Military examines “beaming up” data and people reports SFGate in an article about how close engineers are to developing teleportation.
Not for want of trying, though. Last year, the Air Force spent $25,000 on a report, titled “Teleportation Physics Study,” to examine possible ways to teleport humans and objects through space…In recent years, many physicists have become excited about a phenomenon called “quantum teleportation,” which works only with infinitesimally tiny particles. It might lead to new ways of transmitting cryptographically secure messages, some speculate, but not human beings for a long time to come, if ever.
“Experts in the field can foresee using teleportation in the area of data encryption but not (at least not in the near future) for the purpose of ‘beaming’ macroscopic (e.g., human-size) objects across” space, said Phil Schewe, a physicist, chief science writer at the American Institute of Physics and author of a forthcoming book, “Bottled Lightning,” on the history of the American electrical grid…On one hand, he concluded that “Star Trek”-style teleportation faces enormous obstacles, partly because it would require the development of extraordinarily high-speed computers and would consume mind-boggling amounts of energy. Also, it would encounter all kinds of physics headaches generated by the principles of quantum physics. For example, the computing-encoding of the entire contents of a human body would require 10 to the 28th (the number one followed by 28 zeroes) kilobytes of computer storage capacity. It would take 100 quintillion of the world’s best commercially available hard drives “to store the encoded information of just one human being.”…Also, “it will take more than 2,400 times the present age of the universe (about 13 billion years) to access this amount of data” from the computers, Davis writes. And “to heat up and dematerialize one human being would require . .. the energy equivalent of 330 one-megaton thermonuclear bombs.”
It seems that the Chinese are working on this technology, too. While it might be deemed wasteful and fantasy, in the next decade or so there could be a teleportation race as the demand to move goods and services faster across the planet heats up. Who knows - but the idea is exciting.
In addition to the article, there is a copy of the full Teleportation Physics Study via Evan Poll’s blog or from the Federation of American Scientists site for a PDF file.
