Who says you need to store that much data? Unless I want to carry you around in stored form for awhile I don’t really need to store anything. As the scanning process proceeds I just keep passing info from one place to the other without stopping…kinda like a simple fax machine. For safety’s sake you might have some buffer memory to account for little hiccups here and there but you don’t need anywhere near 10[sup]28**K of storage.
You’d definitely need more than that.
Microsoft Teleportation Manager[sup]TM[/sup] will need at least that much on your hard drive, not counting data.
I’m much more excited about the non-zero possibility that a naked and horny Jolene Blalock could materialize in my bedroom later.
Just for you, I’ve done a few calculations.
In order to transmit 10[sup]28[/sup] kilobytes of data within a 24 hour period (which seems to me the longest practically tolerable span of time for teleporting), you’d need to get a 9.2610[sup]23[/sup] kbits/sec link. Such a connection would transmit one single bit of data within 1.0810[sup]-19[/sup] seconds. That’s an awfully short span of time (light travels about one billionth of an atomic diameter in this time), so no computer or modem whatsoever will ever be able to recognize this flash, separate it from following bits and process it adequately.
Not even Winzip will help you doing this.
Here’s another article about teleportation, and a method of doing it. It’s been a while since I read it, and to be honest, some of it was beyond me, but I got the general idea about what they are talking about.
FYI, she’s featured in a pictorial, wearing very little, in this month’s Maxim magazine. On newstands now.
Sheesh, think you might use parallel channels? That’s just one solution that comes to mind without much trying.
I don’t mean to trivialize the bandwidth issue, but I don’t think it’s the deal-breaker in teleportation. The original difference engine wouldn’t be able to handle the processing involved in rendering this HTML page, and yet we manage.
Thanks for doing the calculations. Still, keeping this stuff in memory doesn’t relieve you of your bandwidth problems. You still have to put the data into memory and then retrieve it. A straight-through connection is still preferrable by limiting the need for gobs of memory.
Scylla:
Till you get to the newsstand try this link.
POersonally, my money is on wormholes. Open one up. send the other end someplace and just walk through. THe advantage is that it also works for time travel.
Jeez, you start reading one of these threads thinking you’ve got all this great stuff to add to it, and by the time you get to the end everyone’s already said whatever you had thought of.
Schnitte I was going to cite that same book. Great source for lots of physics-type questions.
Whack-a-Mole
I think you would need to store all the information at once. How feasable would it be to have half a body constructed at one end of the journey, and another half deconstructed at the other. Assuming that you even were able to scan the information in a linear fashion (ie, head to toe, or whatever) you would still need to put it all together all at once on the receiving end. You can’t have a leg sitting around waiting for the rest of the body.
You could use stasis field…
How the heck should I know?
Again I don’t see how storing things in memory improves anything unless people just want to be stored that way to be re-cretaed at some later date (a sort of timetravel into the future).
Either you scan everything at once, sort of a snapshot, or you scan in a linear fashion. The snapshot thing seems to be preferrable but you still have to move that data into memory and back out again so your bandwidth problems remain.
Example:
A ---->Memory----> B
or…
A ---------------> B
How does storing the entire data set in the middle help you?
I’m not sure if the continual progress of humanity’s science can be guaranteed; we will find ourselves up against limits that simply can’t be overcome.
Whack-a-Mole
ok, so we’ve got
A ------> B
But at some point, B has got to be holding all of the information before putting whatever it is that you’ve teleported (person, rock, whatever) back together. Otherwise, in the case of living things, moving parts might start moving before the rest of the object got there, causing all sorts of problems.
It would probably save a little bandwidth if you just transported the holographic image of the person’s “mind”, plus the configuration of their DNA molecule. It’s not really necessary, I’d think, to reconstruct the body exactly like it was at the point of origin, cell by cell – in fact, it would probably be preferable to have the Java engine on the other side of the transmission reconstruct the body from the DNA menu, since it would know how to interpret the DNA code and rapidly simulate the growth of an organism from a generic human ovum into a mature adult, after which the holographic mind is imprinted into the clean brain medium on the other side. And that way you always end up with a “new” body with all the environmental damage that befell the “old” body, while still retaining the memory of the original.
Simple! Elegant! Let’s DO IT! No problem!
Last sentence should have read “WITHOUT” the environmental damage.
yes, but why destroy the body at the transmission end?
would you step into a machine that was going to kill you and just make a passable ‘you’ copy somewhere else? - I wouldn’t.
Actually what you are thinking of is an episode of “The Outer Limits.” It does sound pretty horrifying to have to “eliminate the redundancy.”
There are actually three different concepts that fit under the heading of “teleportation”.
The first might be called Classical Physics teleportation: You scan an object, obtain sufficiently detailed information about it to be able to build a copy of it, then transmit that information to the intended destination. While Heisenberg’s principle might make it impossible to make an exact copy, you could make a duplicate that would be the same for all human purposes. Of course then you get into the whole dilemma about duplicating people, what to do with the original, etc.
The second, which is much closer to the “Star Trek” concept, is Quantum teleportation. It works like this:
You start with two sets of “entangled” particles- you don’t actually know the quantum states of the particles (in fact you don’t want to), but you do know that they’re matched- If particle #1 in set A has a spin that turns out to be “up”, particle #1 in set B will be up too. If particle #2 in set A is “down”, particle #2 in set B will be down also, etc.
You designate one set of particles as your reference set, and send them to your destination (beam them? Or maybe UPS?), and you use the second set of particles to scan the object to be teleported. You use one particle for each particle of your object to be scanned; say 10^28 for a human being. In the process, you inevitably destroy the original quantum states of the object to be teleported and your second set of particles. However, aside from two clouds of vapor, you get something else: information. To grossly oversimply, you get 10^28 yes/no bits of whether your object’s particles matched the quantum states of your scanning particles. Note that you can’t know any of the original quantum states, but whatever they were you can know if they matched or not for each particle scanned.
Now you send that 10^28 bits of data to your destination, and compare it to the reference set of particles you also sent there. By comparing the two, you can reconstruct the original object. It’s very similar in concept to public key encryption. In effect, you temporarily split an object into two parts: it’s classical information, and it’s quantum states.
Could this be done in real life? You do have the bandwidth problem, but that’s a technical challenge. The hard part might be maintaining a human being’s worth of matter in an entangled indeterminate state long enough to perform the operation. Finally, there’s the problem that to actually make a solid piece of matter disappear in one spot and reappear in another, you would have to be able to describe the object’s mass completely in quantum terms, which no one know how to do yet.
The final method of teleportation is Dimensional teleportation. You warp space in such a way that you create a tunnel or portal to your destination that you can instantly cross. I’m doubtful that this will ever be possible. Warping space like that would require stupendous amounts of energy and unfathomable gravitational forces. Using the equivalent of two black holes just to jump across town would be overkill to say the least.
Well, the user would decide whether they wanted the destruction of the original or not. Freedom of choice. Of course, each duplicate would need to support itself, or one or the other have sufficient funds to support both. The ultimate domestic partnership. And then, there’s the option of having the original placed in storage, either physically (suspended animation) or cybernetically (just store the transmission file, for later reproduction). There should be no more restriction on keeping multiple copies than there is to reproduce sexually or by clone, as long as you can support yourselves.
There’s a story about this. As the tale goes, a scientist visited a trek convention and spoke with the show’s science consultant.
Q: How does the ‘Heisenberg compensator’ work?
A: Very well, thank you.