Why can't humans be turned into energy?

Question

if Einstiens theory E=mc2 is correct then couldn't a human be turned into energy and sent as a signal and turned back into matter?

Answer 1

There's a few parts to this question:

Can we turn people into energy?
Yes; it's possible. If you had an equal amount of antimatter, you could annilate the human and get out twice the energy of the human (one lot from the human, one lot from the antihuman). You'd need antimatter, because destroying the subatomic particles that make up humans would violate certain conservation laws; you need to remove (or add) as much antimatter as you do matter.

Can we send the information as a signal?
There's two parts to this; can we scan someone, and can we send the scanned information?

Scanning seems like it should be impossible due to Heisenburg's uncertainty principle; if you know where something is, you're not sure how fast it is moving, and vice versa. You'd need both pieces of information to classically scan the particle.
However, there has been research into ways of doing so quantum mechanically, and apparently single subatomic particles have been teleported.

However, there's an awful lot of particles in the human body; of the order of a billion billion billion, and that'd take a very long time to transfer over any sort of connection.

Putting the pieces back together at the other end may also be tricky. And you don't want to lose any pieces!

Answer 2

Converting matter to energy and vice versa is one thing; the sun does the former all the time.

Doing that conversion AND producing a complex structure is quite another. How would the process that converts you back to matter from energy know (a) how much of each type of atom to create and (b) how those atoms should be arranged, both in terms of molecules and in terms of the precise physical location of each molecule with your body? The conversion process would need instructions that, as you can imagine, would be just short of infinitely complex.

Of course that assumes that such an instruction-driven conversion process can exist in the first place, which seems pretty unlikely to me.

Answer 3

Well, parts of us can like Methane Gas (if we could harness it) or farts is a gas that could be used for energy. Fat is burned as energy a long with most of the foods we eat but because of the matter in which we're built, we couldn't completely be broken enough to become pure energy.

Do keep in mind that ions and protons the building block of cells are made of energy along with brain matter and the synopsis of impulses that create thought and the electronic impulses at every nerve ending.

Conclusion, although we're made of a great deal of energy particles, with today's technology there's no possibility of complete energy transference.

Answer 4

Oh, a human can be turned into energy very easily -- just burn him or her in a hot enough flame.

Turning the human's energy back into matter requires more than just Einstein's equation, just like turning a pile of crumbled marble requires more than just knowing it was once a statue. In the case of the human energy, there's the extra energy required to analyze and organize the energy information back into not just any material state, but the exact material state you started with. Good luck with that! :)

Answer 5

Well... Einstien's theory makes it impossible to actually reach the speed of light. As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite and the energy required to accelerate it to that velocity becomes infinite... so you can see how it is physically impossible to travel at the speed of light.

Answer 6

Sure.... now the rest of the problem is getting human body to a speed that is twice that of light (2 X 186,000 mile per sec), and then voila', you're energy.

Answer 7

Watch Stargate.

Answer 8

You can be energy and matter at the same time, just ride your bicycle! HELP SAVE THE PLANET!!

Answer 9

yeah.. but the real trick is to form the human back from the energy!!!

Answer 10

Sure we can. We are biomass! Haven't you ever heard about biomass energy generation?