OK, I know. We don’t have practical teleportation. But that hasn’t stopped generations of science fiction authors and movie makers from building stories around it. If you ask most ordinary people, they’d tell you the idea originated with the Star Trek transporter, but that’s far from the truth. So when did people start thinking about teleporting?
Ground Rules
Maybe it isn’t fair, but I will draw the line at magic or unexplained teleportation. So “The Tempest”, for example, doesn’t use technology but magic. To get to Barsoom, John Carter wished or slept to teleport to Mars. So, while technology might seem like magic, we’re focusing on stories where some kind of machine can send something — usually people — to somewhere else.
Of course, there’s a fine line between pure magic and pure technology where they overlap. For example, in the opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen”, a magic helmet gives people powers, including that of teleportation. While you could argue that Tarnhelm — the name of the magic helmet — was a technological artifact, it is still explained by magic, not science.
Some systems need a transmitter and a receiver. Sometimes, you only need the transmitter. Sometimes, you can only teleport within a limited range, but other make-believe systems can transport an entire starship across the galaxy.
Early Teleporters
The Man without a Body is a story from 1877 in which a scientist is able to transmit a cat via a telegraph wire. Encouraged, he attempts the same feat with himself, but the battery dies in the middle, leaving him with a disembodied head. The ending is decidedly devoid of science, but the story is possibly the earliest one with a machine sending matter across a distance.
Then there was “To Venus in Five Seconds.” A woman lures the hero into a room with a machine, and presumably, in five seconds, the room opens up to Venus. Sure, today, we know that Venus would kill you, but in 1897, it made for a grand adventure.
A Bit More Modern
Arthur C. Clarke’s “Travel by Wire” appeared in 1937. In fact, this was his first published story that he later didn’t think was very good. The machine was a “radio-transporter” that perhaps foreshadowed the Star Trek transporter. I’ve heard that Clarke and Roddenberry were friends, so maybe this was the inspiration for Star Trek.
The 1939 serial “Buck Rogers” showed a teleportation device (check out the 13 minute mark in the video below). Who needs elevators?
Speaking of Buck Rogers, the 1953 parody “Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century” had evaporators, which were essentially teleportation booths.
Van Vogt’s “The World of Null-A ” featured teleportation in 1945, although the story takes place in the year 2580. Asimov’s “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” from 1945 used “Doors” to move people around in the year 2117. In the end, some people rediscover the joy of a walk outdoors.
The 1950 serial “Atom Man vs. Superman” used a teleportation machine. Of course, Superman didn’t have it. Lex Luthor used it to make people disappear and reassembled them in a different place (see around the 5 minute mark).
In the second half of the 20th century, teleporters were commonplace in speculative fiction. Alfred Bester wrote about them in the 1956 novel “The Stars My Destination”. Heinlein’s “Tunnel in the Sky” was out a year earlier and stranded some students led by Rod Walker via teleportation.
Of course, many stories depend on teleporters not working very well. “The Fly” (which later became several movies) involved a scientist attempting to perfect teleportation getting mixed up with a housefly. He originally tries to teleport a cat, which I presume was a nod to “The Man Without a Body.”
Then Came…
Of course, Star Trek made the transporter a household name. Gene Roddenberry and his crew didn’t develop the concept out of some future vision. They just couldn’t figure out a cheaper way to show Captain Kirk and friends arriving on a different planet every week.
One thing that was very impressive about the Enterprise transporter is that it didn’t need a receiver. You just “beamed” people to their destination. Of course, each version of Star Trek had their own unique look and sound — sometimes more than one, as you can see in the video below.
The Physics
Of course, we don’t know how to do any sort of teleportation, but you can think about some of the limitations. Most of these devices imply that they take you (or whatever you are beaming) apart and send your actual physical substance to reconstitute at the other side. There are a few imagined systems (like the one on Dark Matter from 2015) that make a copy of you and destroy it, but that’s another problem (see The Philosophy below).
Scanning an entire body at an atomic resolution would be pretty hard. Tearing all those atoms apart, maybe even to subatomic particles, would take a lot of energy. Putting them back correctly would take even more. I’ve read estimates that the amount of data involved in such a scan would be about 1031 bytes of data, although that is, of course, an estimate.
Then there are the practical issues. You can’t just get the passenger unless you want them to appear at the destination naked, so you better scan a little further out. What happens to the vacuum left when they disappear? Do you get a thunderclap of air rushing in? Do you exchange it with the air at the destination?
Speaking of the destination, you have to conserve energy over this process. So, if you beam from a location moving faster compared to the target, where does the energy go? When you come back, where does the extra energy come from?
That’s not to say there’s no way to do these things, just it is harder than it looks at first glance. But plenty of things we do routinely today would seem impossible in 1900. Put a phone in everyone’s pocket? Bah! That would never happen. Except it did.
The Philosophy
The real problem isn’t one of technology but one of philosophy. The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment proposed by the ancient Greek Plutarch. The idea is simple: Suppose there is a ship that was involved in a famous battle, and tourists visit it. Over the years, some of the wood on the ship rots, so carpenters replace the damaged parts. Over enough years, all the original wood is gone. None of the parts belong to the ship that fought in the battle. Is it the same ship?
The transporter suffers from the same problem (a point I made in “Last Men Standing” where a small group of humans resisted transporter technology). If you rip a person apart, did you kill them? If you put them back together, is it the same person? Or is it a new person who thinks they are the old person?
I’m not sure how you ever answer that question definitely. If someone proposed that when you sleep, you die, and a new person wakes up every morning with all your memories, you’d have a hard time refuting it. But you feel like you don’t die every night. But, then again, that’s exactly how you would feel if it were true.
One key would be if the transporter could create copies of people. Star Trek itself dabbled in this, with the transporter creating good and bad Kirk, for example. Forgetting where the extra mass went, though, it was clear that they were not copies but splits of a single original.
This follows with Thomas Hobbes’ extension of the Ship of Theseus paradox. Suppose as carpenters replaced all the parts of the original ship, they saved the pieces and used them to build a new ship. Is it now the original? It seems like if a transporter can make a full copy of you (even if it isn’t allowed to), then what is coming out at the receiver is not an original but a copy. That has major implications for what it means to be conscious and other uncomfortable topics.
Meanwhile…
I’m going to elect to not think about these things. Instead, I’m going to go enjoy more science fiction with teleportation technology in it.
While teleportation seems impossible, Dr. Hamming would encourage you to work on it, I think. Then again, maybe you could just teleport virtually.
“The transporter suffers from the same problem”
It’s not the same problem, though. Humans already have the Ship of Theseus problem – it’s not like the atoms in your body are the same as when you were born or anything. That’s how carbon dating works – you’re recycling all the carbon in your body constantly with the C14/C12 mixture that’s maintained by astroparticle interactions with the atmosphere. You have already been rebuilt multiple times over.
The issue with transporters is just consciousness, which at the very least (ignoring any Penrosian quantum stuff) could be considered as ‘continuity of thought’ – as in, the pattern in your brain that makes up ‘you’ can be traced back straight through your life: there aren’t any actual discontinuities. The idea that you’re a different person after waking up from sleep is nuts: even if you don’t remember things happening when you slept, you know if you slept or not.
If you wanted to have a ‘scientifically accurate’ transporter in science fiction, it’d probably be something like:
1. person’s brain is linked with a complex digital setup and their thoughts “blend” between the two
2. digital setup becomes linked with a copy on the other end and their thoughts “blend” between the three
3. brain in the first end is shut down progressively until thoughts are dominantly in the two
4. digital setup is shut down progressively until thoughts are in the far end
All of these steps (modulo the digital stuff, but that’s not an issue unless Penrose is right, in which case quantum unicorn fairies) happen in some sense during your normal life anyway, so ethical considerations are silly. Not that I’m saying the above is possible, mind you, I don’t think human brains are resilient enough to be screwed with like that.
This is how they transfer consciousness into new bodies in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series. They take old retirees and transfer their minds into young cloned super soldier bodies by blending them together and then shutting off the old corpus once the transfer is complete.
So altered carbon?
Yeah, I was actually going to mention Altered Carbon and needlecasting – in that case it’s a little different because they have this idea of a “copy” of your consciousness and I think you could make a case for that being ethically dicey (see above re: discontinuity). Even if you put the ethics aside, you could make the point that the idea of “halting” a person’s consciousness and “restarting” it later is actually unphysical (as in, it never happens normally and trying to do it could Be Bad).
You could also make the argument that long distances would be an issue due to lag as well without FTL handwavy magic. I mean, obviously in my opinion there’s going to be handwavy magic no matter what since I don’t think it’s possible.
On this topic, suffering discontinuity isn’t a problem really, if happens all the time your brain just ignores most of it. It is quite common to wake up without any memory of sleeping for instance, or to loose a sorry term memory of some action due to context switching. For many people short versions of this happen throughout every day. Consider that when you misplace something you don’t feel the discontinuity of that lost memory, even if when you find the object you still don’t remember putting it there.
“You have already been rebuilt multiple times over.”
Only took six million dollars to do so.
It has nothing to do with carbon dating, and some of your molecules probably are original.
The better question is, when you look at yourself now, where’s the baby you were born as?
“It has nothing to do with carbon dating,”
What the heck are you talking about? The reason carbon dating works is because the C14/C12 ratio for living things is the same as the atmosphere because they’re constantly exchanging carbon with the atmosphere, and the C14/C12 ratio in the atmosphere (1-1.5 ppt) is maintained via constant cosmic ray interactions with nitrogen. Once a living object dies, it stops that exchange and the C14 atoms decay away.
If you were not exchanging carbon atoms with the atmosphere – as in, if you weren’t giving up parts of you in exchange for the atmosphere – it wouldn’t work.
An average adult human has around ~35ish pounds of carbon in them, and breathes out around 150 pounds of carbon per year. They have around ~100 pounds of water and drink over 4000 pounds per year. You exchange virtually all of your body multiple times over with your environment.
The caveat: Yes, I was being hyperbolic, yes, there are some molecules that are the same because not all of your body constantly rebuilds itself. There are some neurons (not all) in your brain that when they carbon date them, their age is identical to your age, but that number’s small. In fact, they used carbon dating to determine that most neurons are regenerated back in the 1990s because the spike in atmospheric C14 due to nuclear testing allowed an easy discriminator.
“to determine that most neurons are regenerated”
many, not most, oops, and the “that number’s small” is “relative to the total mass of your body.”
Carbon dating doesn’t have anything to do with the continuous exchange of carbon or the replacement of cells – just that there is carbon in your body that was captured by plants around the time your body was growing, and you ate those plants.
Of course it would work. If you take a bunch of air with CO2 and put it in a jar, carbon dating would simply count back to the moment when the lid was closed. It has nothing to do with cell replacement.
Carbon dating is accurate to around +-80 years, and part of that reason is that you’re counting carbon that was accumulated through the person’s entire lifespan. For example, only about half of the cells in your hear are replaced through your whole lifespan, whereas cells in the liver have are replaced after three years.
“Carbon dating doesn’t have anything to do with the continuous exchange of carbon or the replacement of cells”
Yeah. Uh. No. You might want to actually do research on this before talking about it. I don’t think there’s a single concept in this sentence that’s correct.
I will note that you’re not exchanging carbon directly with the atmosphere – you’re releasing carbon into the atmosphere (which is a carbon reservoir with a constant isotopic fraction due to cosmic ray interactions), plants take in carbon from the atmosphere to build themselves, and you then consume that carbon to replace the carbon you gave off.
Seriously, don’t take my word for it, go read the paper about how adult neurogenesis – as in the replacement of neuron cells later in life – was confirmed through carbon dating. An essay paper talking about it said “The different 14C concentrations in the atmosphere at different times is reflected in the human body, and a cell that was born at a certain time will have a 14C concentration in its genomic DNA corresponding to the time when the cell was born.”
Let me stress this again just to be clear:
Scientists discovered that the brain creates new neurons later in life by carbon dating the DNA in them. They literally study cell replacement with carbon dating.
The original paper is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16009139/
You might also note the “genomic DNA” mention there as well, because most of the cell is not static. Basically only the DNA is, because it’s only created at cell division!
That’s what people mean when they say “cell X is replaced every Y years” – they’re not talking about the atoms in the cell, they’re talking about the DNA of the cell. The cell builds new stuff and breaks down old stuff all the freaking time! That’s what they do!
You know what, let me just quote from the damn paper again.
“14C in the atmosphere reacts with oxygen and forms CO2, which enters the biotope through photosynthesis. Our consumption of plants, and of animals that live off plants, results in 14C levels in the human body paralleling those in the atmosphere with a short lag for seasonal growing and harvest cycles.”
This is practically from the original paper from Libby – the Nobel Prize winner for carbon dating – in 1964. Go read it.
You know what it’s called?
“Replacement Rates for Human Tissue from Atmospheric Radiocarbon.”
No. Carbon dating has nothing to do with human cell replacement. Carbon dating works on inanimate objects just fine. It has ONLY to do with carbon captured from the atmosphere and dating when the carbon was captured – not whether there was a continuous exchange of carbon with the environment at some point of the object’s existence.
You said that carbon dating wouldn’t work without the cells being replaced. I say you got it backwards: you can time cell replacement because carbon dating works to date when the carbon was captured (ie. the cell was built).
Yes, and animals don’t take in carbon from the atmosphere! They take it from plants or other living things. If carbon wasn’t cycled through and you ate exclusively old tortoises you’d be dated older. And then if something ate you 20 years later they’d be dated even older.
Again: the friggin paper that the guy who won the Novel Prize for carbon dating is literally talking about replacement rates of human tissue. It’s in the title!
You are confusing the general process of carbon dating and how that process is used with humans. You don’t need think about about carbon exchange when trying to date most fossils, as the age they lived is rarely distinguished from when they died, but for anthropology this is a common thing.
You pass a lot of material through, but what you keep in your body is not the same thing. When you eat a sugar molecule, unless your body makes a new cell with it, it’s just broken down and excreted as water and CO2. It goes in and comes out without becoming “you” in the middle.
“unless your body makes a new cell with it, it’s just broken down and excreted as water and CO2.”
Woah, you’re just straight up murdering Dr. Krebs there! Guy’s got a Nobel Prize, but little did he know Dude on Hackaday would be correcting him decades later.
That’s the overall net process but it isn’t what your body does. Just looking at basic aerobic respiration, the CO2 generation (extremely simplified overview! many intermediary steps!) goes glucose -> pyruvate -> Krebs cycle -> CO2.
Except the CO2 released in the Krebs cycle does not come from the pyruvate (via acetyl-CoA). This is like, basic intro biology from college. The carbon comes from the original intermediary molecule, and the acetyl-CoA gets integrated in.
After several swings around the Krebs cycle that original carbon would be released if it was actually the same citrate molecule swinging around, but it isn’t: your body uses the intermediary molecules to build organic molecules!
And that’s just one part!
Obviously saying “you excrete the water” is just ludicrous because it mixes with the water in your body. You don’t magically excrete the exact H and O atoms that were in that glucose! You’re made of water!
Just looking at the carbon – some of the carbon from the original glucose does get released as CO2 directly, but not all of it.
Except that CO2 is not even what’s breathed out because CO2 isn’t inactive in the body either! You’d die if all the CO2 was stripped out of you! Anyone who drinks carbonated drinks knows that if you bubble CO2 through H2O, you end up with a mixture of H2O, CO2, H2CO3 (carbonic acid) and hydrogen and bicarbonate ions (it’s an acid in solution!). And those bicarbonate atoms are also used to make stuff in the body.
Seriously, you’re just extremely wrong here.
Are you always aware of whether or not you slept, though?
Imagine you are watching a movie with friends, and you’ve seen the movie before, and it’s late and your tired, and the movie wasn’t engaging the first time through.
If your mind wanderers, can you tell the difference between daydreaming (where you are awake) and you actually falling asleep and dreaming?
That’s not what I mean, though: that’s telling the difference between sleeping and some other form of activity. What I mean is that you know that sleep has occurred not because of memories, but because of the other effects on your brain.
Memories aren’t the sum total of a person: the literal structure of your brain encodes who you are as well.
The idea of “how do you know you’re not a new person created out of thin air every morning” is silly, because there’s nothing special about waking up – you’re not just your conscious mind. You could just say “how do you know you’re not a new person created out of thin air one second ago?”
You can’t really say this without using fmri or similar. It is quite common not to remember sleeping, especially when fatigued. Now, in the car of teleportation it’s very likely you would suffer personality shifts due to minor neurological changes. This can happen sure to something as simple as a concussion, there’s no telling what might be affected.
You’re confusing not having the memory of sleeping with not having the effects of sleeping. You’re not just the sum of your memories: just because you’ve forgotten your childhood doesn’t mean its effects have disappeared.
“The Fly” (1986 film) should not be missing here :D
It isn’t actually, it’s mentioned in the piece about the original Fly.
Outer Limits (1995) season 7 episode 8 Think Like A Dinosaur “During testing of a molecular transporter device, a duplicate of a woman is created.” That machine works with a liquid that can send you to a distant planet. https://youtu.be/ojlfQgI_4pc?feature=shared
I remember that episode. You have to balance the equation.
Strictly speaking, Dark Matter only transmits your consciousness and genome to create a temporary clone at your destination, while the original is comatose for the duration of the “trip,” waiting for the clones new memories to be downloaded for the return. They called it “transfer transit.” If the clone dies before download, the original wakes up not knowing what happened. Made for some interesting plot twists. But it was never treated like teleportation, more like an advanced replacement for teleconference. I think the clones would decompose in like 48 hours or something.
72 hours
You mention “ship of theseus”, perhaps you might consider “Triggers broom” for future reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAh8HryVaeY
There was a novel called Spock Must Die by James Blish where a malfunctioning teleport created a duplicate Spock. It raised some interesting philosophical questions but also raised a hollywoodean answer by proclaiming that one of the duplicates is evil and killing him.
There was a TNG episode about just that, but with Riker.
In a similar vein, in hitch hikers guide to the galaxy, a cloning machine malfunctions such that half a clone is started before half a machine is completed meaning that the machine cannot be turned off without murdering a clone. So lawyers come up with a solution, where another machine creates an anti-clone that marries the original clone, with a clause saying they give up the right to exist. If they kiss, they both disappear.
In some ways the philosophical debates, which are glossed over largely in star trek are the interesting bits. For example what is to stop a army being produced by teleportation, or a immortality machine.
How society is changed by new technology and the consequences is an important element
Sadly, I Can’t recall the name of the story. But I think there was also a movie based on the idea that transporters could also be used for cloning people. Something connected with verification of transport, I believe?
As you can imagine, there were some legal/ethical issues with having duplicates of people and how it was handled.
Cordwainer Smith has a person stressed to the point of spontaneously transporting to a different planet. John Carter had to be in a particular cave with strange properties and his body was left behind(?) as he transported through space and likely a much earlier time. Clifford Simac has a teleportation hub in “Way Station” in which the bodies are left behind (or the entity is killed by the process and copy is at the far end) and flushed into the recycling system (Good buck). Information is sent ahead to prepare a new body. Larry Niven has Transmats and explores the the problems with conservation of momentum and energy and how to deal with them.
The Alfred Bester novel in fact did not feature teleporters. Humans developed the ability to teleport themselves by using nothing but their minds. While it is a decidedly sci Fi novel with star ships and interplanetary and time travel, the teleportation (jaunts) is/are much more akin to magic.
That being said, everyone should read it. It’s a little campy as might be expected from it’s era, but it’s a really fun Novella. The book should only take a few hours to read.
Vorga! PyrE! “DON’T MOVE SO LOUD!” A great novel!
I still think the most impressive thing about the Star Trek transporters os the Heisenberg Compensators.
And I still like the response to the question of how they work, “Nicely”.
Classy.
Sorry RFC1437 (1993) didn’t get a mention. Or is email to old fashioned ?
I’m curious why you included The Stars My Destination, but excluded John Carter. They both boil down to some people having an innate (essentially magical) ability to will themselves to another place.
John Carter is mentioned at the beginning of the article.
I believe in “Star Marines” by Ian Douglas he described 3 or 4 types of teleportation.
There was one “made for television” movie where aliens gave humanity teleportation technology, and was training a human operator how to run it. It operated by scanning the subject, sending the data to a receiving station where the subject was reconstructed, then destroying the original subject. A lady came in to be teleported to a distant location, but an error occurred that prevented the sending station from knowing if the transmission was successful, so the lady was let out until they could find out if she should try again (if it failed) or be killed (if it worked).
Involved sentient alien dinosaurs. Outer Limits? I’ve seen it.
Outer Limits TOS: An alien explains to a human that he and the six suburban blocks around which he once resided were “teleported” to a planet light years away. Quite a concept for a 1963 sci-fi series.
I always liked the way they dealt with teleportation in the Dark Matter (2015) series. They scan you and your brain and put you in a cryopod. Then at some distant Transfer Transit station they use your scan to imprint a clone body. You have 72 hours at your destination, before the clone body expires, to return to Transfer Transit where the body is recycled and your neuroimprint is transferred back to your body as you are brought out of stasis remembering everything as if you were actually there. If your clone body doesnt make it back to Transfer transit, whether by missing its expiration time, or being killed, you wont remember what happened on your away mission.
oops, didnt notice the “There are a few imagined systems (like the one on Dark Matter from 2015) that make a copy of you and destroy it, but that’s another problem ” mention of Dark Matter before I typed.
I felt the writers did a good job of avoiding the ethical and philosophical complications that exist in “The Prestige” 2006 where you make a copy and destroy the original.
Great movie! I love where he keeps running it on a cat and thinking it wasn’t working. Meanwhile, the yard is filling up with cats!
Thought it was kinda lame/sad that, in the end, the surviving Christian Bale brother didnt uncover how the machine works and remake his executed twin with it.
What about 1961 Charley and the Chocolate Factory?
It’s a curious accident that all the authors mentioned just happen to be American.
It might be if it were true. Clarke and Jane were British, and Van Vogt was Canadian.
Then there is the ‘The I Inside’ by Allen Dean Foster. Aliens teleporting in/out. Good book BTW.
“Speaking of the destination, you have to conserve energy over this process. So, if you beam from a location moving faster compared to the target, where does the energy go? When you come back, where does the extra energy come from?”
It’s worse than that! If you’re in a spaceship and you’re above a beaming point on the equator in geostationary orbit, you’re still beaming to a place with much lower potential energy. Where did that energy come from?
You have the same problem when talking about wormholes, for that matter, which would be the kind of teleportation that’s not mentioned here.
Larry Niven handled this on Earth with the Transmat network connected in some way to a huge mass floating in water, I think ta the North Pole. It is a momentum compensator. It makes imperceptible little movements as the millions of people are using the system and makes small violent thumps when massive objects go through the commercial system. The greatest compensation is for a transfer from the equator at noon to the opposite side of the equator at midnight during a lunar eclipse.
It depends exactly what you mean by wormholes, but if you’re talking about a “tunnel through space”, and you don’t posit any additional magic, then general relativity can take that in stride – it’s just that the logical resolution may create new problems for SF writers.
Since a tunnel through space is just regular space with unusual topology, space-time is curved through the tunnnel. If you have a wormhole to Jupiter, then Jupiter’s gravitational field would extend through it, so there’s no change in potential energy when you traverse the wormhole. But the flipside is that objects on the Earth end would fall towards it, and/or be squished against the outside walls of the wormhole building.
If the endpoints are moving relative to each other, the situation would be similar but even harder to calculus; space-time is by definition continuous between the two frames, and you’d experience the resulting curvature as “artificial” gravity, which would produce acceleration that resolves the kinetic energy issue as you pass through the wormhole.
If you have a wormhole leading to a point directly above you, and drop a hammer into it, the hammer won’t just keep accelerating forever; instead you’ll warp gravity locally such that the whole column between the two endpoints will experience freefall.
IOW you can’t have geometries of space-time that violate conservation of mass/energy, because that conservation is what defines the geometry of space-time in the first place.
I was more referring to how science fiction depicts wormholes rather than how wormhole metrics are studied in physics, but, to clarify (yes, warning, this is long):
“then general relativity can take that in stride”
It actually can’t. This is something that both science journalism and GR theorists communicate extremely poorly. It’s the same thing when people say “time travel is OK in GR!” No, it isn’t. Not at all. (And again, yes, I know you’ll find people saying the exact opposite elsewhere. What they’re wrong about is what general relativity is, and what it isn’t.)
Einstein’s equation in GR is pretty straightforward: it’s just “the curvature of spacetime is equal to the stress-energy contained within it.”
The first part is completely unbounded – that’s just geometry. You can make whatever kind of curved spacetime you want. It could be twisted into a pretzel or in the shape of a giant smiley face. Doesn’t matter. It’s just a curvature metric. Describing a random metric is not general relativity. It’s just geometry.
The general relativity portion – the physics – comes in the other side of the equation: the stress-energy portion. That’s the physics. And here’s the problem – we understand the stress-energy tensor of exactly two things. Bare, noninteracting masses, and the electromagnetic field.
That’s it. Nothing else. And if you go and make your weirdo wormhole portal to Jupiter as the geometry and ask “cool now how do I make this in physics,” general relativity says one thing: you don’t. Period. The end. You do not. There is no way in general relativity to make a portal to Jupiter that something passes through.
Where science journalism and GR theorists fail is that they say “but… what if we could” and they just pretend that there’s magic fairy powder that creates the metric that GR is explicitly telling you “nope” to.
But that’s not general relativity. That’s just messing around with geometry. Seriously, it makes no sense: someone took 2 Schwarzschild metrics, joined them together, and then investigated the worldline dynamics and GR said that any perturbation would immediately revert this back to two separate metrics. They then ignored this result, and people started reporting this as “wormholes are possible in general relativity.”
The TL;DR: general relativity is actually not okay with wormholes because in order to make them work people make up things that are literally outside the bounds of the stuff that general relativity is purporting to describe. Positing “magic stuff” that fixes things is stupid, you could just posit that it interacts with spacetime entirely differently in the first place if you’re gonna go ignore everything.
Yes the door, portal, or wormhole concept is far easier to comprehend and comfortable to actually go through.
The idea of a door that you just open to another place and walk through sounds easy, but when you start thinking about the details, it becomes worse. You still have all of the same energy concerns, but now you’ve got direction issues to deal with as well with the fields crossing the portal.
Imagine a portal facing down at the North Pole connected to a portal facing up at the South Pole: you’ve now got an unbounded “rip the Earth apart” problem. The goofy ‘wormhole’ metrics that theorists think about are generally empty, flat space to empty, flat space.
“Portal” – the game would have been interesting then.
Yeah, in Portal, gravity specifically doesn’t affect he other side of the portal. Interestingly (air, liquid) pressure does though, at least in Portal 2.
Ugh, thanks for reminding me of that steaming pile of manure that was The World of Null-A from the otherwise very talented AE Van Vogt. I would have cosen instead “Way Station” by Clifford D. Simas or Asimov’s “The End of Eternity”.
Way Station scanned the object or body’s structure and presumaby its wavefunction as well, destroyed it and transmitted only the data. The receiver station had to have the necessary chemicals ready to re-create the body (the pending arrival notice included the list of chemicals, arranged by container # as well as other needs of the visitor/in-transit traveler). It involved a bit of telepathy at the end. Hope I didn’t give too many spoilers.
And Asimov’s time capsules or cabins traveled the time axis of “hyperspace” powered by the Nova Sun in the distant future. ‘Twas something of a power hog.
ERRATA:
“chosen”, not “cosen”.
“Simak”, not “Simas”.
Way Station doesn’t exactly destroy the body. IIRC the body is killed by the process (or not?) and the stationmaster pulls a lever to flush it to recycling tanks.
Yes, that’s basically it and makes sense to boot. Why use fresh chemicals when the same stuff works just as well? Makes you whole again in more ways than one = )
In modern knowledge, if you wanted to include “Penrosian quantum hoopla” in consciousness or something, it’d be totally viable to say that the source and destination would have a shared source of entangled pairs (which were maintained via a supply chain or something, it could literally take years, it wouldn’t matter, you could theoretically maintain it) and then you’d use those pairs to transmit the quantum state info to the destination (classically).
In that case the person’s consciousness (since it’s got the Penrosian quantum stuff) would naturally be destroyed by the process and recreated later.
Obviously a bit early for that stuff in the 1960s, but it’s doable.
can we get an article about actual quantum teleportation?
can we see a diy teleportation of photons?
that’d be cool. while fiction is fun (i loved asimov) non fiction and doing it IRL is the coolest thing.
Quantum teleportation isn’t teleportation. From a layman’s perspective it’s very badly named. What’s being “teleported” is the state – the information, not anything physical. This is extremely interesting from a physics point of view because you can’t create a duplicate of a quantum state, so the fact that you can transfer the state from one entity to another is interesting.
To stress the point, quantum teleportation doesn’t even have to involve the same types of things – you can ‘teleport’ the state of one qubit to a totally different kind of qubit. From a layman’s perspective, it’d be better called “quantum communication” rather than teleportation, because from a practical perspective that’s what it enables.
I think looking at Star Trek as a whole you have to say that the writers are really cheating. When it’s convenient, people can be stored in “pattern buffers” and transferred about and such no problem. And straight copies can be made, absolutely. But by and large the universe sticks to the comfortable “what goes in comes out” concept, even when folks with absolutely no potential ethical restraints have transporters (e.g. Jem’Hadar). Same goes for replicators when used as plot devices – the MacGuffin can’t be replicated, but very often can be transported. The wrong person can be beamed up, but somehow diseases can be filtered out (or not, as convenient).
Overall though, I’d have a hard time swallowing any assembly/disassembly transporter tech on that same philosophical basis. Wormholes have credibility issues of their own, but at least they’re not as patently insane to use even when working as intended.
Bv Larson has a series with multiple types of transportation techs in it. Undying mercenery iirc. The most interesting one is a teleportation harness where the person remains conscious during the transit, which takes around 1 second per lightyear, although without a body. They are just aware of themselves as existing. He takes an interesting idea of having a feeling of needing to breathe throughout the journey but having no lungs with which to do it. It turns into a torturous journey that keeps building this need to breathe with no way to satiate it. Then he has instantaneous transportation gates and a few more.
There’s a Charles Stross novel, Glasshouse, from when he was writing science fiction, that has a lot of interesting angles on “realistic” teleportation. In particular, the existential privacy issues that could arise from letting ISPs process literally your entire being.
The handy thing about quantum consciousness stuff (in the Penrose sense) is that it sidesteps a lot of those issues because it’s literally impossible to actually access or process any of the information by a man in the middle. There’s just literally no way to access it.
Of course the less handy thing is that the quantum consciousness stuff is probably not real, so there’s that.
All of the historical references to teleportation seem quaint in that they don’t include surge pricing.
Stephen King’s “The Jaunt”
Very Good, Very Bradbury, and Very disturbing thoughts on teleportation Mishaps.
Don’t forget the ‘speed’ of teleportation! Like any superluminal travel method, if you can teleport faster than light you break causality, and thus are able to produce perpetual motion/overunity machines. Handily solves the “where does the energy come from?” problem, by introducing a much worse one.
“Like any superluminal travel method, if you can teleport faster than light you break causality”
This isn’t entirely true – it’s argued a lot that even wormhole-type stuff (or Alcubierre-type warp drives) can break causality, but they make huge assumptions on the dynamics of the system.
For instance, the standard “wormholes are time machines” example comes from Kip Thorne, where you imagine a wormhole between a stationary observer and a spaceship initially side-by-side, and the spaceship zips off and then comes back, with the wormhole onboard the entire time. Because the spaceship has experienced less proper time than the stationary observer, the wormhole connects “past” stationary to “present” stationary. Poof, instant time machine.
The problem is you can’t make a traversible wormhole period in standard GR (you know, the version that describes our universe) so you have to Make Up Random Stuff to do it. And the whole “I can change the relative positions/locations of the wormhole” thing is an assumption on how that Made Up Random Stuff behaves.
This is a problem with basically all superluminal stuff, even the ones that ‘kinda sorta’ exist within the bounds of sanity (e.g. Lenz’s soliton version of the Alcubierre drive) – you can’t actually make them work because the amount of spacetime bending is so absurd that you have to invoke magic, and if you’re gonna invoke magic you can invoke it to do whatever you want.
I may have missed it but wasn’t the ring system in Star Gate a large molecular transporter ? Also don’t forget the humor in transporting….” Snotty beamed me twice last nice..it was wonderful” – Spaceballs (Mel Brooks)
https://youtu.be/etY7kbRRQ_c?si=UPn1-2wZ7WeM-0Q7
There were many different transporter types in the Stargate franchise: you had the stargates themselves (which were transporter + spatial wormhole), you had the rings which dematerialize someone and either send them to another ring transporter elsewhere or… I dunno, get thrown at the planet, that part’s weird – and then you had Asgard transporters later which were Star Trek beaming. Plus Stargate: Atlantis had other ones as well.
Just looking at the stargates, it always seemed like there were weird arbitrary restrictions – matter could only go one way, but radio goes both ways, etc. – but they were describing it as a combination of a connection between two points and molecular disassembly/reassembly. There was also a mention that gravity goes through it too (an episode where it connected to a planet near a black hole), although obviously it’s heavily suppressed somehow.
In later episodes/seasons, the entire Stargate network was treated as if it was actually periodically communicating with each other to update information, so it reinforces the “this is actually a super-advanced computer-type system.”
Those weird restrictions actually probably made it more reasonable, because one of the benefits of imagining that is that photons (since they’re bosons) can be compressed to arbitrary levels, meaning the actual ‘space bridge’ only needs to be infinitesimally small. The weird “gravity only kinda sorta goes through” isn’t entirely nuts either since obviously the ‘space bridge’ part itself involves a ton of bending space, so you could imagine that whatever’s generating the spatial curvature just expends what’s needed to flatten it.
Of course the vast majority of the show is silly-pants, but hey.
Well you can say sending a picture or a video over the internet is a form of teleportation
But you compress 4 dimensions into 3
2 spatial + 1 dimension of time
And You can certainly exchange information, with the “carbon copy” of the subject on the record, but its not necessary in realtime
That’s why you can view such record both forward and backwards in time
Be yours using that extra dimension you as the viewpoint
That’s why time travel is not necessary easy, unless you have another spatial dimension to observe the time from or having 2 dimensional time instead of 1 dimensional time
But you’re***
Pfft “autocorrect and auto fill”
In Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon proposes the idea that your consciousness doesn’t really need to be tied to your body, and that it can travel across space and time if properly aware of how to do so.
It’s actually quite an amazing novel, putting forth many interesting ideas. Highly recommended.
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/14/the-alien-energy-crisis-solved/
Recommended reading: Larry Niven’s essay; ‘The Theory and Practice of Teleportation.’
In the ‘All the Myriad Ways’ anthology, and elsewhere.
Following the work of Dan Winter, I’ve learned that humans actually possess a native ability to teleport themselves. The fractal Golden Ratio structure of our DNA permits non-destructive implosion. At the implosion point, the DNA becomes a longitudinal compression wave. The way you arrive at your destination is through the use of your consciousness (which also happens to be fractal Golden Ratio cold plasma field). You can train yourself to access this ability through biofeedback meditation. It’s critical that you’re able to maintain brainwave coherency.
Wow. Really… uhh… compelling stuff. You may want to check the definition of learned.
From Animator John Weldon:
https://www.nfb.ca/film/to_be/
And from Mad Magazine:
https://trekkerscrapbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/f76a6-face-wants-to-sit-down.jpg
(with apologies to Claude Shannon and Nick Bostrum…):
It was hard not to notice that the comments on the article seems to be mostly based on the ideas of a transporter that’s designed to move the person’s actual “components” rather than the type that sends just their “information” (where the new basic components would be gathered and assembled “locally”). Personally, I feel “squirting the wet-bits” down to a planet’s surface is kinda tacky… rather like trying to raise the dead using the decaying/decayed bits. Better to use their information with new stuff!
I’m not the same person I was at six, twenty, or forty, either physically or mentally. My memory is colored over time by neuron path changes, and cell damage, in addition to my own often confused and biased views. The cells in my body have mostly changed several times and my outlook/personal “data” has too. It could be accurately said that I’m not the same person I was even yesterday. We are all Ships Of Theseus, and both life and time, probably aren’t what we normally assume they are. If in the end we are made of data, which changes with the passage of time, it really may not matter what the data is played on, or at what speed – as long as it stays coherent (I think I’m quoting Alan Turing in that last bit, which can get kinda tricky!). It’s somewhat recursive to think that the act of making a copy may well add information to the “batch” you’re working with – but so did yesterday.
Why is the ‘Jumper’ series (Steven Gould) not mentioned?
The movie is (imo) terrible, but I enjoyed the books (jumper, reflex, impulse, exo). They are quite scary and gruesome at times, but also go into the nitty gritty nerdy details of teleportation like ‘do you keep your momentum?’ and ‘do you leave behind a vacuum?’ etc. In fact those details are key to the story.
In the last someone starts a space agency teleporting stuff straight to orbit. Oh, and back to earth, sometimes. That cleans up space junk, but causes ‘concerns’ with the owners of spy satellites…
And there is lots of other problems teleportation causes with various 3 letter agencies. Or baddies that want to move stuff undetected. So, interesting book.
But, yeah, the first book starts with domestic abuse and there are various other rather horrible and/or gruesome things in it, definitely not a kids book.
Not to spoiler it but as ‘parental guidance’: The main character gets abused, kidnapped at some point, there is torture, one of the main characters nearly gets raped, a main character accidentally kills someone and feels horrible about that. Its gruesome. Not something I thought I would read, but it got recommended due to the teleportation stuff (I think in Lateral (the quiz podcast) or something adjacent) and the implications teleportation would have in the real world and that indeed makes for an interesting story.
Regarding the philosophical implications, I very highly recommend the animated video “To Be”. You can find it at https://www.nfb.ca/film/to_be/ . Dr. “Bones” McCoy would approve!