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Improvements in Teleportation
assaultriflesforfree writes "Here's a little update on quantum entanglement and teleportation from The New York Times (free registration, yay): 'Employing a facet of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," scientists have taken particles of light, destroyed them and then resurrected copies more than a mile away.' I am a little skeptical about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle statements, though. Is this really a form of Star Trek's Heisenberg Compensator?"
I had a long discussion about teleportation with some friends, and this is what we came up with..
If you are destroyed and then replicated, you are effectively dead. Consider if you could meet your replicate before being destroyed. He would say to you: "Ok, I don't need you anymore, so I destroy you now." Is that good for you? Maybe it is good for him, but certainly not good for the real you.
However, the copy of you would be good for me and everyone else. To us, you are the same person. You will fulfill your life's duties and make great works. However, you won't be around to witeness it.
So basically we concluded that teleporting an object by replication/destruction would be helpful to everyone except the object in question. Feel free to teleport burritos and things, but teleporting yourself would not be doing you a favor.
The only solution I can think of would be to come up with a teleportation method that does not involve destruction. If we ever want to be bouncing around the Universe like in Star Trek, we're going to need to be able to travel the speed of light or use weird things like wormholes to get anywhere. Physically transferring object data from point A to point B is just too time consuming. You'll die of old age by the time you reach Neptune.
Certain cells are NOT replaced regularly in our bodies, most importantly the central nervous system cells.
/. article a while ago about how every time we "remember" a memory, it's actually re-written in our cells? Sort of like a DRAM refresh process. So you get some new frontal-cortex cells grown, somehow walk through your memories, thus getting them resaved into the new cells, before you weed out the old ones.
The nerve that runs from a motor neuron in your brain down to a muscle in your lower leg is ONE cell, and that cell doesn't regenerate if it dies.
This is why spinal cord injuries are such bad news, and why stem cell research (cells that DO grow) is so neat.
So when you're 80 years old, some of your most important cells are also 80 years old! I think this will be the most limiting factor in exending human life span -- we'll figure out how to reset telomeres to cause infinite regeneration of cells, so your skin, muscles, bones will all stay 20 years old forever. But those pesky CNS cells... aren't used to dying and being replaced.
But maybe they WILL be able to convince CNS cells to die, and get new ones to grow in their place. Conceivably, every 40 years you'd need a CNS cell flush, along with some rehabilitation to train in the new cells to function properly.
Memory could even be preserved! What was the
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT