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LONDON, England (CNN) -- Admit it -- at one point or another we've all dreamed of being able to teleport. How much easier and less stressful life would be if, at the flick of a switch, we could whisk ourselves direct from home to work without the intervening two hours crushed onto public transport, face wedged into the armpit of a man with a sweat gland problem.
We are years away from the development of a teleportation machine like the transporter room on Star Trek's Enterprise spaceship. The laws of physics may even make it impossible to create a transporter that enables a person to be sent instantaneously to another location, which would require travel at the speed of light.
I can see something like that as a means to send information, but it staggers the imagination to think about what would be involved in terms of sending an entire human being. I don't see anything like that happening anytime in the next few years. It's one thing to teleport a photon. But it's a whole different matter to send an entire human being.
The freaky part is that while the copy of you might be wandering around in some different location, the original you would no longer exist. To complicate matters even more, every particle of you would have to be copied. How would you copy the identical patterns of a person's memories? What happens if during the teleportation process, some kind of glitch occurs? Kind of reminds me of the movie, "The Fly".
^ Good point about the person's memories. Never thought about that. What you said about a copy of you wandering around is some different location reminded me of Dr. Pulaski from Star Trek: TNG. She hated the transporters, and commented one time that everytime she stepped into the "damned thing", she was convinced her molecules were going to be scattered across the quadrant. Dr. McCoy likewise commented that he signed on to practice medicine on the Enterprise, not to have his atoms scattered back and forth across space.
Every great invention, technological idea was eventually used for destruction and evil in one way of the other, what makes you think the same will not happen with the teleportation technology once and if it became real.
Remember the end of the movie 'Stargate'?
Human race, for the most part is nothing better than talking, thinking monkeys. That much technology and power at the hands of bunch of evil-minded, greedy, control-freak monkeys cannot be a good thing.
It seems to me that to teleport a person or even an object, you'd have to change matter into energy, and then change it back in the correct sequence. What is required to turn matter into energy?
I read an article somewhere a few months ago that stated that the amount of information that would need to be stored and transmitted in order to teleport a human being would fill - get this - enough one terabyte hard drives to fill the Empire State Building.
And that's just one piece of the pie. There was also something in that article about how it's pretty much impossible anyway, as you not only have to know how every particle is organized, but also how it's moving. What happens if you put your pal back together and some electrons aren't orbiting in the right direction anymore?
Crazy stuff. Maybe it's physically possible, but we'll never see it in any of our lifetimes.
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