beam me to the moon
You probably don't want Scotty to beam you up. Whatever he assembles on the other end won't be you.
Like flying cars, robot maids and weekends on a lunar resort, teleportation is an essential part of science fiction. When I think of how many times I wished I could just teleport to the office or to a hotel hundreds of miles away without having to navigate through a maze of streets in a ton and a half of metal on four wheels, I lament the cruel laws of physics that won't let teleportation become reality for anything bigger than a subatomic particle.
You see, the problem with teleporting big and heavy things like humans is our mass. There's a good reason why nothing can travel faster than light. Light is carried by mass-less photons so they can easily achieve 299,792 km/sec when there's nothing in their way. Objects that actually have mass need a push to get moving, as kindly pointed out by Newton. The faster they need to go, the more energy they need. But when they get close to the speed of light, their momentum becomes so great, they can't overcome it and either stay at their maximum speed or shatter as the stress of acceleration becomes too great.
The current theory of how teleportation would work isn't exactly instantaneous travel. It's travel at the speed of light. By deconstructing the object to be teleported into a blueprint and sending this information to another device which reconstructs it, there wouldn't be any actual traveling involved. We would just be zapped into quadrillions of atoms and reconstructed from a new set of atoms at our destination. I tell you, I can't wait until… whoa! Wait! Zapped into quadrillions of particles? Wouldn't that, oh I don't know… kill me?!
So not only am I dead, but now there has to be a device big and complex enough to receive the blueprint of how to put together an exact replica of my body and assemble it almost perfectly. Terrific. I'm now about to become a literal version of Humpty Dumpty and all the king's horses and all the king's molecular assemblers would have to put me together again. Even if they get it right, it's not me. I'm dead and gone, vaporized after stepping into a teleporter. Of course this also brings up the question of how practical an ultimate assembling device would be. If it could put anything together from a detailed blueprint, including living things, the sheer cost, security and logistics involved would be enormous. And how much more useful would it be in factories and hospitals instead?
The best bet we have for convenient travel is artificial, traversable wormholes. We wouldn't have to build hyper-capable assemblers and scanners, just a source of energy that could tear a hole in space and time and keep it open for however long it would take to travel through this tunnel plus a margin of safety. Until then, it looks like we're gonna have to travel the old fashioned way and actually cover the distance between point A and point B.
[ illustration by Eric Dima-ala ]
