Beam Me Up? Teleporting Is Real

[n2doc]

"I have a hard time saying this with a straight face, but I will: You can teleport a single atom from one place to another," says Chris Monroe, a biophysicist at the University of Maryland.

His lab's setup in a university basement looks nothing like the slick transporters that rearrange atoms and send them someplace else on Star Trek. Instead, a couple million dollars' worth of lasers, mirrors and lenses lay sprawled across a 20-foot table.

"What they do in the TV show is, they send the atoms over a long distance," says David Hucul, who recently got his Ph.D. with Monroe. "But, really — if you could build anything, you wouldn't send the atoms."

That's because atoms are big and heavy, and you don't really need them, he explains. The laws of physics say that any atom of carbon is identical to any other atom of carbon. Oxygen, hydrogen and so on: They're all perfect atomic clones.

"The thing that makes us unique is the states of those atoms," Hucul says. "So you'd really send the information — the state of the atom."

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http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/29/427161157/beam-me-up-teleporting-is-real-even-if-trekkie-transport-isnt

[DavidDvorkin]

1. He's really talking about cloning.

[longship]

2. Even if it worked, which I doubt, there's the continuity problem.

Like Dr. McCoy, I would not step onto a transporter pad.

What makes anybody think that the person materializing at the destination is the same person who dematerialized at the source? Unless there's a way to prove continuity, the person at the source is destroyed (i.e., killed) and what appears at the destination is a duplicate, but different person.

But at any rate, transporting the quantum state of an atom is one thing, an entire animal or especially a human another. Both are, as far as anybody can tell, impossible.

[Hal_____]

3. Yes

Yes:
"Like Dr. McCoy, I would not step onto a transporter pad.

What makes anybody think that the person materializing at the destination is the same person who dematerialized at the source? Unless there's a way to prove continuity, the person at the source is destroyed (i.e., killed) and what appears at the destination is a duplicate, but different person."

[Thor_MN]

4. I blame some of the people I know on the photocopy effect...

You know, where you get a copy of a copy of copy, etc, and it's kind of shitty? Like that, but with people.

[phantom power]

6. On the other hand, we haven't really proved we have continuity as we are.

There was a little sub-plot in China Mieville's novel Kraken, where this guy repeatedly transports himself, and ends up in a state of near catatonia from being haunted by the ghosts of all the versions of himself he killed. Simultaneously funny, and disturbing.

Here in the mundane world, it's a wide open question how much of our experience of continuity is 'real' continuity (whatever that even means) and how much is an illusion, perhaps analogous to the way we perceive continuity from still images.

[WestCoastLib]

7. You are not the same collection of atoms today that you were 20 years ago.

I'm not sure that it matters (pun intended)

[longship]

8. But replacing them all at once cannot be claimed to be continuity, can it? nt

[WestCoastLib]

10. I don't know

We(as in "we humans", not likely any of us alive today) may find out sometime.

I was just pointing out that there very well may be no difference in swapping out all your atoms at once, vs. swapping them out slowly over years, as it relates to "being yourself". And that we know we can do the latter and still retain who we are.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

5. You are going to have so send so much information on so minute a scale

That the real problems are going to be bandwidth and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

[DetlefK]

9. It's not teleportation if you have to transport the raw material there by hand.

[Bonobo]

11. I love this quantum stuff! nt

[chknltl]

12. Regarding Astral Projection

I think this should be relevant to the conversation of teleportation, especially "Beam Me Up" style teleportation. In Star Trek they beam up not only everything that makes up one's physical body but also ones mind. I've wondered about that. If we actually have one, how does the Star Trek teleporter know which atoms the soul resides in? What about ones thoughts?

There is a pseudoscience phenomenon known as astral projection, what if it were possible perhaps even easier to teleport in a bio-mechanical astral projection format? One would step into a 'teleporter', ones body would remain behind but your thoughts, your id your soul, well whatever 'it' is that makes you you gets teleported to a machine body. The disadvantage is that you could not take your physical body with you and that your body would then need maintaining on a life support system. The advantage is that the machine body would be preadapted to pretty much any hostile environment imaginable. How damned cool would it be to be an actual flying deep-space rover, gliding over any of our solar system's amazing moons but then be back home in ones own body by the end of an eight hour shift!