A citation of scientists proving that perfect teleportation is possible in principle, having actually teleported something, is a strange definition of real to you?
Well, it’s the best I can do. If you don’t believe those researchers when they say you have to destroy the original that’s your lookout. I’m going with the scientists who’ve actually done it rather than your feelings.
I don’t think anyone considers sleeping as a form of “death” or “total stop of the brain” till the person wakes. The person’s mind is intact and working the whole time (as evidenced that external stimuli can wake the person…the brain is still aware on some level even when asleep).
I believe those scientists who say that using their method and interpretation of “teleporting” a photon destroys the photon. I don’t believe actual teleportation of humans will EVER be possible. It’s fiction. As fiction, it’s strange to make definitive statements about it.
If you want to base your understanding of a fictional device on several experiments on single particles, then go right ahead. Just don’t tell me that your idea of how a fictional device will work is definitive.
And just to humor your idea of destruction of the original, so what? I go into the teleportation machine on Earth, and wake up teleported to Mars. I’m still alive, and not destroyed.
I suggest you read the article I linked to. Teleporting humans is possible in principle.
That said it may well be a practical impossibility (i.e. the hurdles of building a machine that could do it may be insurmountable) but the rules of the universe do not forbid it.
And the “destroy the original” is the one form of teleportation that is not fictional since they have actually done it. All the non-destructive forms are science fiction as far as we know now.
Just to poke a little hole in the mysticism of C here, but it is possible to move at a speed greater than C. In fact, you’re doing it right now: the universe is expanding slightly faster than the speed of light.
Superluminal travel (and the possibilities it opens) is fun to dream about, but there’s no realistic possibility that it could happen within your lifetime, unless you’re secretly the Highlander.
Depending on your reference point, the universe is either expanding slightly faster, slightly slower, or much faster or much slower, than the speed of light. That does not mean that you are moving with that velocity, just that something is receding from you at that velocity.
For anything useful, you have to be able to approach another object at greater than the speed of light, and that is, as einstein tells us, verboten.
The universe is not expanding “slightly faster than the speed of light”, or at any one speed. The recession velocity increases with distance. So objects far enough apart do have a mutual recession velocity that can exceed c. But this is attributable to the metric expansion of space, it is not possible to travel through space faster than c.
You don’t even need to bring sleep into it. I, right now, am not the same person I was at the time that I started writing this post. That person is gone forever, and the person who goes on is a different person. Except there’s no “person who goes on”, either, because that person is a different person than the person I am as I complete this post, and so on.
And yet, I care about those other persons in the past, and the persons who will be in the future, and call all of them “me”. Why is that? Once you have an answer to that question, you’ll have answers to all of the teleporter questions, too.
Well, except how to actually make one.
About this hypothetical teleporter, what is there at the other end? A receiving station? Was it also teleported there?
It seems slightly less science-fictional to suppose you have access to a nigh-inexhausible source of propulsion, so that, while you cannot travel at the speed of light, you can get close enough for all practical purposes. Even if it took 6 months to get to Alpha Centauri, I could deal with that.
Alpha Centauri is much further away than 6 light months. It’s over 4 light years.
Maybe if you could reach relativistic speeds you could get there in 6 subjective months. I do wonder what level of acceleration you’d have to achieve to do that. If it’s much greater than 1g you’d have a very uncomfortable ride, plus you’d have to begin to decelerate at the same level no later than halfway there if you want to be able to stop at your destination. It may not be possible to withstand the required g’s.
Realistically, it was built there by a vehicle that is fueled with lots of antimatter, has a very tiny payload (a few thousand kilograms), and basically the capability to bootstrap an entire space based industrial civilization. Totally reasonable, actually, we can describe in detail how such a vehicle would work today. We have existence proof in that living cells have about the same density of machinery you’d need.
Anyways, such vehicle might realistically still take centuries. You need to be immortal to go to the stars. Pretty obvious. And the beings who ‘rode’ the vehicle will own the new star system, and anyone they accept who was beamed over is a mere guest.
These teleportation paradoxes are a complete waste of forum space, because they wouldn’t exist. The actual way this technology works is, the neural network for the ‘beings’ (whether created artificially or made by copying the networks of a deceased preserved human brain, it doesn’t matter) is just a digital file.
Whenever the being wants to go somewhere, it sends a fork (a copy) of itself via transmission networks to that location. There is such a thing as forward error correction, and there are algorithms where if you send N bits + M error correction data, only N total bits need to be successfully received, out of the whole message, to reconstruct the entire message correctly. So if the being’s neural network files are 3 petabytes, it would need to send maybe 5 petabytes to make up for noise over interstellar distances.
Anyways, once the being wants to return, it just gets a fork sent back, and then the original + forked copy get merged using algorithms that weight each being’s relative experiences and personality changes.
Relatively simple and straightforward and probably something that will be demonstrated in the next 40 years. (not the starship part, but the fork/merging of the network data for an artificial sentience)
If you accelerate at a constant 1g then it takes about a year accelerate to (nearly) light speed. Then consider a year slowing down at the other end. So two years accel/decelerating and three years or so at cruising speed (guess…not sure how to calculate that) so a five year trip.
Subjectively to the passenger the trip will go a lot faster (a bit less than two years to them…guessing again but seems it should be close).
Now you just need to figure how you can carry enough fuel to accelerate for two years (not to mention the fuel needed to push your relativisticly heavy ship).
To reach Alpha Centari in 6 months subjective, you’d have to be under a constant 13g. At 1g, travel time would be a little more than 3.5 years.
At 10,000g’s you get there in less than a day.
(And fortunately, your pizzas will all be very flat.)
The one thing that always seems to get glossed over with these “generation ships” on their hundreds or thousand year journey - building the most complex machine ever created, putting it in the harshest and most unforgiving environment imaginable and having it function without a critical failure longer than not just any machine ever built, but longer than humans have built machines at all.
What your saying is, don’t go with the lowest bidder?
There is a very nice calculator for this:
http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel.php
at 1G acceleration/deceleration, it would take 3.5 years perceived time for the traveler to travel 4 light years out. It would take 5.6 years in observer time.
So relativistic speeds are not an answer to any useful human interstellar travel, other than to the closest stars, and then only if you’re willing to give up years of your life.
Maybe some sort of suspended animation? Of course everything, including the refrigeration units, would have to work for centuries unattended by humans.
If you can get very close to light speed then the people on the ship can get pretty far in a semi-reasonable amount of time.
Using the calculator Okrahoma provided above a 4 light year trip seems to take the people on the ship 3.5 years. A thousand light year trip would take about 13.5 years. That would probably mean you want to hibernate but you wouldn’t have to if you could grow your own food and could keep the water running.
Of course if you do this roundtrip when you return everyone you know will have been dead for about 2000 years so that would be weird.