59):
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
(09:21):
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
(09:42):
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
(10:06):
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
(10:27):
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
(10:50):
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.
(11:12):
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
(11:34):
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
(11:57):
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
(12:17):
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
(12:40):
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
(13:02):
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.
(13:23):
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
(13:45):
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
(14:06):
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
(14:28):
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
(14:50):
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
(15:12):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:56):
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
(16:18):
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
(16:40):
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
(17:00):
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
(17:21):
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
(17:42):
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
(18:04):
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
(18:27):
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
(18:49):
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
(19:13):
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
(19:34):
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
(19:58):
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
(20:19):
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
(20:39):
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,
(21:00):
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
(21:20):
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
(21:43):
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
(22:03):
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
(22:26):
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,
(22:48):
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,
(23:09):
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
(23:31):
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
(23:54):
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
(24:17):
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
(24:38):
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
(25:00):
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
(25:21):
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
(25:43):
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,
(26:06):
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
(26:32):
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
(26:53):
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
(27:14):
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.
(27:36):
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.
(27:56):
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
(28:18):
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
(28:39):
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
(29:01):
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
(29:25):
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
(29:45):
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.
(30:06):
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
(30:27):
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
(30:49):
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
(31:10):
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
(31:30):
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
(31:51):
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
(32:15):
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.
(32:37):
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
(32:59):
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
(33:21):
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
(33:43):
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
(34:06):
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
(34:27):
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
(34:48):
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
(35:09):
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
(35:29):
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
(35:52):
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
(36:15):
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
(36:38):
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
(36:59):
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
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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,
(38:03):
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
(38:25):
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
(38:47):
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.
(39:09):
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
(39:29):
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,
(39:53):
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
(40:16):
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,
(40:37):
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
(40:58):
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
(41:21):
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
(41:42):
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
(42:04):
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
(42:25):
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
(42:47):
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
(43:07):
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
(43:31):
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,
(43:55):
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
(44:16):
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
(44:37):
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
(44:58):
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.
(45:21):
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
(45:44):
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,
(46:05):
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
(46:26):
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
(46:46):
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
(47:08):
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
(47:32):
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.
(47:53):
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
(48:17):
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.
(48:41):
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,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Be there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says I will
be there and everywhere, here, there, and everywhere. I'm Jonathan
(00:21):
Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're not going
to mess around at the beginning. We're gonna get right
to business because we're talking about teleportation and no burying
the lead in this episode like we've been known to
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
(00:45):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:30):
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.
(01:53):
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,
(02:15):
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.
(02:41):
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
(03:02):
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
(03:25):
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
(03:47):
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
(04:09):
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
(04:30):
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,
(04:54):
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.
(05:18):
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
(05:38):
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,
(05:59):
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
(06:22):
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.
(06:43):
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
(07:08):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:50):
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,
(08:13):
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
(08:37):
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
(08:59):
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
(09:21):
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
(09:42):
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
(10:06):
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
(10:27):
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
(10:50):
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.
(11:12):
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
(11:34):
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
(11:57):
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
(12:17):
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
(12:40):
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
(13:02):
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.
(13:23):
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
(13:45):
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
(14:06):
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
(14:28):
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
(14:50):
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
(15:12):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:56):
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
(16:18):
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
(16:40):
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
(17:00):
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
(17:21):
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
(17:42):
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
(18:04):
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
(18:27):
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
(18:49):
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
(19:13):
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
(19:34):
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
(19:58):
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
(20:19):
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
(20:39):
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,
(21:00):
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
(21:20):
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
(21:43):
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
(22:03):
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
(22:26):
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,
(22:48):
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,
(23:09):
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
(23:31):
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
(23:54):
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
(24:17):
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
(24:38):
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
(25:00):
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
(25:21):
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
(25:43):
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,
(26:06):
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
(26:32):
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
(26:53):
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
(27:14):
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.
(27:36):
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.
(27:56):
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
(28:18):
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
(28:39):
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
(29:01):
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
(29:25):
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
(29:45):
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.
(30:06):
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
(30:27):
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
(30:49):
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
(31:10):
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
(31:30):
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
(31:51):
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
(32:15):
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.
(32:37):
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
(32:59):
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
(33:21):
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
(33:43):
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
(34:06):
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
(34:27):
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
(34:48):
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
(35:09):
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
(35:29):
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
(35:52):
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
(36:15):
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
(36:38):
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
(36:59):
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
(37:20):
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
(37:41):
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,
(38:03):
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
(38:25):
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
(38:47):
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.
(39:09):
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
(39:29):
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,
(39:53):
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
(40:16):
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,
(40:37):
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
(40:58):
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
(41:21):
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
(41:42):
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
(42:04):
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
(42:25):
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
(42:47):
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
(43:07):
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
(43:31):
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,
(43:55):
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
(44:16):
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
(44:37):
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
(44:58):
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.
(45:21):
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
(45:44):
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,
(46:05):
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
(46:26):
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
(46:46):
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
(47:08):
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
(47:32):
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.
(47:53):
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
(48:17):
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.
(48:41):
For more on this topic and the future of technology.
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