Will we ever be able to teleport?
This is one of the most famous Science Fiction concepts of all time. I think this would be one of the most useful inventions that man would ever discover. Imagine being able to instantly move over long distances. That would spare us allot of time and save lives from road transportation! But can we even achieve this means of transportation?
To answer this we first need to know how it works.
Ok how does this actually work? Does a machine break us apart then sends our particles through the air and rebuild it? Well that is certainly an option! But such process would be quite fast, if we teleport on earth. It would not be instantly, but it still would be fast. The problem comes in when you want to teleport to the other side of our galaxy. (Let's say in this scenario that we have a machine that can receive our particles and rebuild us on the other side of our galaxy). It would take years to teleport from earth to the other side of the galaxy, in fact ages!
We can not send our particles at the speed of light according to Einstein’s famous equation E = mc^2. This means that the best we can do is 99%. This means that it would take even longer to get to our destination than what it would have taken us moving at the speed of light!
So ok that is clearly not going to work to teleport over really far distances. But hey atleast we can teleport safely and almost instantly anywhere around the earth right? Well not really. With the system described above well, we will have big problems with transporting your particles safely. There are a lot of things in the way of your particles, especially when transporting your particles in normal air outside. There could be a big chance that some of your particles could collide with normal air particles, or hit something else like a building or person.
If we were to send your particles through a big vacuum tube, then we will have a better chance if getting all of your particles to your destination. The bad thing is we cannot teleport without these pipes. Which means it limits us to how far we can teleport! But what if there is another way of teleporting? What if there is a way without the need of pipes? Here is where quantum mechanics come in.
Quantum mechanics is a weird, just like I have stated in my Is The Sum Of All Natural Numbers = -1/12? post. The atomic level of the world have weird properties that are in conflict with classical mechanics. We can not determine the position of an electron, this is one of the weird things that we have discovered in quantum mechanics, we can only use probability to determine the most likely places to find an electron but this is the closest we can get to finding the position of one. Another weird property of the quantum world is Quantum entanglement. This property made Albert Einstein angry is quantum entanglement. It states that if two particles are entangled then one particle will have a up spin and the other will have a down spin. If you change the up spin particle to a down spin particle, then instantly not matter how far away the other particle was turns to a up spin. This is why Einstein got angry because it defies classical mechanics. It sounds crazy, it sounds spooky! That is why Scientists call it the spooky effect. But with this comes faster and most likely safer teleportation!
In our new hypothetical machine that can teleport us will be able to scan millions and millions of particles in your body in a matter of seconds. Let's say the computers also use a type entanglement technology for a connection that can let the two machine communicate almost instantly. Ok now the computer at your start location scans your body particles and its quantum states. It also simultaneously scans and finds particles entangled to your body’s particles at your desired destination. Then it has to change your particle’s spin. The entangled particles at your destination would also instantly change, and then BOOM a clone was made of you. The final process would be to destroy your body at the start location.
Successful experiments have been done to teleport particles using this entanglement technique. This is cool and very terrifying! This is how we most likely would be teleporting in real life!
The verdict:
The amount of particles and processing speed needed to scan all our body’s particles is too big. Maybe we could scan all your bodys particles with a beast quantum computer. There is a bigger problem than our technological problem, we have an ethical delima. You need to destroy a human after you cloned him! Personally I would not want to teleport! So I say no, I do not think we will be teleporting ourselves anytime soon!
What do you think? Would you want to teleport? Leave a comment below, upvote and follow me if you liked what you read!
And as always
Thanks for reading!
Here is good reading materials:
On teleportation experiments
More on teleportation
On Quantum entaglement
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Thanks for reading!
Teleportation is possibile if you what The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I agree with you!
Then we agree with each other.
I think I will pass on the teleportation!
Teleportation must be like portal or worm hole, other way it is really creepy scary.
Definitely not like in movies "The Fly" or "The Prestige".
It is creepy! It would be fun like a teleport through a wormhole.
Hi @stormblaze
If I follow you, we will have a clone of ourselves being made of particles that is not ours. In other words, you did not really travel, a copy of you was made on the other side.
What would happen with things like your memory, will that also be cloned on the other side? (I would like to know what a brain specialist, would think on the memory recovery)
What type of energy will be needed to reverse all these particle spin directions?
Thanks for the article
That is a ethical problem!