Saturday, February 19, 2011

Teleportation

Teleportation, the movement of objects from point A to point C without passing through the space between, actually does happen, on the quantum level. Individual atoms have been known to teleport around, though macro-sized objects, things at our level, do not. Developing some means of actually doing so would revolutionize hundreds of industries, from manufacturing (why weld when you can just teleport the steel into the right places) to transportation (Instead of bothering with boats and trucks, goods are teleported from the factory that made them to the store that sells them....or even to the buyer's home) to mail (the post office only needs one facility now: teleportation central).
Attempts to bring this to fruitition often involved some very strange ideas indeed. There was a guy who was popular when I first came to the internet, and surprisingly is still around. Alex Chiu, a rather odd businessman and philosopher, was hawking his "immortality rings," which appear to be some sort of re-machined industrial washer that he then magnetizes and claims that it provides immortality to the wearer. Wouldn't the world be crowded if everyone was immortal, people asked him? He responded in the affirmative...and then answered that a teleportation machine that he invented. It involves a series of coils, which according to Mr. chiu's beliefs about atoms, would convert the atoms into a signal which could then be transmitted to the receiver. I find this idea strangely popular, especially with string theorists.
If human-sized object teleportation is possible, by what means could it occur?

3 comments:

KaiWen said...

Those industries would never allow such a device to be invented because it would destroy their profits. Its like a cure for cancer, big pharma would go to extreme measures to make sure it never comes to light, because treating cancer by selling drugs is more profitable than curing it in one swap. As such, teleporting something instantly is not as profitable as shipping it by conventional means. Of course, this all depends on how cheap it is. Even so, teleportation would kill hundreds of thousands of jobs in the shipping industry.

Professor Preposterous said...

Yeah, if you were a transportation company, you'd probably buy it up, fire your truckers, and reap the massive profits, laughing all the way to the bank. The truckers would be royally angry.

The Chinese guy said...

What kind of teleporter though? In that not all teleporters are equal. In sci fi at least.

Star trek teleporters are like fax machines and shredders. They make an exact copy of you and destroy the original. Explored in the TNG where Riker gets a copy made of him and the original is not destroyed. For all outsider intents and purposes the copy is you since they have your exact memories and experiences. Thus outsiders think it is the same person. Except the YOU YOU is now dead put into the shredder immediately after being faxed.

Stargate's Tokra ring teleporter was less lethal. It projected a field which moved your physical body at high speed through some sort of energy tunnel.

While the stargate itself is a tunnelling device rather than a kill the original and use a nano lathe to create a copy version.

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