Teleportation — Fact and Fiction 348
jcatcw writes "Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars fame, and director Doug Liman discussed teleportation with MIT professors to compare the reality to the special effects version in the upcoming movie, Jumper. Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, said, 'It's a little less exotic than what you see in the movie. Teleportation has been done, moving a single proton over two miles. [But] teleporting a person? That is pretty far down the line. The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.'"
Shouldn't that be... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars infamy..."
There, fixed that for you.
Does it matter that you "die"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Normal notions of being, self, life and death don't really apply, at least, most of what people think of doesn't apply and if you break it down, it usually comes down to religious questions, like the soul. If you believe that your body requires a supernatural soul to animate it with intelligence and desires, than teleporation likely isn't for you. If you believe that you are essentially a matrix of interacting atoms, a materialist in other words, than it shouldn't bother you.
Re:Teleportation Fraud (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Death and Rebirth (Score:2, Insightful)
> The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable.
That's really the difficulty: reading and writing all the states of all the atoms/particles with enough accuracy to keep something alive is quite likely impossible. I would say the best (most likely possible) method of teleportation would be more like warping space so that something ends up in a different location without actually moving.
Science aside... (Score:3, Insightful)
Plot outline from IMDB: "A genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between "Jumpers" and those who have sworn to kill them."
Another Hollywood abortion...
I see dead people! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Death and Rebirth... Thinking wrong use here... (Score:5, Insightful)
My other thoughts:
Using it as a cloning/copy tool, (which was done in a few episodes). "Counselor, why don't you go down to the teleporter and copy yourself so we can have a threesome?" or "Scotty! I need you to copy these 20g bars of latinum for me. I need to go back to the surface and tip one of those green strippers."
Using the teleport as a backup tool. "The captain is dead again. What is the latest tape backup? Do we have one backed up BEFORE he became such a bitch?"
Medicine. Why use a scalpel to remove a liver when you can just beam it out? Why do they still have disease when they can just beam everything BUT the virus back to the ship?
Yeah, we spend too much time pondering things like Star Trek. Then again, I guess that's what made it such a great show; it makes you THINK!
Re:Death and Rebirth (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's absurd to think that it doesn't, unless you're a dualist [wikipedia.org]. In which case you're beyond help anyway.
Re:Does it matter that you "die"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let us assume there is nothing "mysterious" about consciousness, that the technology exists to scan and recreate biological structures exactly, down to the molecular level, and also that a means exists to "freeze" or otherwise suspend a person's biological processes without damage.
There is a room with two operating tables, let's say one with a blue light overhead and one with a red light overhead. You are brought into the room and placed on the table under the blue light. A general anasthetic is administered and you drift off to sleep noticing the glow of the blue light. Your body is "freezed" and scanned. The left half of your body is then precisely cut away from the right half and placed on the table under the red light. Using the scan information, the complementary half of your body is reconstructed, in the "frozen" state, joined with the original half, on each table. Each of the two now complete, molecularly-identical bodies are "thawed", the anasthesia wears off, and they wake up. Which light do you see?
Re:My concern with teleporting a living person (Score:3, Insightful)
IOW immortality.
Re:My concern with teleporting a living person (Score:4, Insightful)
One view, stemming from the Scottish philosopher David Hume, could be characterized as saying the question is meaningless. "Identity" is a construct of language, in reality objects don't have identity they just have a bundle of properties.
If you think about it, the way you pose the problem leads to an answer, which in turn poses new problems.
If we suppose that the entity at B is exactly like you wouldn't that mean he has every property you have? Well, then what about identity? If identity is a property, and the terms of our problem are to assume that B is like A in every respect, then he'd have to be you, because the technology would have reconstructed that property. If he is not you, and identity is a property, the technology has failed to meet the conditions of our problem.
So when you consider some teleportation technology, you ought to consider if it reconstructs whatever property it is that you consider to be identity. For example, if identity is the possession of immortal soul that being nonphysical is not measurable or observable in any way, then there is no teleportation technology that could ensure that your immortal soul isn't stripped of any physical container.
Teleportation (and time travel) would produce a person that is necessarily different in one characteristic: location in space time. If you look at identity as being part of a contiguous process in space time (the way Kurt Vonnegut's Trafamadorians saw people as a kind of four dimensional snake), then teleportation or time travel results in a new, non-contiguous segment, and thus a different identity. But if that is identity, it's not clear why anybody would care so much about it.
So the good news is that according to the bundle theory, you don't have to worry about it teleportation, time travel, or duplication. On the other hand, maybe you should worry about Alzheimer's, brain damage, or learning new things and having new experiences.
Shilling (Score:3, Insightful)