How teleportation could work: Star Trek transporter - how to make one!

Is teleportation possible? In the Star Trek transporter, 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.

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. 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. 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.

The body consists of about 1x10^28 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, or a very large hydrogen bomb

Why not just take the atoms of the body and beam them? 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.

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. the energy required to move these subatomic particles is about equivalent to about their rest mass, or about 100kg. This is a lot of energy, equal to about 2000 megatons of tnt.

But 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? - about 1X10^31 bytes of data. It’s a large number. It is a trillion times more than all the data on the internet today.

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. 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 1x10^28 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.

Quantum mechanics or quantum teleportation is also a problem. The laws of QM are such that the process of making a measurement alters the system. 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. Could changing the quantum state by measurement result in a completely different human being?

The transporter surprisingly opens up a Pandora’s box of some profound existential questions. Where is this human being during the transfer process? He would be nothing more than a stream of particles and a stream of information.

Second, 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?

Third, how do we know that the reconstituted human being is the exact same individual? 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?

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