The science behind teleporters.

[MetalAtlas]

Teleporters. I'm sure that everyone who reads this knows just what the heck a teleporter is, and if you don't you're in a whole new level of living under a rock. The ideality behind it is so high, alo t of us wonder why we haven't invented this technology yet. Here are 3 reasons why the teleporter would be the most awesome invention ever made (and ultimately the least possible thing ever.)



1. Instantaneous Travel

We all know that, in theory, teleporters would make our lives infinitely easier, and take out the need for wasting fuel and work on things like cars and planes. Think about it, in an instant, we could just be whisked across the world to any destination. Travel would be easy and you could have friends and family all over the world of who you could see whenever you felt like. And no need to get up early for wok. Just get ready and beam right over. Even look at it like Star Trek did. We could build a beam strong enough to teleport us to the moon, where we could possibly colonize. The possibilities are endless! Or maybe not.



The problem: You would have to imagine that the price to make and produce these teleporters wouldn't come cheap. The science behind it would have to be precise in every case, to avoid beaming part of ourselves to different locations. The ability to reproduce and maintain every teleporter in a mass production would be infinitely pricey, and the likely hood of having a cheap, public, available teleporter are pretty much shot to hell. Which brings us to....



2. You're a new person when you come out of a teleporter!

No, really. Here's the science behind a teleportation device. A person enters, the machine scans the person (or thing) inside making sure to note where every atom is in which spot correctly, right? Well, actually, the most idealistic way for a teleporter to work without having to transmit massive amounts of data through the air at a deathly rate would be for it simply to scan the targets DNA or cellular structure. It would be the same as uploading a song into your music player. Instead of moving the song from say a CD to the computer, it merely copies it. So essentially, a teleporter would do the same thing. But we can't have multiples of everyone running around every time they get teleported. So the original would have to be destroyed. So essentially, teleporters would commit mass murder everyday and the only 'original' people would be the technology fearing conspiracists who thinks the government is out to get you.



3. A teleporter can cure cancer! (And other diseases, disabilities etc.)

Going back to the science of having to copy a person, it stands to show that copying a persons DNA would be infinitely easier than moving it quickly over a vast space. But think of this. People become sick, get strains of virus or bacteria, lose limbs or senses and essentially break down. But none of these things are coded in your DNA (not counting hereditary illnesses, which even so, wouldn't be a factor to if or when they become apparent). So a blind person could be teleported and come out on the other side able to see. The idea that is that you are a copy of your own DNA structure, so things that happen after your born or essentially after your conceived wouldn't show up in this 'new' body. It's like being born again every time you come out the other side.



The problem: Unfortunately, other things like age and strength and memories aren't encoded into DNA either. At least from what science has been able to map. So even though we can recreate our DNA, and say we were somehow able to get the right age, there would be too many factors to be able to get the right size, weight, heights, muscular overtone, etc that you had when you went in the teleporter. And even if science was able to pinpoint all of these variables, there still isn't a way to be able to map a person's brain and there memories, likes dislikes, or essentially, who they are as a person. So it would be like starting all over again from infancy, unless we figure out a way to control all of these things. Which, in turn, would mean we could take things out, say drop a few ponds, give someone some nice muscles, maybe blue eyes, a memory of making out with Katy Perry etc. Essentially, the world would be able to create falsities and make people someone different, just by entering on of these machines.



Conclusion:

The teleporter seems like a great idea when you simplify it, but in reality, to be able to control all of the aforementioned variables would be quite impossible, and we wouldn't want someone to figure this out, or you end up with something out of DollHouse. So yeah, let's not rush technology. I think I'll be happy driving my car and flying U.S. Air. Thank you.

[Zageron]

I have taken part in many arguments regarding this technology, so I'll keep my point short.

2. You're a new person when you come out of a teleporter!

This is the only reason I would NEVER use a teleportation device. Yes, this could categorize me as "... the only 'original' people would be the technology fearing conspiracists ..." type of person. I have a strong belief in "souls", or the current state of conscience that one lives. I do not believe that anyone who was pumped through teleportation would retain their current "soul". The sad part is that this would never be testable, as the beings that come out of the other side would firmly believe that they are the originals.

I don't have any desire to have myself carry out my own path, without me knowing about it. It's a complicated issue that may or may not be true. It's all perception.

[argo15]

The problem would be for people who believe in an afterlife.

I myself would be all for teleporters.

What is our being but a collection of thoughts and memory. If your brain was somehow put into a different body, wouldn't you still be the same person?

[abro13]

Sounds like your idea of teleporting is having clone machines that are able to beam peoples' "data" to other cloning machines to clone another you on the spot and kill the original you...

[Reincarnate]

1. Impossible. You can't beat the speed of light, son. Even if you try to refer to something like quantum entanglement, it still doesn't allow for superluminal communication.

2. I've heard this argument countless times and it's just silly to me. Why would we even bother making a teleportation machine that just kills us?

Zageron: If that is how you feel, then allow me to spook you. Think of a memory when you were little -- maybe 5 years old. You remember being there and everything -- the sounds, the tastes, the smells, the sights, etc... but here's the bombshell: You *weren't* there. The atoms in your body then are not the same atoms in your body now.

[ledwix]

Originally Posted by argo15

If your brain was somehow put into a different body, wouldn't you still be the same person?

Unfortunately, no, you wouldn't still be the same person. You'd stop existing. You are described not only by genetic, environmental, and mental faculties, but also by your position. If you don't believe in an afterlife, then you must understand that the essence of you wouldn't magically get warped to the other person. It'd just be another person in another place who happened to have your same attributes. But the conscious entity inside that body wouldn't be your conscious entity, because your consciousness is located only in your own brain, not someone else's.

Think about it. Subatomic particles can be described by just a few variables. Let's say that electron X is in the 1s energy state of a hydrogen atom. Electron Y is in the 1s energy state of another hydrogen atom and shares the exact same quantum numbers as electron X, except that electron Y is positioned about a meter away. Technically speaking, these electrons are physically indistinguishable, in that if you were to line them up and try to decide which one came from where, it wouldn't even be theoretically possible to determine it, but that doesn't mean that they're the same. One is a meter away from the other, and thus what happens to one doesn't necessarily happen to the other.

So while others wouldn't be able to distinguish the teleported self from the original self, your own personal consciousness or soul would stop existing.

[Reincarnate]

If your actual brain was put into another body, your consciousness would remain continuous because consciousness is localized within the brain (as all sensory processing occurs there). Making a COPY of your brain and then putting it in another body merely makes a copy.

It'd be like asking if a hard drive's data is the same if you simply put the drive into another computer vs. copying that drive's data and inserting it into an entirely new drive. Both may have identical data, but we wouldn't say they're the same.

[devonin]

And yet we seem somehow either immune or willfully ignorant of the effects of the Grandfather's Axe on the subject.

We get the heebee jeebies about the idea of being demolecularized and then reconstituted, but apparantly only if it happens all at once, instead of over time.

[Reincarnate]

Well we don't want to basically kill off our consciousness and simply recreate another one. The underlying mechanisms are different when it's over time.

[devonin]

Eventually every individual piece of matter has been replaced with new ones. Is there something about our consciousness that permeates the whole system, such that we can state with certainty that there's persistance across the replacing? If so, couldn't that still happen through a system like matter transportation?

[h4rpy]

Yeah, since all organisms must be nourished, the matter from which they are made will be eventually entirely reconstructed. So every living thing is dynamic in constitution.

Nao, memory encoding involves physical changes on the molecular scale. If a person were to be deconstructed and reconstructed elsewhere, provided the model of the person is absolutely accurate, as well as the reconstruction, you would get the exact same person because there shouldn't be any discernible difference between the matter of the original and the new construct.

With that and the theory that every single every living thing is inherently dynamic in constitution, I think that at the exact moment the new construct is complete, there would be no discernible difference between it and "the original". Therefore, it would be the original.

Sometime after that moment, the two would be different.

Hmmso let's assume that both constructs are still alive after the process is done. For whatever reason, the law states one of them must die. A loving family member must vouch for one of them. Which one would she justifiably vouch for?

Probably both. Certainly not just one of them. It can't sensibly be argued that the first retains the right to live because it's the original. It's not authentic. At the moment the process was completed, the new one was exactly the same as the original. There is nothing to distinguish them from one another except in an abstract, or imaginary sense. Every living thing is dynamic. "That one was there first" is not true, because the original changed the exact moment after the "snapshot" of the construct's model, and every moment thereafter.

... So if the deconstruction and reconstruction of a person walking into a teleporter instantaneously takes place, it may be that there's nothing to fear.

[ChrisReams]

If teleporters do come around, I'm not gonna be the one to test it and come out as a ****ing smeagol.



Edit: Whoops, this is Critical Thinking. Okay, adding to the subject...could it ever be possible for us to beat the speed of light? I just dont see how that's gonna happen.

[devonin]

By our current understanding of physics, no, we won't ever be able to beat the speed of light. It does seem at least somewhat possible that we may be able to develop means to bypass needing to worry about the speed of light, arriving at places faster than light could, not by exceeding the speed, but by things like wormhole technology or other folding styles of movement.

[Calcium Deposit]

Well, Half Life/mass effect was able to solve the problem of faster than light travel/communication using "entanglement". Basically, two particles are put into an entangled state. In this state, when the north pole of one particle is rotated up, the north pole of the other particle rotates down. Theoretically, this would happen instantaneously no matter how great of the distance between the two particles.

[Reincarnate]

I really hate it when people bring up entanglement. You cannot use quantum entanglement to communicate faster than light.

Think of it this way. Consider a message you want to send to a friend. You want to use a coin for this. So you flip the coin -- and whatever it lands on, hold it up so you see your side and your friend sees the other. This is like an entangled state that collapses the wavefunction -- if you see heads, your friend will see tails. If you see tails, your friend will see heads.

Now, using just that coin alone, transmit a message to your friend.

[Reincarnate]

Another way to think about it: You have a box with two marbles, one black and one red. You pick one at random and give the other to your friend. You guys speed off away from each other for many light years. Then you examine your marble and realize it's black.

[MetalAtlas]

there are things faster than the speed of light. If you were to get a telescope that was strong enough to see, say a planet x amount of life years away, the time that its would take the light to reach said telescope would be showing you something that happened in the past. Essentially, time is perceptual. Even though you witness something first hand, it still take some part of time for you to witness the event, so you're technically watching it in the past. So in theory, to be able to piggy back this idea into a teleporter, you would either have to move really really fast, essentially as fast as or faster than time itself, which might open up other problems in addition to the ability to remap the entire brain etc.

[Kage06]

If they did go the route of "copying" you, then you wouldn't come out perfect on the other side at all. It'd also copy every other cell, etc. It wouldn't simply copy your DNA and replicate it. You'd be as you were.

But the true way for me would be if we find a way to find a worm hole and harness it if one was even possible, so that essentially, you aren't transferred through wires, but through time to another place.
That make any sense? That way, you would be yourself on the other side.

If though only our cells were cut and pasted to our new location, think of it this way (and I know it is weird), but cells are copied all the time, and old ones die.

You are essentially not the person you were, how many years ago it takes for all the cells to replicate once in your body.
You are a copy. Your brains cells have probably been copied countless of times, including what stores memories.

The only difference is, it would happen in an instant, so you'd have a complete self as you were, as if cells had replicated over time and created who you still are.

Am I making any sense?

I do know that using this method, if you had cancer for example when you left, you'd still have cancer on the return.

We would need to know basically everything about the human body for this idea to ever materialize though, and by that point, we'd have technology to pin point cancer cells, and destroy them without the hassle we do now. That's a given.

[Reincarnate]

MetalAtlas: There's nothing currently faster than the speed of light. You'd need infinite energy just to accelerate something TO the speed of light.

Kage06: The point of the question is really to address what "we" actually "are."

The reason the cell-replication paradox isn't a paradox is because in one scenario we have replacement over time and therefore a continuous consciousness -- but in the cloning process we are simply killing the original and therefore not allowing for a continuum.

--

Scenario 1:
As of time t, I am composed of atoms, which we'll denote collectively as A.
I allow atom set B to replace me over time x.
As of time t+x, I am composed of B.

Scenario 2:
As of time t, I am composed of atoms, which we'll denote collectively as A.
We create an example replica of me out of B with any memories necessary for his experience to feel continuous.
I am killed.

---

Even though in both scenarios we are looking at atom set B as "me," I'd lose my continuity in the latter case even though the end result is the same. We are localized to our function.

[devonin]

Of course, in Scenario A, there could actually be discontinuity, but our mind simply confabulates into the blanks so that we don't realise when the break was. We've got the idea that our memories are faulty and easily tricked already embedded into our conception of how the mind works. Who's to say we'd even notice the gaps?