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Teleportation — Fact and Fiction

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the there-and-back-again dept.

jcatcw writes "Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars fame, and director Doug Liman discussed teleportation with MIT professors to compare the reality to the special effects version in the upcoming movie, Jumper. Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, said, 'It's a little less exotic than what you see in the movie. Teleportation has been done, moving a single proton over two miles. [But] teleporting a person? That is pretty far down the line. The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.'"

4 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Death and Rebirth by Sangui · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Whenever I see discussion about teleportation discussed, I think about Ilium and how in reality when they were teleporting, they were being killed and brought back to life at the other end, they were never the same person, made of the same atoms, just an exact copy.

    1. Re:Death and Rebirth by Tangent128 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Good (if creepy) exploration here: To Be.

    2. Re:Death and Rebirth by ScrewMaster · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think this would escalate to a whole new level if you teleported someone and failed to erase the original, and the two got together and were told to argue it out who needs to live and who needs to die. They'd both have the same conscious train of thought and would probably both want to live and would both believe they were "the real one" etc.

      There was an episode of ST:TNG which dealt with that idea, when a transporter beam was deflected by the oddball atmospherics of a hostile planet and the Riker who was beaming up got doubled ... one made it back to the ship, the other ended up trapped on an abandoned research base for ten years until he was rescued by Enterprise. The one that got out was the one that we all came to know, and the dupe started out identical but evolved emotionally in a different way. It was kind of a cool episode, actually.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  2. My concern with teleporting a living person by zygotic+mitosis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've always had this nagging feeling that by disassembling your brain and moving it, that instant of consciousness would cease to be. You would actually die; in the destination pod, what is essentially a perfect clone is born with your memories. Of course, it would be seamless, and your teleported self wouldn't have any recollection of having died. This would also be impossible to prove, but it's what I choose to believe about this fictional device. Teleportation engineers kill humans!