Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: Teleportation  (Read 3634 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline motorollinTopic starter

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Nov 2005
  • Posts: 8669
    • Show only replies by motorollin
Teleportation
« on: May 20, 2007, 11:22:50 AM »
If teleportation ever becomes possible, I find it most likely that it will work like in Star Trek:

1. The traveller's molecular structure is converted in to a pattern or algorithm

2. The pattern or algorithm is sent to the destination

3. The pattern or algorithm is used to reconstruct the traveller's body from a stock of matter

However, this poses several problems:

1. What happens to the traveller's original body at the source? Is it broken down in to stock matter? Is this equivalent to killing the original person?

2. Once the biomass is recreated at the destination, the nervous system would have no electrical activity. Thus the heart would not beat, leading to brain death. Would a medical team at the destination be able to ¨kick start¨ the traveller's nervous system with an electrical current in order to revive them?

3. The body at the destination would effectively be a clone of the original body. So would this be the same person? Since they have a biologically and chemically identical body and brain it is reasonable to assume that they will think and behave in the same way as the original person, and if memories are stored chemically and this can be reproduced then they will even share the memories of the original. But is this enough for the traveller's consciousness to be preserved? Will this be exactly the same person that entered the transporter, or would it effectively be a new person? This is really a philosophical question: are we just a bundle of nerves, tissues and chemicals, or are we more than the sum of our parts? Do we have something more (the soul?) which would not survive the process of the body being broken down and recreated?

Discuss :-)

--
moto
Code: [Select]
10  IT\'S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN
20  FOR C = 1 TO 2
30     DA-NA-NAAAA-NAAAA DA-NA-NA-NA-NAAAA
40     DA-NA-NAAAA-NAAAA DA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NAAAAA
50  NEXT C
60  NA-NA-NAAAA
70  NA-NA NA-NA-NA-NA-NAAAA NAAA-NAAAAAAAAAAA
80  GOTO 10
 

Offline A4000_Mad

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Dec 2006
  • Posts: 1392
    • Show only replies by A4000_Mad
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #1 on: May 20, 2007, 12:15:37 PM »
I don't have the answers but as a Star Trek fan I sure like your points and questions :popcorn:

BTW It reminds me of another question... "Could you go back in time and shoot your mother before you were born?" Anyone solved that one yet? :popcorn:

A4000 Mad
A4000 Mad
 

Offline Karlos

  • Sockologist
  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Nov 2002
  • Posts: 16867
  • Country: gb
  • Thanked: 4 times
    • Show only replies by Karlos
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #2 on: May 20, 2007, 01:14:47 PM »
Nothing will be like it is in Star Trek, which is cringingly lame in just about every technological prediction it has made. You can forgive the original series for a lot of its naivety, but the ones that were made subsequently...

Proof: Do you really think a race which has achieved molecular level replication, FTL travel, artificial gravity, matter teleportation would be using touch-screen computer terminals? ;-)

I find either wormhole generation or something like Greg Bear's "descriptor theory" based teleportation far more likely for a species that has a decent grasp of cosmology / quantum mechanics.

-edit-

Which is nice, because it completely disposes with your original problem. Neither solution implies any required deconstruction/information transmission/reconstruction of the teleported matter. The closest you get to that is Bear's descriptor theory approach in which every particle in the body to be moved is momentarily made congruent with one under explicit quantum control and simply have their positional data "edited" in place. The universe doesn't care, provided the net change in energy is zero... He uses the mechanism in "Moving Mars" to, erm, well... move Mars. To an entirely different star system.
int p; // A
 

Offline Karlos

  • Sockologist
  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Nov 2002
  • Posts: 16867
  • Country: gb
  • Thanked: 4 times
    • Show only replies by Karlos
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #3 on: May 20, 2007, 01:20:32 PM »
@A4000_Mad

If you subscribe to the notion that the future is a divergent set of possible outcomes based on the present, it might be possible to rationalise the past in the same way.

That would open up a possible solution. If you were to go back in time and kill an ancestor, it may only be one possible alternate history in which it happend. There could be a near infinite number of alternate histories in which it didn't. A congruent history convergent with it up until the present would still exist, otherwise identical except you didn't kill your ancestor and that one would become the originator for your existence in the present, ready to go back in time and eliminate yet another....

Maybe...:lol:
int p; // A
 

Offline motorollinTopic starter

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Nov 2005
  • Posts: 8669
    • Show only replies by motorollin
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #4 on: May 20, 2007, 01:51:35 PM »
@Karlos
Ok, well forget that the idea came from Star Trek's theory of transportation. As a scientist, how would you answer the issues listed above?

--
moto
Code: [Select]
10  IT\'S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN
20  FOR C = 1 TO 2
30     DA-NA-NAAAA-NAAAA DA-NA-NA-NA-NAAAA
40     DA-NA-NAAAA-NAAAA DA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NAAAAA
50  NEXT C
60  NA-NA-NAAAA
70  NA-NA NA-NA-NA-NA-NAAAA NAAA-NAAAAAAAAAAA
80  GOTO 10
 

Offline Karlos

  • Sockologist
  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Nov 2002
  • Posts: 16867
  • Country: gb
  • Thanked: 4 times
    • Show only replies by Karlos
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #5 on: May 20, 2007, 02:41:24 PM »
It is a difficult question. First of all, if the original person is not destroyed before their clone is reconstructed at the receiving end, they are not the same person anymore. Any overlap conscious existence immediately renders them different people. The clone would have the memory of arriving at the destination, the original would not. They diverge from that moment onward.

If the process physically destroys the original prior to the construction of the clone, it's harder to say. The clone would have the conscious memory of the original and would likely regard him/herself as the same person, despite the obvious interruption of physical existence.

A persons identity is strongly bound to their past experiences, which in turn exists only as memory for that individual. If you think about it, when you woke up this morning, your sole connection to the past is only a memory. You have no conscious recollection of the intervening time asleep. So, from that perspective, a teleported person has a sense of continuity that we are likely comfortable with.

However, you do have the additional knowledge that your body is the same one that got into bed and went to sleep. I would suggest that this knowledge, often overlooked, is also subliminally fundamental to our sense of continuity. A person teleporting according to your proposed method, fully aware of the way in which it operates, would not have this reassurance.

In my opinion, a clone, no matter how perfect, is not the original entity. Without continuity of their physical and mental existence, they would cease to be the same individual.

Worse still, I would imagine the cloned entity would eventually develop some form of neuroses deriving from the knowledge of the destruction of their original self.
int p; // A
 

Offline Karlos

  • Sockologist
  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Nov 2002
  • Posts: 16867
  • Country: gb
  • Thanked: 4 times
    • Show only replies by Karlos
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #6 on: May 20, 2007, 02:49:21 PM »
Quote
Worse still, I would imagine the cloned entity would eventually develop some form of neuroses deriving from the knowledge of the destruction of their original self.


Having said that, I'm not sure. After all, there are people alive that have received organs from other people. What psycological effects occur when you know that the heart in your chest was actually someone elses?

In these situations, people probably overcome any qualms they may have via the knowledge that without it, they'd probably die.

Still, the teleport situation is different. It's your whole body that is being replaced. None of it is the original one you remember...
int p; // A
 

Offline Zac67

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Nov 2004
  • Posts: 2890
    • Show only replies by Zac67
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #7 on: May 20, 2007, 03:19:07 PM »
Imho, teleportation through 'scan, destruct, transmit, recreate' is a dead end.

It seems that our consciousness holds its roots in quantum effects and these would have to be scanned with no (or very little) margin to error in order to be recreated. Quantum mechanics make this impossible, so we'd have to use quantum entanglement to copy the information to the new entity - doing this to a complete (living!) human body would be too complex to be actually done. Since various parts of the body keep moving all the time (heart, blood, electron activity, ...), the scan/entanglement would have to happen instantaneously.

PS: Just read up a bit on 'descriptor theory' - just manipulating some 'global variables' in the universe seems intriguing.
But I'm afraid that theory defies some physical laws... E.g. moving a mass without interaction with the rest of the universe (mass-wise) changes the center of gravity, which is always maintained otherwise.
 

Offline motorollinTopic starter

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Nov 2005
  • Posts: 8669
    • Show only replies by motorollin
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #8 on: May 21, 2007, 08:12:27 AM »
Quote
Karlos wrote:
if the original person is not destroyed before their clone is reconstructed at the receiving end, they are not the same person anymore

How do you know that? How do you know that an exact duplicate of the same brain physiology and chemical layout would not result in an identical, or even shared, consciousness?

Quote
Karlos wrote:
If the process physically destroys the original prior to the construction of the clone, it's harder to say. The clone would have the conscious memory of the original and would likely regard him/herself as the same person, despite the obvious interruption of physical existence

I agree here. I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here as I don't really buy the concept of the soul. But don't you think it's possible that destroying the original body would effectively kill any non-corporeal element of the person's existence? (just like if they died). The duplicate might end up a soulless being.

Quote
Karlos wrote:
I would imagine the cloned entity would eventually develop some form of neuroses deriving from the knowledge of the destruction of their original self

I'm not sure about that. Assuming that their body was *exactly* as it was before, and they retained all of their memories and personality traits, then their sense of continuity of the self would be preserved (as in your sleep example). I don't think the destruction of their old body would be as much of an issue for most people as you think since they don't 'lose' anything. But again, we just don't know.

--
moto
Code: [Select]
10  IT\'S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN
20  FOR C = 1 TO 2
30     DA-NA-NAAAA-NAAAA DA-NA-NA-NA-NAAAA
40     DA-NA-NAAAA-NAAAA DA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NAAAAA
50  NEXT C
60  NA-NA-NAAAA
70  NA-NA NA-NA-NA-NA-NAAAA NAAA-NAAAAAAAAAAA
80  GOTO 10
 

Offline blobrana

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Mar 2002
  • Posts: 4743
    • Show only replies by blobrana
    • http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/blobrana/home.html
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #9 on: May 21, 2007, 09:23:25 AM »
Hum,
QT happens all the time, naturally.

The  particles that make up your body can  sometimes disappear to somewhere else...
Over time, it would be possible to visit everywhere in the universe - bit by bit... \o/

Offline Boot_WB

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Feb 2005
  • Posts: 1326
    • Show only replies by Boot_WB
    • http://www.hullchimneyservices.co.uk
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #10 on: May 21, 2007, 10:20:42 AM »
[geek]
Your original description of the star trek teleportation method is inaccurate.
The original is not scanned, transmitted, recreated from stock matter and the original destroyed. The body is scanned, matter is converted into energy, energy is transmitted, and the same energy (in whatever form star trek boffs decided it exists) is then reconverted into matter at the other end. Consequently there is no cloning, no need to "kick start" the body (as the original matter is recreated in its original energy state.
Hence such jolly adventures as Lt Barclay's awareness of creatures in the energy stream in the eposode Realm of Fear, which would not be (and I use the word hesitantly) feasible if it was just an algorithm which was being transmitted.
[/geek]
Mac Mini G4 (1.5GHz, 64MB VRam, 1GB Ram): MorphOS 3.6
Powerbook 5.8 (15", 1.67GHz, 128MB VRam, 1GB Ram): MorphOS 3.8.

Windows-free since 2011-2014 (Damn you Netflix!)
 

Offline Cymric

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Nov 2002
  • Posts: 1031
    • Show only replies by Cymric
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #11 on: May 21, 2007, 10:31:51 AM »
Quote
motorollin wrote:
Quote
Karlos wrote:
if the original person is not destroyed before their clone is reconstructed at the receiving end, they are not the same person anymore

How do you know that? How do you know that an exact duplicate of the same brain physiology and chemical layout would not result in an identical, or even shared, consciousness?

This is the famous no-clone theorem in quantum information theory, which states that you cannot create perfect copies of arbitrary and unknown quantum states. And it's all Heisenberg's fault that we cannot know exactly what all quantum states in a given object are. Ergo, by definition the clone cannot be an exact replica of the person going into the transporter.

This, by the way, makes no assumption whether what we refer to as 'consciousness' is actually a quantum or classical phenomenon. It has been argued on quite good grounds that it is classical, and that means you can copy it. But there would be tiny, tiny changes in its 'structure' which could eventually destroy it, much like Mandelbrot's butterfly hypothesis.


Quote
Quote
Karlos wrote:
I would imagine the cloned entity would eventually develop some form of neuroses deriving from the knowledge of the destruction of their original self

I'm not sure about that. Assuming that their body was *exactly* as it was before, and they retained all of their memories and personality traits, then their sense of continuity of the self would be preserved (as in your sleep example). I don't think the destruction of their old body would be as much of an issue for most people as you think since they don't 'lose' anything. But again, we just don't know.

I'm in agreement with Karlos here, not because of the knowledge of having been destructed (although it could be a factor), but simply because there is no such thing as an exact copy. That means you invite (mathematical) chaos in with open arms, and I'm not at all convinced at the moment that the human mind is capable of quelling the neurological storms which stem from such artifical causes. We'll be able to answer this question a whole lot better once IBM's BlueBrain project is well underway.
Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well.
 

Offline JaXanim

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Mar 2002
  • Posts: 1120
    • Show only replies by JaXanim
    • http://www.intuitionbase.com/waveguide/home.html
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #12 on: May 21, 2007, 03:51:48 PM »
Did Nikola Tesla work on teleportation? They say so in 'The Prestige'.

JaX
Be inspired! It\\\'s back!
 

Offline Tigger

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Feb 2002
  • Posts: 1890
    • Show only replies by Tigger
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #13 on: May 21, 2007, 05:32:31 PM »
Quote

JaXanim wrote:
Did Nikola Tesla work on teleportation? They say so in 'The Prestige'.


Not as far as I know, but he did blow up a big chunk of Siberia one time  :lol: .
     -Tig
Well you know I am scottish, so I like sheep alot.
     -Fleecy Moss, Gateway 2000 show
 

Offline Zac67

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Nov 2004
  • Posts: 2890
    • Show only replies by Zac67
Re: Teleportation
« Reply #14 on: May 21, 2007, 07:04:57 PM »
Quote
Cymric wrote:

This is the famous no-clone theorem in quantum information theory, which states that you cannot create perfect copies of arbitrary and unknown quantum states. And it's all Heisenberg's fault that we cannot know exactly what all quantum states in a given object are. Ergo, by definition the clone cannot be an exact replica of the person going into the transporter.


This may not be entirely true. Of course, due to Heisenberg, you can't measure the quantum state of the body to be transported in order to duplicate it elsewhere. But it may be possible to clone its exact state onto an entangled set of matter (Heisenberg was talking about measuring; as long as you don't actually know the state, it might be transportable).

However, as mentioned earlier, I think this method is far too complex to be feasable with an entire human body, no matter what technology.