Teleportation. The global economy. And everything.

Factual Questions
1

I have been following with some interest the latest push to understand how the transference of matter (or information about matter , anyway) works. Or, to put in a more media-buzzword-friendly way, teleportation.

The question that pops to mind is: What happens to the global economy if teleportation comes to pass? What about local economies? Those of strong nations? Those of the weak? Or would there be any real change at all?

For the purposes of the discussion, assume that the cost of teleportation is negligible (ie: about the cost of a phone call) and that you can’t teleport people, only stuff.

2

I’ll save the $25 bag-checking fee if I can zap my suitcase to Las Vegas next month.

Does that count? :wink:

3

Forget Fedex Ground vs Fedex Air - I want Fedex Teleport!

4

What equipment do you need, and where? If you need a sending device but no receiving device, then the first application would be weapons: 'Port a bomb to your target on a very short fuse, and stand back on the other side of the globe and watch the fireworks. I can’t even imagine what it would do to society to make it possible for anyone in the world to kill anyone else in the world on a whim.

If the technology requires a sending device and a receiving device, but the receivers were common, widespread, and open, you’d get a very similar result: You’d just send your bomb to a receiver when you suspect that your target is going to be nearby.

To stop this threat, you’d need to have all of the devices in centralized locations, with checkpoints, security screenings, and all the rest, much like we have in airports. And even if the basic technology itself is fairly cheap, all the security overhead would add up. I don’t imagine that it’d actually be much different from what we have now.

5

WHile I don’t want to burst the daydreaming bubble… keep dreaming. Nothing they’ve done is impossible by physics, but as far as we know we’re pretty much at the limit of practical “teleportation”. Which isn’t really what they’re doing, either.

They aren’t really transferring matter. They’re transferring information, which is a whole 'nother ball o wax.

6

At a minimum, the shipping, trucking, and automotive industries would cease to exist.

7

You cant move people (that was one of the original assumptions) so autos would not have their currently utility compromised.

And note to the Bandit: Yes, it is dreaming, but so is Superman at the Bat, so shush :slight_smile:

8

For as high class as this board is it surprises me how often people say it won’t ever happen; or that we are at our practical “limit” of teleportation.

9

Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York, has written several popular books, including Physics of the Impossible. In it, he closes a chapter on teleportation with

This is a guy who built an atom smasher in his garage for a high school science project.

10

Hotels would become non-existent. What about popular destinations? How crowded would they be if you could go there for an hour on a whim? For example: I want to party on Duval Street in Key West tonight; me and 4 bajillion other people. You would have to have some way of limiting the crowds…

11

I’m thinking teleportation could enormously simplify the mining of coal. Most of the nastiness of coal mining come from the way we get to the coal now.

I’m also thinking teleportation mining will be achieved very close to the time when coal becomes obsolete.:smack:

12

As Chronos points out a lot depends on how exactly teleportation works. If you can send a package to any receiver anywhere in the world, then any terrorist with a transmitter can send a bomb to any receiver.

That means a given receiver has to be tuned to only accept shipments from trusted transmitters. And trusted transmitters will have to be behind closed and locked doors, with some sort of approval process before shipment, accompanied by a videophone link where both sides approve the other. Otherwise it’s like leaving the door to your warehouse unlocked.

If transmitters can send anywhere on the planet without a receiver then you’ve got the ultimate weapon and can bomb anyplace on the world you can get coordinates for. Let some nogoodniks get ahold of a transmitter and there’s no limit to the trouble the can cause.

We can also ask, since teleportation has to follow the laws of physics, if you transport an object to the other side of the globe, you’re taking an object traveling at thousands of miles an hour in one direction and transporting it to a location where everything else is moving thousands of miles an hour in the other direction. How do you match velocities, and if you don’t, what happens? Instant boom? Or the transporter just doesn’t work?

And so on. The effects of teleportation are strongly contingent on how teleportation actually works, and since we have no way of knowing how it would actually work since it is essentially magic, we can only speculate. The classic exploration is Larry Niven’s “Exercise in Speculation: The Theory and Practice of Teleportation” collected in “All the Myriad Ways”.

13

The problem with a speculation like this is that it all depends on the practicality of the system. I mean, we could describe modern solar power as energy from the sun that’s virtually free to produce. It’s accurate in terms of ongoing costs, but any speculation we came up with would be totally nonsensical because we haven’t talked about construction cost, regional variations in cloud cover, limited battery and redistribution technology, etc.

So the first issue is the cost of the devices. Are we talking something that only FedEx or the military could afford to build? Would the UPS Store have one at each location? Or would it be as common as a fax machine? Is a physical receiving device necessary, or just a sending one?

You have a restriction on transporting people, but not stuff. We’d want to know why. Does it kill people or just cause cancer? Would it be useful for transporting live animals? Meat, dairy and agricultural products? Other complex organics like plastics, oil and coal?

Then we’ve got patents. Even if the technology is cheap to use, you know the developing company will have huge R&D costs to recoup, and they’ll have a patent giving them exclusive rights for 17 years. They’ll charge whatever they can, which means it might not be cheap after all. And how long before the FDA or some other government agency grants permission (over the objections of numerous lobbyists) to make it legal for use?

So… in summary, I’d say that it would take decades before the tech really was cheap and effective. During that time, you’d see heavy use in industrialized countries that can afford to make them widespread, though I can’t sure what kind of use without knowing more. Eventually, all transportation and delivery services would focus on human beings and any other niche markets created by limitations of the technology. You’d see an increase in import/export activities of all kinds, but especially with products that have a shelf life (agricultural products, especially). There would be a reduction in the demand for oil, which would probably destabilize a lot of economies (Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, for example)

14

I assume we’re talking about quantum teleportation. What this really involves is transferring a quantum state from one particle to another – that is, changing the state of a particle that’s far away so that it matches the state of a particle that’s nearby. In the process, you change the state of the particle you started with (which is why it’s teleportation as opposed to duplication). Because two particles in the same quantum state are indistinguishable, the end result is the same as if you had somehow physically moved the particle from point A to point B.

In other words, it may be more accurate to think of it as “destroying the particle at point A while creating an identical duplicate of it at point B”, but this is essentially equivalent to teleportation.

This is all well and good for atoms, but scaling it up to macroscopic objects is basically impossible. To make the problem clear I need to outline the steps in quantum teleportation:

(1) Create entanglement between two particles that are far apart from each other. Neither of these particles is the one you wish to teleport.
(2) The sender performs an operation that breaks the entanglement between this pair, and instead entangles their half of the pair with the atom they want to teleport. In the process, the receiver’s half of the pair is also changed, but not necessarily into the state they wanted to send.
(3) The sender then measures their new entangled pair (in a particular measurement basis), and transmits this information (by classical means) to the receiver.
(4) The receiver uses this information to further adjust their particle so that it now has the state the sender was trying to send.

The problem is that if a given particle has two possible states, then a pair of particles has 4 possible states, and three particles have 8 possible states. So N particles have 2[sup]N[/sup] possible states. N is really, really large for macroscopic objects, so 2[sup]N[/sup] is ludicrously, unthinkably large. If you wanted to number each of the states of your macroscopic object, your numbers would need to have more digits than there are atoms in the known universe.

Note that for teleporting a macroscopic object, the procedure requires the sender to measure the state of a macroscopic object, transmit that state to the receiver, and then have the receiver modify the state of their macroscopic object. Even if you could somehow measure and the state of such a large system, there’d be no way to record or transmit the result of your measurement. As I said, we’re talking about more bits of data than there are atoms in the known universe – a lot more, in fact. Also note that the procedure would require you to entangle a macroscopic number of particles, and entanglement becomes increasingly fragile with the size of the system.

I think most people who work on this stuff admit it will never be possible with macroscopic objects, barring some breakthrough no one has even remotely thought of yet. Some people like to be optimistic, but I think that optimism is about on the level of me saying “Maybe someday we’ll figure out how to travel through time – but I don’t have any idea how.”

15

By the way, that’s not to say that it isn’t fun to speculate on what the consequences would be of real Star Trek style teleportation of macroscopic objects (even limited to inanimate ones). But I think it’s important to note that it’s fiction, like speculating on what would have happened if the Confederacy head won the American Civil War. People working on “teleportation” are only working on microscopic objects – where the idea does have potential applications as a means of communication, but not for moving significant quantities of “stuff” around.

16

Turns out I didn’t need to assume. I just noticed the link in the OP, and it’s referencing this article from science magazine. My Ph.D. research advisor was one of the authors.:slight_smile:

17

But note that our system of teleportation doesn’t have to be quantum teleportation. If we get an object at the receiver that looks pretty darn similar to the object in the transmitter, that could be close enough. So you might just need to record the position of every atom, or every 1/100th atom, or some other sample.

But then we’re not so much talking about teleportation as we are duplication. What’s the point of destroying the original except if the original in it’s original location is now useless? And heck, why bother even having an original, why not just send the instructions for how to make the duplicate? And so on.

Or we could imagine a teleportation system that works through bending space and suchlike and then we’re talking about something completely different.

I remember David Brin had a parody of Star Trek where the ship had a slurry mechanism. They sent really long tubes down to the surface of the planet, then put people into a bath that dissolved them into individual cells, the resulting slurry was pumped down to the planet via tube, and then reconstructed on the surface. Note that this system is actually less invasive than the proposed Star Trek mechanism where they break you down into fundamental particles.

18

Even if we aren’t concerned with exactly duplicating what we started with, if we’re using a protocol at all similar to quantum teleportation (I’ll abbreviate it QT) then you have to start with as much material at the end point as at the start point. If QT were scalable to the macroscopic level you can make the lump of coal on the surface look just like the lump of coal in the mine, but you can’t make a lump of coal appear on the surface where there wasn’t anything before. And as Lemur866 says, why even bother having an original? If we knew how to make coal from scratch, we could just make coal. (This would still be pointless, though, since it would cost more energy to make it than you could get from burning it.)

Likewise, QT wouldn’t be any use for teleporting a bomb to our enemies, since (1) there needs to be one atom at the target for every one we send, and those atoms have to be entangled with atoms at our source. Getting a bunch of entangled atoms to the target (without destroying the long-range entanglement) is significantly harder than getting a bomb to the target. (2) It requires us to send a classical signal to the target (which our enemies could interfere with), plus we need to have a person there to receive it, and they need to have the appropriate equipment to perform the quantum mechanical operations needed to conclude the teleportation. Again, it would be easier to just get a bomb to the target by conventional means.

Basically for all these applications you need Star Trek style teleportation, not quantum teleportation. So even if we could somehow do quantum teleportation on macroscopic objects, its uses would be much more limited than that. In short: If you can’t get an equivalent amount of matter to the target by classical means, and you can’t get a signal to the target by classical means, and you don’t have someone already at the target with the appropriate equipment to receive whatever it is you’re teleporting, you can’t do quantum teleportation.

19

Quoth tim314:

Double-check your math, there: In binary, you’d need exactly one digit for every particle you’re sending, which is much less than the number of particles in the Universe. And if you’re talking about base-10 digits, the representation would be even shorter.

20

Whoops, I misspoke. I shouldn’t have said the number of digits was more than the number of atoms in the observable universe. What I should have said is that there are more states (i.e., basis states) than atoms in the universe. Or equivalently, to specify an arbitrary state takes more numbers than there are atoms in the universe. So that’s not as bad as what I said, but still, it’s hard to imagine how we’ll ever be able to perform quantum operations on states like that.

Even just having to send some 10[sup]23[/sup] digit number is bad enough – even if you could transmit one digit per femtosecond, it’d still take you a few years.