# will teleportation ever become a reality? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 8, 2001, 11:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-teleportation-ever-become-a-reality/86090 "2001-10-08T11:15:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Jdeforrest](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/49beb7/32.png) [@Jdeforrest](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jdeforrest)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2001, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-teleportation-ever-become-a-reality/86090/41 "2001-10-09T12:30:26Z")
Do you think you would end up ancient if you didn’t go to sleep while being teleported like in Stephen King’s, “The Jaunt?” ---
**Author:** ![Schnitte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/schnitte/32/9033_2.png) [@Schnitte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Schnitte)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2001, 12:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-teleportation-ever-become-a-reality/86090/42 "2001-10-09T12:31:30Z")
About RexKatWA’s proposal not to scan every atom but only holography plus DNA: Won’t help you about teleporting people. It would allow you to reconstruct a perfect clone, i.e. a twin, of the passenger, but the memories and knowledge this person had before the teleportation would get lost beacuse they’re stored in brain cells and not in the DNA (DNA gives you only the construction plan for the brain, not the data saved there). About the multiple channels thing: Even if you could manage to use, say, one billion, channels parallelly, the span of time (now longer than originally, by the factor 1,000,000,000) reserved for every bit will still be much too short to allow data registration and processing. Of course it’s a technical problem, not a theoretical one, but remember that computing still is a very young science. New upcoming technologies often ahve a very fast growth in their beginning, but after some time growth begins to slow down (see Bill Gates’ famous what-if-car-industry-had-developed-the-same-way-computing-did comparison); I hardly think the rate of acceleration keeps on forever. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2001, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-teleportation-ever-become-a-reality/86090/43 "2001-10-09T13:32:59Z")
RexKatWA’s proposal was to send a holographic image of the ‘mind’ too (although how this would work is questionable - part of the way that the brain works is that physical connections are made and broken - the brain is a hardware/firmware/software combination) ---
**Author:** ![micco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f8ce5/32.png) [@micco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/micco)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2001, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-teleportation-ever-become-a-reality/86090/44 "2001-10-09T14:01:35Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Schnitte \* > \*\*About the multiple channels thing: Even if you could manage to use, say, one billion, channels parallelly, the span of time (now longer than originally, by the factor 1,000,000,000) reserved for every bit will still be much too short to allow data registration and processing. Of course it’s a technical problem, not a theoretical one, but remember that computing still is a very young science. New upcoming technologies often ahve a very fast growth in their beginning, but after some time growth begins to slow down (see Bill Gates’ famous what-if-car-industry-had-developed-the-same-way-computing-did comparison); I hardly think the rate of acceleration keeps on forever. \*\* Everything you said is certainly true. I just have a pet peeve about thinking some visionary thing won’t ever work because of some current limitation. The old difference engines were limited by how fast you could spin the gears, but lo and behold, we invented a new technology. I didn’t mean to trivialize bandwidth concerns, but worrying about how to move the data before you even know how to get the data or what it would look like seems premature. Kind of like worrying about how to make the turn signals blink before you invent the internal combustion engine. However, that’s just my opinion and there’s no point stifling brainstorming, so I’ll keep my snide comments to myself. ---
**Author:** ![heptapod](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a88e4f/32.png) [@heptapod](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/heptapod)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2001, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-teleportation-ever-become-a-reality/86090/45 "2001-10-09T16:18:28Z")
Here’s another article regarding research into teleportation that was posted this morning. [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/09/science/physical/09QUAN.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/09/science/physical/09QUAN.html) (registration required). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-teleportation-ever-become-a-reality/86090.md?page=2)