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To boldly go nowhere

By Eric W. Davis

From “Teleportation Physics Study,” by Eric W. Davis of Warp Drive Metrics in Las Vegas. Commissioned by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and released in August, the paper calls for $7.5 million for teleportation research. It was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists.

Future space explorers and their equipment will need to travel easily and quickly from an orbiting spacecraft to the surface of some remote planet, or military personnel will need to travel easily and quickly from their military base to another remote location on Earth, or space colonists will need quick transport to their new home planet. Instead of using conventional transportation, the space explorer, military personnel, space colonist, and/or his/her equipment go into the “Teleporter” (a.k.a. “Transporter” in Star Trek lingo) and are “beamed” to their destinations at light speed. The mechanism for this teleportation process is hypothetically envisioned to be the following:

Animate/inanimate objects placed in the teleporter are scanned by a computer-generated beam. The scan beam encodes all the quantum information contained within the animate/ inanimate object into organized bits of information, thus forming a digital pattern of the object. The scan beam then dematerializes the object and stores its pattern in a pattern buffer, thus transforming the atomic constituents of the dematerialized object into a matter stream. The teleporter then transmits the matter/pure energy stream to its destination in the form of an annular confinement beam. At the receiving teleporter the matter/pure energy stream is sent into a pattern buffer, where it is recombined with its quantum information, and the object is rematerialized.

Problem: There are a lot of important little details that were left out of the teleportation process because we simply do not know what they are. Does the teleporter transmit the atoms and the quantum bit information signal that comprises the animate/inanimate object, or just the quantum bit information signal? There are 1028 atoms in a human being. How does one transmit this much information, and how do we disassemble that many atoms? Are humans simply the sum of all the atoms (and the related excited atom quantum states) that compose them? Would this also include the reconstruction of a person’s consciousness (personality, memories, hopes, dreams, etc.) and soul or spirit? This question is beyond the scope of this study to address, but it is nevertheless one of the most important concepts awaiting a complete scientific understanding.

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