Teleportation and speed of light travel?

Hey, I’m not sure if this is suited for general questions but I’ll ask anyhow:

I was reading “Changes” By Isaac Asimov, the book consists of little essays on what Dr Asimov thinks the future will be like; on the 68th essay he speaks about the speed of light and how it would be very difficult to travel, in a spaceship, at the speed of light. He explains that even if we would have the propulsion technology to do so, hydrogen atoms present in space would render the spacecraft radioactive, small asteroids could hit and destroy it; and other things in space might be difficult to detect before its too late.

This got me thinking; and I think this is pure science fiction; but I’m just wondering if anyone has thought about that before or if I’m the first one; and if its a reasonable reasonning or if there’s an obvious flaw…

I thought of two separate things:
1.Sub-lightspeed (slow) unmanned spacecraft are already a reality. And I’d think its reasonable to assume they would increase their speed in the future to a larger fraction of the speed of light.

  1. Teleportation: I read somewhere that already, some scientists have teleported a lazer (to me it seems like they just switched one “OFF” and the other one “ON”, but the scientists say that it was truly teleportation - so I’ll take their word for it). Anyhow, if they teleported a lazer, it would seem that theoretically it would be possible to teleport a human being in the future (possibly far far away in the future). I understand that to do so, a machine analyses the composition of the original (which it must destroy for some reason) and then transmits the information to the destination place where it is re-created (or teleported if you prefer).

So I thought that it would be reasonable to envision light-speed travel in the following way:

  1. An unmanned spacecraft is sent far away at slow, normal and safe speeds, on board a teleportation machine, receivers and all sorts of futuristic stuff. Say the spacecraft travels 10 times less then the speed of light.

  2. After 100 years of traveling, it would reach some place that is 10 light years away.

3.When it arrives (or throughout the voyage), the people of earth use a teleportation machine and transports a human being into the spaceship - the ‘information’ being sent through light, which, obviously, travels at the speed of light.

So, basically I was thinking that this way, once you’ve been somewhere at slow speed, it would be possible to travel there at the speed of light forever after. (or until it is unoperable for a reason or another)

So, am I the first one to think about this (I expect the answer to be no, but I’ll hope anyhow); also, is there a flaw in my reasoning (besides that teleportation isn’t feasable now and may never be…)

Your sub-light speed conclusion is probably correct, I think. Accelerating to near light-speed would require colossal amounts of energy (say, a few hundred suitably placed H-bombs) and scifi solutions such as wormholes or warpsapce, while they may not violate Einstein’s equations, would require vastly more than that. Until we can built a ship which could literally fly through the sun I think we’re stuck.

Your “teleporation of lasers” (“laser” must be spelled with an “s” by the way since it stands for “stimulation”) query is about the Einstein Podolsky Rosenbourg paradox, which might be true for quantum-level particles (electrons and smaller) but would not work with anything bigger, like an atom, let alone a human.

Does this mean that you’d have a lasers? Sorry if I missed the point here.

argh, as in “a lasers” wasn’t really clear above

Hmmm… let me quote from Asimov’s book:

“What’s the best way of approaching that speed limit?
Well, the energyu-gobbling chemical-rocket engine is suitable for getting into space, but once there we might switch to an ion-drive engine, which emits speding ions (electrically charged atom fragments). The ions move much faster than the gases in an ordinary rocket exhaust, so the ions give a much more efficient kick forward to the spaceship. Of course, the ion is submicroscopic in size, so the kick forward is submicroscopic in size too. Even if billions of ions shoot backward each second, the spaceship accelerates very slowly - but steadily.
After the ship has been in space a year under this tiny but constant, acceleration, it would indeed be moving at speeds approaching those of light.”
(I’m quoting this from “Changes” by Isaac Asimov (page 191) and I might have made a couple of errors while transcribing it here)

So, does that make any sense or is it out of date? Also, why would you ever literallly need to fly through the sun?

Also, for the teleportation of lasers; is that a “it is definitly theoretically impossible” or is it a case of “we have no idea how that would be possible” (I couldn’t think of a better way of expressing what I ment…sorry)

(finally, I stand corrected on ‘laser’…I’ll keep that in mind although I personally think it sounds more way-cool with a z)

mallocks: I think he means “Laser” as opposed to “Lazer”.
a s instead of a z…

No, you’d have “a laser” instead of “a lazer”

It makes perfect sense, either in terms of a craft which emits ions or one onto which a stream of ions is directed (a so called “light sail”). However, even the total force provided in this way is so incredibly small that, from F=ma, unless the mass of the ship is tiny then the acceleration will be miniscule, such that thousands of years would be required to get up to speed. Something big enough to carry a transmitter and battery lies, I suspect, in the far future, and something big enough to hold and sustain a human for many years might lie in the realms of fantasy completely.

My “through the sun” idea was merely to illustrate the level of engineering and material resilience required for a normal, massive ship to survive the vast energies required for sci-fi style space navigation.

I believe it must come under the latter heading for now, but I strongly suspect that such an idea would be associated with a fundamentally infinitessimal probability according to the Uncertainty Principle.

Quantum entanglement and quantum teleportation are definitely realities, although the information is transferred no faster than light -
I will be surprised if any object larger than a molecule is teleported in my lifetime.
But the idea of sending unmanned spaceprobes to other star systems and subsequently sending upgrades by laser is a good one-
if artificial intelligence is possible, the space probe can recieve copies of intelligent programmes and if necessary send them back again.
in fact it would be much simpler to just beam copies of programmes around the galaxy- this system could be upgraded to sending copies of human minds, and perhaps eventually copies of human bodies- possibly by quantum teleportation, possibly just by sending the recipe for human bodies from one laser transmitter to another.
Of course in this scenario no-one actually travels anywhere- but the universe still has people (of sorts) all over it.


sci fi worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html

DrLiver, since I used exactly your basic situation of having a person teleported at the speed of light to catch up with a sub-light craft in a story once, I’m obliged to say that the idea is a sound one.

The real handwaving part comes in not at the spacecraft side of the story, though, but at the teleportation side.

Think of what it would mean to teleport a person. You’d somehow need to do a three-dimensional scan of a person’s body, particle by particle, assigned a state and relationship to each particle. I’ve seen numbers for how many bits of information this would require. I don’t remember offhand, but it is incredibly huge. 10[sup]20[/sup]. 10[sup]27[/sup]. Who knows? And you would have to make this scan virtually instantaneously, or else the relationships on both a micro (particle) and macro (neuronic) level would change all the way through the body, making reconstitution difficult. (Would you want to come out of a teleporter with your feet and your head even a second apart in terms of internal communciation?)

And what does this mean for the body involved? Can you break it down particle by particle and send it as a beam? Probably ridiculous. What about just sending the information? Better, but think of what that would mean. Jim Kelly had a story in which just the information is sent out and the body left behind is killed so that duplicates are roaming around. How do you send this much information as a beam? (Harder, how do you hit a moving spacecraft 10 light years away with it?) How much redundancy does you have to build into the system? What is your receiver like? And how do you reconstitute the body at the other end? Do you have vats of individuals particles lying around? How do you put them together?

We have no idea how that would be possible, in spades. Comparatively, starships are on the Wright Brothers level.

Hmm, Exapno Mapcase, that’s what I thought too (about teleportation being the hard part). However I haven’t thought of it in depth as you did; since I’m no science fiction writer and only discovered a couple of science fiction books recently. I am disappointed that I’m not the first one to think of it, but as I said earlier, I was expecting that…every genial idea I have was thought of before…always…

What I had in mind exactly is the following: say the body can somehow be scanned instantaneously, then the information of the body (every cell, atom, connection - everything; which as you said would be ridiculously gigantic) is stored somewhere and can be sent through light (by relaying it if necessary), maybe some super-duper advanced machine could be reconstituted with raw atoms. I haven’t thought about the rest though (redundancy & co). (But this would be in the very very far future so one would expect new science breakthrough)

Oh and one more thing, would you be kind enough to point me towards how I could acquire one of your books (are they sold on amazon.com? or libraries? are you a well know author?), I would really enjoy reading something written by a fellow SDMB member!

No, he means “lazer”: Light Amplification by the Zuccini Emission of Ralph Waldo Emerson (obviously, the W and the E are left off).

Anyway…

I imagine that, in theory - meaning that if we can develop technology that can exactly recreate a person on the cellular level - it’s possible. However, all you need is for the signal to hit a stray bit of space dust, and suddenly the data packet for your spleen is lost. This can be overcome by sending the signal, oh, several hundred times, I guess.

But it’s impractical. If you’re just sending the information about a person, and then rebuilding him from raw materials on the other end, why bother “deconstructing” the person on THIS end? Either way, THAT person wouldn’t be doing any travelling… for all intents and purposes, he’d cease to exist - that is, he’d be dead - the second he would be deconstructed. The person at the other end would be reconstructed with all his memories, personality, and appearance intact, but he’d be built out of different matter, and thus be a different person.

It’d be a great way to colonize other stars. It’d be a terrible means of tourism.

Some discussion of teleportation and copying on this thread
I mentioned the methods of copying known as *uploading, nanocopying, quantum teleportation *and quantumscale copying (perhaps you could call this last one picocopying)

There are no doubt ways to compress the data- the human brain has approximately10[sup]15[/sup] states, so you could perhaps regard that as the absolute minimum-

unless there are some parts of the brain which are non-essential or easy to replicate from a generalised prototype-
perhaps the cerebellum, or the amygdala, could just come off the shelf-
similarly the whole body could be an easy to produce stock item-
or chosen from a catalogue.
(no doubt the conditions on other planets would require some design changes anyway).
Bargain basement teleportation.
The cheapest, in terms of data, would be just to send an artificial intelligence program, loaded with a fake personality modelled on the original person. The bundle could then be loaded into an appropriate robot mobile body.
To be honest, this technique may be the only form of ‘teleportation’ ever developed, and all the others could be never needed, if the emulation is good enough.


sci fi worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html

The differenc ebetween teleporting photons and teleporting a macroscopic object, is probably the difference between making a brick and building the empire of state building. The photons were teleported using quantum entanglement, it is just is not feasible to do the same to a person’s particles, also IIRC the photons were teleported well below the speed of light.

I agree. (Nevertheless, there it is, the Empire State building. Somebody got round to making it eventually.)
Having said that, quantum teleporting will be needlessly complicated if the bargain basement techniques work at all.

As far as tourism goes, yes, less than satisfactory.
Also no good for alleviating population pressure in the home solar system.
but physically travelling to these distant stars is likely to remain difficult, and should perhaps be avoided wherever analternative is available.

Perhaps a better analogy would be the differenc between throwing a brick ten feet and throwing the empire of state building 10 feet.

The point is at the moment we cannot even began to imagine ways in which this technique could be used to teleport people.

I would think that even the scanning part would be a big problem. If you are working on the particle level (and you would probably have to do that to make an exact copy) our old pal Heisenberg will mess with the measurments.

         ROFLMAO!:D

sci fi worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html

Nocous, the teleporter uses principles related to the hesienburg principle, it basically converts the particles reality into information that can be sent to a pre-specificed location, by entangling the particles with another set of particles.