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
28atoms 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.