How can we be certain that human teleportation, if one day developed, doesn't actually kill the user?

Question

I think I heard that scientists have 'teleported' particles and that there's an outside chance that one day teleportation of larger objects and even living organisms may be possible. My question relates to whether we can guarantee that the process actually transfers the complete information of an organism without destroying it. Imagine a scenario with two 'pods' - one transmitting and one receiving - what if the person 'arriving' at the receiving pod was actually only a facsimile of the one who entered the transmitting pod, with memories intact up to the point of getting into the pod. This facsimile would believe they were the person that entered the transmitting pod, wheras they are actually a perfect copy, and the original person has been destroyed in the process. To anyone observing the process, it would appear as though the transfer had been successful. Doubt this will happen in my lifetime (if ever), but how could you prove that the process is not killing the users?

Many of you seem to think I'm living some kind of deluded 'star trek' fantasy. Please note I did say that the technology doesn't currently exist, and that it probably won't ever exist - but some theoretical physicists have given thought to this as a serious topic - most of the technology that surrounds us now would have been astounding to people 50 years ago let alone a couple of hundred years ago. To say that teleportation, while seemingly fanciful, is completely impossible (like faster than light speed travel, which clearly is impossible) is to perhaps underestimate the technological advances that the next 500 years holds. The reason I asked the question was because of an article in the Telegraph about possible future technologies - just because some of you have small minds and watch too much TV don't presume I do.

Antoine - re. your comment about it being death, but temporary - this is my point - from the perspective of the person entering the machine and 'dying' this is actually the end of their life, but this fact is 'concealed' because a perfect replica of that person is reassembled at the other end. The replica has all of the memories intact and therefore appears to be the original person, but the conciousness of the original person has in fact been terminated. I'm suggesting that it may be difficult to determine whether such a system was actually 'transporting' the persons conscience, or just transporting the data to reconstruct a person who had effectively been destroyed, because the end result in both scenarios appears to be the same. IANALY if we don't destroy the original (lets say that's you) and there's a perfect copy, then which one is you? From the perspective of your conscience you are the original. If the original is destroyed then surely you are destroyed.

Answer 1

There will have to be an interstellar bureaucracy in charge of teleporter safety.

Answer 2

to be able to teleport people you'll need to be able to:
- get in an instant, the size and type of at least all atoms, and possibly down to the elementary particles, of the entity you wish to teleport (or "beam"). For just the atoms this will be of the order of magnitude of Avogadro's Number, ie 10 to the 23rd (times the number of moles of human matter, which is mostly water). Let's say about 10E27-10E28.
And for each of these you'll have mass, type, velocity, location (actually in quantum physics there is a limit to how precisely you can know both speed and location at the same time). So let's say you end up with 10E28-10E29 bytes of data.
A GB is just 10E9. Worldwide storage capacity today is maybe 20 to 50 billion GB, max 100 billion GB, I guess, only ie 10E20.
So to start with, you'll need about 1 billion times the world's data storage capacity - AND in a reasonable compact package.
Even if storage capacity doubled every 18 months (Moore's law) - which won't happen unless we invent new technologies - then it would be just over 45 years untill the world'd storage capacity was that large. And maybe 75 years until it fits within a reasonable package.


- and you'll need an equipment that can find all this out in seconds, i.e. a processing power VASTLY beyond today's global computing power!


- my guess is that, by the time we get to such data storage and computing capacity, AND the ability to find out so much detail about a big lump of material, we'll be able to sort out the other detail points ;-)


Which leaves your philosophical question very open:
- would the user be "killed"? YES. but only temporarily. I let you figure out the ethico-religious implications of that (in a short-story, Isaac Asimov has a mega-computer acquiring a sense of humour after having developed teleportation, because it involved the temporary death of a human being and therefore shook the First Law, not to harm a human being).
- would the new person be the "real" person? YES, physically. Of course if anyone believes there is an immortal soul, and that soul one freed won't reattach immediately, then I guess the new person would be "soul-less". But still others may argue that the sould would probably immediately re-attach to the identical copy of the person?

Interesting topic, in any case!

Answer 3

I don't have that much to add beyond what others have already pointed out, but I will say that your question goes to two of the fundamental questions of human nature. One is, are we more than the sum of our parts? Second, can science really measure everything about a being, physical or not, and replicate them perfectly? Or is there an ethereal component to a person?

I don't think the debate about how possible this would be is very interesting, but you did ask this in Physics so some of that is to be expected. As one person mentioned, the science fiction implications are both entertaining and interesting.

Asimov's computer unable to reconcile having temporarily killed someone is a good example. Another is to question if a teleporter did exist, but didn't transport some ethereal component of a person, what would that look like? How would we even know that the copy was incomplete? It's easy to imagine a story in which the copies slowly start to degrade in unexpected ways years after the teleportation.

This is a question that is hard to categorize, if you ask it here you get assaulted by quantum nerds, if you ask it in philosophy you'd get assaulted by people who spend entire doctoral studies on the question, and if you asked it in religion I don't even want to imagine what you'd get in response.

Answer 4

Depends on the type of teleportation (yes, there is more than one) - the most widely reported form has used entanglement to copy the properties of a particle, producing an exact copy in a different location. However, a recent article in New Scientist (29 Sep 2007) briefly describes a computer simulation of an experiment using quantum interference to move the original particle through space from A to B without actually passing through the intervening space. Neither method actually involves the death of the transportee - in the first case you create a clone in a different place, in the second the person really is transported...

Answer 5

First, it is not far-fetched to imagine this being possible someday. One could theoretically get a perfect and complete three-dimensional measurement of the position of every atom in a human body by sending several near-instantaneous orthogonal pulses of high-frequency energy (e.g., x-rays) through a body. These impulses would penetrate the body and project a wave pattern onto some recording medium that would contain complete information about the body. Think of it as a "matter hologram." Matter is a very stable form of energy -- in fact, every physical thing in the universe is a wave. Recording the wave pattern using holographic techniques could allow the same wave pattern to be regenerated somewhere else by, for example, subjecting it to the same impulse functions. However, with respect to creating stable matter it would require an extraordinary amount of energy to do this, and recording such a hologram would require a film or other recording medium with a far greater resolution than anything science currently knows of.

Having this technology would not just enable teleportation, it would allow people to make "backup copies" of themselves, in case something catastropic happened to them in the future. Your question assumes that one would necessarily destroy the original body when creating the teleported one, but I don't see why that would be necessary.

Now, assuming that some law was passed that the original must be destroyed when teleportation was successful, your question boils down to whether or not the new copy would "be" the same person as the original.

But in fact your body sheds its cells, as waste, hair, skin flakes, continuously, and I've read that ALL the cells in your body will be entirely replaced every seven years (most much more quickly). So your question could also be asked with respect to normal human existence not even contemplating teleportation, as follows: are you the same person you were seven years ago, even though there is NO matter in common between your body seven years ago and your body today?

I think most people would answer, "Yes, you are the same person," because our sense of identity does not concentrate on content but rather on form -- your body slowly and continuously evolves but maintains a consistent form (as does your mind). Were this not the case, you would wake up every morning thinking you were a different person -- in a lot of ways you are, but the form is so similar that you never think that.

Therefore I would argue that a perfect electromagnetic facsimile of a body would result in the facsimile and the original being the same in every way, and because all of our memory and self-identity is wrapped up in the electro-chemical configuration of our brains, the facsimile, having this exact configuration, WOULD BE the original.

The only possible argument I can think of against this is that there's some non-physical, non-electromagnetic aspect to a human being. There is absolutely no scientific evidence of this; in fact there is a lot of evidence that the opposite is true, that the religious aspect of our being is actually generated by the brain. (See, for example, "Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief" as well as numerous books by Dawkins, Dennett, and many others.)

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Regarding your follow-up: BOTH the original and the copy would be you. There's a seriously entertained theory in quantum physics called the "multiverse" that posits that at every instant the universe splits into all its myriad of possibilities, and you exist in many of them simultaneously. Likewise, there's no reason "you" (defined as that set of forms, details, ways of being and perceiving with which you and the world identifies you) couldn't be in the world multiple times, of course diverging slightly moving forward based on different experiences.

If your new question, "which one is you" is asking phenomenologically which copy is you, I still answer BOTH. Both would think they were, and both would be right. Your total being is nothing more nor less than a wave pattern; replicate that pattern and you have an identical, equally viable and important entity. We live in an age of perfect mechanical reproduction, of writing, of data, of art, of engineering components, a great many things -- why would reproduction of oneself be any different?

Answer 6

I think that so far we've just transferred some data using electron pairs. These are very strange quanta phenomena which act like the classic identical twin pain and feeling transfers. That is if one is altered the other is also affected despite being remove from the local.

We're a long way from Star Trek technology. In reality this would result in killing the original and reassembling a doppelganger from the transferred data.

You probably need a good quantum physicist to explain this properly.

Answer 7

Its a bit hard to answer your question, seeing as the technology doesn't exist yet! Their is a process, called quantum teleportation that does work today, but this doesn't 'move' an object: it merely uses quantum physics to create a duplicate of the object in the new location, BUT, the original has to be destroyed for the process to work! (The same thing can't exist in 2 places at once.) So in theory, if used on people, then yes, that would be killing the original person, and merely creating a clone!

Answer 8

If mankind survives yet another thousand years, then i might say its very almost particular, or some suitable alternative. finding a hundred years into the destiny we would see such wonders of technologies, its very almost pointless to evaluate. think of roughly what somebody might have concept interior the 70s in case you noted computers, information superhighway, digital cameras, facebook, gps in peoples automobiles, an those little pocket sized cellular telephones which persons use for all those issues (and infrequently use to unquestionably refer to a minimum of one yet another). they might merely snigger you off as being keen on action picture star trek. That develop into basically 30 years in the past. some years returned, somebody outfitted an engine with molecules. greater tips suits on a a million millimeter memory card than shall we slot in a room 10 years in the past. You wager, if there's a call for for it, they are going to teleport human beings sometime. i believe it is going to artwork like a fax device. it is going to deconstruct each and every atom interior the persons physique, and reassemble it on the different end. If this works, we would have some intense inquiries to respond to. working example, "is that this the comparable guy or woman on the different end?" and "What does this propose regarding the existence of a soul? "

Answer 9

As you point out, imagine the scenario where a complete molecular scan is done of you and a copy is created at the other end. What if the original you forgot to be broken down and both of you existed. Would it be OK to destroy the origianl you? How would you feel about that?

Answer 10

its easy teleport a trained animal and hope for the best and besides if you can transfer mater from on place to another dont you think it would have far more benificail uses than saving a fat guy a walk to the shops ?? and i belive i have read an artical about the believed success of teleporting particals maybe new science or something like that

Answer 11

When the cows are back in the shed and the beetles are happily eating away on the poo provided, then the moon shall rise and the little piggies run with their fingers up their bums to see what was the matter.

I hope this pointless answer is apt enough to a pointless question.