Teleportation Today

"To boldly go where no man has gone before", sounds like a good motto for this article. Unfortunately its already been taken, however its not the only cliché we can borrow from Star Trek for today's article. Beam me up Scotty pretty much sums up today's efforts.

Unlike our intrepid Chief Engineer Scotty from the iconic Star Trek TV series, teleportation today is a long way from beaming Captain Kirk and crew down to any nearby planet. Science has however been able to teleport much smaller commuters a shorter distance of around (I'll say it quickly) one meter. Well it's a start.

Way back in 1998 a team from the Californian Institute of Technology successfully teleported a photon 3.28 feet over a coaxial cable and recreated the photon on the other side. This may not sound a huge deal but it proved teleportation was possible.

The most recent teleportation experiment took place in Denmark on the 4 October 2006. Dr. Eugene Polzik and his team from at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen teleported information stored in a laser beam into a cloud of atoms. This is a great step forward, for the first time teleportation between two different objects (light and matter) has been successful.

Unfortunately we are years away from being able to teleport to the ISS (International Space Station). Some say the laws of physics make it impossible.

To be able to successfully teleport a human being the first thing we would have to do is scan each individual atom in the travellers body, (That's each individual person who wants to be teleported) about a trillion trillion atoms. The data containing the information about these atoms would be beamed to the location you desire, where the traveller would be reconstructed atom by atom and presto! You have arrived.

Herein lies the problem, only the data containing the information about the travellers atoms is transmitted, not the traveller. Their body is destroyed in the process and a copy reconstructed at the other end. Ouch! I hear you say. What happens to consciousness, the non tangible, non matter part that makes us who we are? What happens to our memories? Is it the same person who is reconstructed or just a physically copy of their physically bodies? The cost of travelling down the wire or wireless of this biological fax machine may be the death of the original traveller, their ideas, their dreams, emotions and memories. They may be reconstructed a mere copy of themselves. A reflection of what they once were. Like looking at a old home video, you can recognise them but they're not the real person.

Let's hope that science will overcome these possible problems. Let's face it, teleporting to the office is a lot better than catching the bus.

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