In Star Trek, teleportation allows you to materialize wherever faster than the time it takes Kirk to say "Beam me up, Scotty". The reality - even if the technology existed to make it possible - would be somewhat different, according to a group of physics students at the University of Leicester.
If slow broadband speeds are hard to cope with now, try beaming speed. Teleporting just one person off the surface of the Earth would take 350,000 times longer than the universe has been in existence using existing technology. What?
That may not be so surprising when you consider the amount of information being transmitted. Including all the data in the traveller's brain, this amounts to around 2.6 times 10 to the power of 42 bits - that is, 2.6 times one followed by 42 zeros or 2,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of data - this would take 823,890,283,164,753,000,000 centuries to upload or download at 1 Gigabit (billions of bits) per second, give or take a century!!! Hardly the instant transportation we would come to expect in the future. Now if we had upload/download speeds of 1 Googolbit per second (number 1 followed by 100 zeroes), then this entire transport would take place in less than a second. THAT is more in keeping with what Start Trek technology can do.
But would you end up with the original, or a duplicate? If you were duplicated, would the original then have to be destroyed to avoid cloning?
OMG! Think of the possibilities! And the possible "data errors"!
- "What do you mean my ear is missing? I had two before I was beamed up?"
- "How do you explain I can't remember anything. I'm sure I had a perfect memory before I was transported, but I can't remember now."
David Starkey, a member of the University of Leicester team, said: "We decided to investigate the practicalities of teleportation as a means of everyday travel.
"We employed several approximations to determine the amount of data required in bits to fully store a human genetic code and neural information, and the signal to noise ratio of typical signalling equipment.
"Our results indicate the time scales to complete a full teleport of an individual are a little too lengthy at this time. Current means of travel remain more feasible."
The students, all in their final year of a Master of Physics degree, worked out what it would take to represent a human as transferable data.
They found that the energy required to teleport into orbit was dependent on bandwidth. The less time it took, the more power was consumed.
The universe is thought to be abound 14 billion years old. Beaming someone up to an orbiting spacecraft would take about 350,000 times longer than all the years that have passed since the Big Bang, using the limitations of bandwidth speeds available today. The findings are published in the University of Leicester's Journal of Physics Special Topics.
So Star Trek teleportation in addition to consuming incredible amounts of power requires unbelievable bandwidths and transmission speeds that would make even the current gigabit Internet providers pale by comparison. It's like comparing the speed of a tortoise to the warp speed of the Enterprise - only you'd have to be much faster.
Oh well, I guess we'll just have to rely on worm holes.
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