got used to this idea that these days’
computers are so much faster than they
were twenty years ago. This would

be such an incredibly huge amount of
more data to transfer, and that means
many, many orders of magnitude

that is simply inconceivable for any
technology we can think of now.

ls there any research about this?

People are very interested in this

idea of transmitting the state of a
very simple physical system from

one location to another. So the
demonstrations of the principle has
been done, because if you do it for an
atom or even a very small collection
of atoms, literally a few atoms, then
you can conceivably do this process
for a few atoms; and that is what they
demonstrated in labs. But once you
want to scale it up fo any realistic sort
of finite sized objects that we could
manipulate or even see, the numbers
are so astronomically huge that you
cannot even imagine that we built
something to transmit that required
amount of information, so it really puts
a damper on the idea of doing it for
anything that we think of as a normal
object.

ls there any difference between solid
objects and fluid objects?

In principle no, because you need to
represent the information required of at
the deepest level of every individual
atom, but this does not represent the
problem. The problem is more than
that just because there are so many
atoms in any object, so the state of this
is really an issue. In other words, there
are more mechanical issues about
how you would assemble atoms in that
way one at a time; because atoms are
so incredibly small and the time that

it would take to sort or meaningfully
assemble a macroscopic object out of
atoms is an incredibly huge amount of
time, and industrially, we do not make
things that way because it would be
too slow to just think about one atom
at a time. When we manufacture
things, we do it in such a way that we
are manipulating very large chunks

of atoms all at once, and we do not
worry about what each individual
chunk is doing.

Network Teleportation

There are a lot of difficulties from the
computer science perspective. These
limitations are described on quora.
com by Frank Heile, a physicist and

software engineer from Stanford
University:

What are the computational limitations
of scanning and sending a creature's
information?

To have a scanner that can record the
position of every atom in the body to
accuracy of the order of the size of a
hydrogen atom would require position
accuracy of about 10-10 meters. To
get that accuracy over a distance of
order | meter, this would require 30
decimal digits, which would be about
100 binary digits per atom. However,
there would be a lot of redundancy

in this data, so let's be optimistic and
assume you could compress this down
to | bit per atom, so we still need
approximately 1027 bits of data to
just specify the positions of all the
atoms in a human body. According

to Wikipedia, the approximate data
storage capacity of all the computers
and storage devices in the world today
is roughly | zettabyte = 1021 bytes =
102? bits. Therefore, the data for the
scan of one human would require at
least 10,000 times the total storage of
all the data stored on Earth right now.

The total traffic on the entire World
Wide Web/Internet was about 31,000
petabytes per month in 2012. At that
rate, it would take more than 3 million
years to transmit the bits needed to
specify the positions of all the atoms in

the body.

Even if you can store and transmit

this data and then store it again at
the destination, you still have the
problem of scanning the original body
and constructing the final body. The
scanning of the body will probably
have to be destructive since you need
to essentially take the body apart to
get to the inner atoms of the body.

So you had better be able to do the
scanning in a very short period of
time or the person will die during the
scanning operation and you will end
up reconstructing a dead person at
the destination. Finally, you cannot take
a long time to construct the body at
the destination since the early parts
you construct will die while you are
finishing the construction of the later
parts. It is safe to say that this method
of teleportation is, for all practical
purposes, impossible.

Human Teleportation

Above all, in terms of DNA

and biological objects

the problem of teleportation is more
complicated. This question is answered
by Sebastian Mackedenski, Dr. Chow
H. Lee's Biochemistry & Molecular
Biology graduate student at UNBC:

ls it possible to scan and duplicate
human bodies with respect to DNA?

Teleportation of biological material

is inherently going to be complex.

At the protein and DNA level,

there is data in the form of atomic
coordinates, oxidation state, and even
the surrounding solvent that must be
stringently maintained to retain proper
function of nature's tiniest machines.
Consider that cancer is a result of
genetic mutation, and even small
changes in DNA can have disastrous
health implications at the organismal
level. Accuracy of every individual
atom placement and even electron
placement is therefore paramount to
successful teleportation. Furthermore,
biological macromolecules often
cooperate together in multi-unit
complexes or in connected pathways,
necessitating nearly instantaneous
materialization of all the "parts" in a
pathway, let alone an entire living
organism. Imagine putting together a
person organ by organ, how long do
you have to teleport the heart after
you teleport the brain? Rapid Nano-
scale 3D printing offers some hope for
this beloved sci-fi tech, but practical
restraints in speed, accuracy, and
data bandwidth (every atom needs

a set of coordinates) at the extremely
long distances that would make
teleportation —_ useful, make it
unlikely

11

that we will see the canonical Star
Trek "beam me up’ style teleportation
any time soon. However, perhaps
the saving grace of the idea of
teleporting biological molecules is
that they inherently gain complexity
by automatically folding from a linear
sequence of DNA/RNA nucleotides
or protein amino acids, into a

regular 3D structure with precise
atomic coordinates, a natural sort of
information compression.

While the classic concept of teleporting
an object across space involves making
it seemingly disappear in one spot
and re-appear in another, perhaps
the definition needs some relaxing.
DNA sequencers are machines that
can decipher or "read" the genetic
code of organisms. Entire chromosomes
have been sequenced and can be
read like a book as a series of A's
T's C's and G's. On top of that, DNA
synthesizers already exist, machines
that can make custom DNA molecules
of any sequence. So if the objective is
to "beam" a DNA molecule of a certain
sequence and size to another location,
simply reading a genetic sample
in one location and emailing the
sequence to a synthesizer elsewhere
will effectively produce the desired
effect. Let's take this one step further -
biochemistry labs habitually engineer
bacteria to make useful proteins such
as insulin based on the gene DNA
sequence. If a sequenced, emailed,
and synthesized DNA molecule was
inserted into engineered bacteria at
a distant location, then we now have
complex proteins showing up at the
destination. This may be a far-
cry from a complete human
being, but it’s a start.

In summary, it is

very safe to say that
there is no method
for teleportation of
human bodies that
could possibly work
or be practical in our
universe. Sorry, Sfar

Trek fans.