Human
Teleportation
We are years away from the development of a teleportation machine
like the transporter room on Star Trek's Enterprise spaceship. The
laws of physics may even make it impossible to create a transporter
that enables a person to be sent instantaneously to another
location, which would require travel at the speed of light.
For a person to be transported, a machine would have to be built
that can pinpoint and analyze all of the 10'28 atoms that make up the human body. That's more
than a trillion trillion atoms. This machine would then have to
send this information to another location, where the person's body
would be reconstructed with exact precision. Molecules couldn't be
even a millimeter out of place, lest the person arrive with some
severe neurological or physiological defect.
In the Star Trek episodes, and the spin-off series that followed
it, teleportation was performed by a machine called a transporter.
This was basically a platform that the characters stood on, while
Scotty adjusted switches on the transporter room control boards.
The transporter machine then locked onto each atom of each person
on the platform, and used a transporter carrier wave to transmit
those molecules to wherever the crew wanted to go. Viewers watching
at home witnessed Captain Kirk and his crew dissolving into a shiny
glitter before disappearing, rematerializing instantly on some
distant planet.
If such a machine were possible, it's unlikely that the person
being transported would actually be "transported." It would work
more like a fax machine -- a duplicate of the person would be made
at the receiving end, but with much greater precision than a fax
machine. But what would happen to the original? One theory suggests
that teleportation would combine genetic cloning with
digitization.
In this biodigital cloning, tele-travelers would have to die, in a
sense. Their original mind and body would no longer exist. Instead,
their atomic structure would be recreated in another location, and
digitization would recreate the travelers' memories, emotions,
hopes and dreams. So the travelers would still exist, but they
would do so in a new body, of the same atomic structure as the
original body, programmed with the same information.
But like all technologies, scientists are sure to continue to
improve upon the ideas of teleportation, to the point that we may
one day be able to avoid such harsh methods. One day, one of your
descendents could finish up a work day at a space office above some
far away planet in a galaxy many light years from Earth, tell his
or her wristwatch that it's time to beam home for dinner on planet
X below and sit down at the dinner table as soon as the words leave
his mouth.
For more info, please go to http://www.howstuffworks.com/teleportation.htm
