Is teleportation possible – Star Trek style?
When I was a kid watching Star Trek reruns on TV, the one technology that I found most inspirational, and thought I would definitely see in my lifetime was the teleporter. In my kid brain, it seemed like a simple idea.
You just take the atoms in someone’s body, and beam it to a planet using some kind of atomic gun. What’s the big deal I thought.
The writers of Star Trek actually invented this technology as an afterthought to save money. It was to avoid the high expense of the special effects needed to show the Enterprise or shuttle craft actually landing on planets.
So they just faded in and faded out characters onto the surface of planets instead, using a creative now technology.
Little did they know that this money-saving afterthought would go on to inspire so many little kids and generations of scientists. The big question is, could this technology actually work? If so, how would it work?
But surprisingly, this technology also opens up some profound questions – like what is a human being? Are we just the sum of all our atoms? What about the soul – what happens to it during the transportations process?
Let’s look at the feasibility of this technology, and the profound questions it brings up. And let’s do that right now!
Let’s start off by looking at how the transportation technology on Star Trek is supposed to work. Here is exactly what Star Trek, the next generation technical manual says about energizing and dematerialization:
“The molecular imaging scanners derive a realtime quantum-resolution pattern image of the transport subject while the primary energizing coils and the phase transition coils convert the subject into a subatomic debonded matter stream”
English translation – the atoms in your body get converted to their subatomic particles – protons, neutrons, and electrons, and are transmitted as a stream of particles to the surface of a planet or wherever the transporter sends it, and are somehow reconstituted.
It appears from the words “quantum resolution” that they are capturing and beaming information along with the subatomic particles to the destination. Presumably this is a second stream of information that is necessary to reconstitute the human being at the new location.
Let’s start with the dematerialization part – how do you dematerialize a person into not just their atoms but to their subatomic particles as described in the manual?
The matter in the human body is made of up molecules, which are made up atoms. Atoms are made up of subatomic particles. To get the subatomic particles into a matter stream, first we have to take molecules apart into atoms. Then we have to take the atoms apart into their constituent neutrons, protons and electrons.
These two steps requires energy. Taking molecules apart requires a lot less energy than taking the nuclei of atoms apart. Molecules can come together and apart in normal chemical reactions, for example when you mix baking soda and vinegar, you are taking apart atoms from molecules and putting them together to make new molecules.
But taking nuclei apart is whole other ball game. This is what happens in an atomic bomb, the nuclei of atoms are split apart resulting in lower energy atoms – which releases a lot of energy. The forces holding neutrons and protons together in the nucleus, called the strong nuclear force, is millions of times more powerful than the electrical forces holding atoms together in a molecule.
Let’s look at how much energy would be required if we debonded, as the technical manual calls it, all the atoms of the body.
The body consists of about 1×10^28 atoms. If you want to turn all these atoms into neutrons and protons, all the nuclear binding energy of the strong nuclear force will need to be overcome. This turns out to be the energy equivalent of about a 20 megatons of TNT. This would be a very large hydrogen bomb
You might at this point say, why split the neutrons of atoms, why not just take the atoms of the body and beam them? That’s a good question. This would take a lot less energy, and would be less complicated to reconstitute back into a human. So this would probably be a better way to go. But we are going strictly by the Star Trek technical manual. And debonding is what it says in there.
But debonding would not be the end of the story because now that you have all these subatomic particles, you have to transport them at very high speed to the surface of a planet. If you want to transport them near the speed of light, which is what appears to happen if you watch any Star Trek episodes. lets say 99% the speed of light, this also requires a lot of energy. This is the kind of energy that particle accelerators, like the large Hadron collider, use to move particles.
It so happens that the energy required to move these subatomic particles is about equivalent to about their rest mass, or the same as the weight of the individual, let’s say about 100kg.
This is a lot of energy, equal to about 2000 megatons, or about 4 times more than all the nuclear weapons ever tested on earth.
But you can’t just stop here. If you just capture the particles and transport them to the surface, you would be transporting a blob of particles. You also need to transport the information contained in that human body so that those subatomic particles can be rematerialized in exactly the same way that they were dematerialized.
How much information would this require? Well, if we have 1×10^28 atoms, we can make a rough estimate that each atom can be characterized by about 1 kilobyte of data. This kilobyte of data would include things like the precise location of the subatomic particles, the energy state of the atom, the other atoms surrounding the atom, and other information.
So this adds up to 1X10^31 bytes of data. It’s a large number. A very large number. To give you an idea, the total information stored on the internet is estimated to be about 1×10^19 bytes. So it is a trillion times more than all the data on the internet today.
Storing this amount of information and transmitting it is not trivial, at least not with our current technology. The fastest available theoretical data transfer speeds today is about 100 terabytes per second. At this rate it would take more than the age of the universe to transfer the data of a human body. But data transfer speeds have been increasing exponentially for years, and are likely to be orders of magnitude superior in the future, so I would not classify this current technology barrier as being impossible to overcome.
Another technical challenge is to rematerialize a person on the surface of a planet. In order to do this, a mechanism has to exist that is able to resolve the human body on subatomic scales. According the Star Trek technical manual, the transporter has a range of 40,000 kilometers, about 3 times the diameter of the earth. This kind of subatomic resolution from 40,000 kilometers away would require a resolution power 100 trillion times that of the Hubble telescope, requiring a mirror that 50,000 kilometers in diameter.
So the challenges are immense – we have to dematerialize 1×10^28 atoms, and stream it at nearly the speed of light from one location to another. We have to have second stream of information accompanying the particle stream. And we have to be able to rematerialize with a subatomic resolution from 40,000 kilometers away.
Some of you might have noticed that I have conveniently avoided a little thing called the laws of quantum mechanics so far. This is a bit of a problem. The laws of quantum mechanics are such that the process of making a measurement alters the system. This is dramatically shown in my video on the double slit experiment. The bottom line is that in obtaining the precise quantum state of particles will alter it such that we will not be able to rematerialize them exactly the same as before measuring them. Will this affect the overall details of the human being that is going to be rematerialized – I don’t know for sure. I don’t think anyone knows for sure. So this is a question mark. Could changing the quantum state by measurement result in a completely different human being at the consciousness level? Maybe.
These are big challenges. We obviously are not capable of doing it currently. Will we ever be able to do it? You might be surprised to hear me say this. But my answer is YES, I think we will be able to do this in the future. I am sure some viewers will accuse me of being ignorantly optimistic. But I say never bet against human ingenuity.
But more than its feasibility, I think the concept of the transporter surprisingly opens up a Pandora’s box of some profound existential questions.
If and when we are able to do this, we are effectively killing the human being from his initial location, and reconstituting him in the second location. Where is this human being during the transfer process? He would be nothing more than a stream of particles and a stream of information. Where is the soul? Is this some kind of purgatory for the human soul?
Secondly, what constitutes a living human being. If we transported all the atoms in exactly the right configuration without the information, wouldn’t we have transported merely a dead body. Is the only difference between a living human being and a dead human being the information contained in the information stream that is being beamed along with the particles. Is so, does the essence of consciousness or the sould really just come down to information?
Third, how do we know that the reconstituted human being is the exact same individual. He may have the exact same atoms and the same memories, but is his consciousness the same? How would we know?
What if we made a copy of his information stream, and used another set of identical subatomic particles to create a duplicate human being. Would they be two different individuals with the same consciousness and awareness, or two completely different individuals? Which one would be the original person?
These are some big spiritual questions. Star Trek mostly avoids all these questions. I don’t have the answers, but I think making such a transporter would perhaps allow us to answer them, and put to rest some questions that we humans have been asking ourselves for thousands of years.
I think we will be able to do it. I actually think that any technology that is not forbidden by conservation of mass, energy, and information, will be a reality at some point in our future. And I think we will answer many of the big questions. I may be ignorantly optimistic, but sometimes ignorance is the only way to remain optimistic in life.
H
