Beam Me Up Scotty

Along the treacherous twists and turns of useless advertisements and self-induced self-loathing that some of us refer to as the internet lies a treasure trove of "what if's" and "how about's" that tends to fog up the ol' biological processing unit with needless 1's and 0's that keep me awake at night. The most recent brain-worm to dig its way into my waking mind is: teleportation.

For thousands of years, we have used only our Jesus wheels (feet), and perhaps the pedes of fellow mammals we have enticed into servitude, to get about at speeds too negligible to mention in any great detail. Taking days — even weeks, depending on the amount of teeth between point A and point B — to traverse distances we alive today would call a Sunday drive.

Even today, the most common mode of moving ourselves about is becoming more and more tedious with every passing mile, because it just does not seem fast enough. Even with hyper-vehicles capable of breaking the 400 km/h barrier, any journey beyond the corner store still takes longer than it takes to boil a kettle. This is simply unacceptable.

Enter the realm of science fiction — well, almost. Quantum teleportation is a very real, very spooky reality. Currently being used to investigate quantum states of particles thanks to the principles of entanglement, this kind of teleportation is rather useless with regard to a quick family visit halfway across the globe. What I'm more interested in is the Star Trek — beam me up Scotty, now you see me, now I'm over there — kind of thing.

A couple of problems though. Data... A single human body would consist of the equivalent of 130 quadrillion terabytes of data. For reference — sort of — all the hard drives in the world today only add up to about 10 billion terabytes, falling short about 10 million times of being able to contain just one of us. Now let's assume for a moment that this — and the near-cosmic level of energy required to pull this off — is not an issue.

Two quite jarring realizations still remain. Firstly, with this kind of teleportation, what you are essentially doing is destroying yourself in one place, sending all that information somewhere else, and reconstructing yourself there. You will be keeping your memories, personality — unfortunately — and all the bits that matter. Except the matter... You will be all new, fresh atoms. Philosophically speaking, are you still... you? Or are you a copy of an original that no longer exists?

Secondly, as amazingly fast as teleporting to your friend half a world away in an instant would seem, there is still a cosmic speed limit: the speed of light. Teleporting anywhere on Earth will essentially be unaffected, but anywhere beyond that? To the Moon would take a grueling 1.28 seconds. To Mars, a few minutes to a few hours depending on where both planets are in their orbital path. Although this is by far more impressive than the current nine-month journey time, eventually it will become tedious as well.

So, whether it takes a few days, a few hours, minutes, or just a couple of seconds, our impatience truly knows no bounds.