Russia aims to develop 'teleportation' in 20 years (by 2035)

Slackers! We got there decades ago, sort of.

a reply to: Bedlam

Can you help us out here? The OP says:

And while scientists in 2014 at Delft University successfully teleported information encoded into subatomic particles with 100% accuracy, this is so very far off from the kind of teleportation we're used to seeing in shows like Star Trek, Stargate, etc.

Is there any connection at all?

a reply to: Phage

TBH, I think only vaguely. They're imposing some sort of particle state using entanglement, at a distance, which is in itself sort of cool and oddball.

The supposed thing in Florida actually instantiated matter. Or it was causing the thing to be elsewhere in toto in some manner. You didn't have to pony up enough energy to create a few hundred grams of test object, it went from point A across the street to point B over some sort of waveguide thing. There were a lot of details that matched across stories.

But again, it could all have been cover story to disguise something else in development. It did hang together better than a lot of the scuttlebutt you hear.

originally posted by: Metallicus
a reply to: _BoneZ_

What they need to work on is hot female androids. I wouldn't need to leave my house.

lol nice one, i agree.

On another note teleportation can be done today, all you have to do is stop time with a time machine. but doing so could be highly hazardous as you cross the threshold and everywhere you have to deal with infinities.

originally posted by: _BoneZ_
It will take a massively powerful computer to teleport just inanimate objects, let alone living beings. I think teleportation will be a little farther off than 20-years.

Computer power isn't the only stumbling block. If matter is converted to energy and back to matter, the energy requirements would be incredible for anything with significant mass. What are the energy requirements? The speed of light squared times the mass. The speed of light squared is a big number.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
Then there's the problem of "All of a sudden, NUKE!"

If it was a 1 megaton nuke that converted say 1% of mass to energy, you would need at least a 100 megaton energy source to create it (likely far more due to inefficiencies). Seems like a waste of 99 megatons. There has to be a more efficient way to deploy the 100 megatons of energy than creating a nuke which will waste most of it.

originally posted by: okrian
Teleporting a bit of info on a sub-atomic level is one thing, this isn't gonna happen. Very little info in this article, which is not surprising considering the claim (or planned claim anyway).

Star Trek made it seem so easy though, all they needed to violate the known laws of physics was a "Heisenberg Compensator". In reality though, there is no such device and "Heisenberg Compensator" means "piece of science fiction magic that allows us to transport humans in violation of the known laws of physics", specifically the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which places limits on how accurate the copy can be made, because you can't ever measure the true state of the original with complete accuracy.

However I think the decades old fax machine is in some sense a crude "transporter". You may not get the exact same sheet of paper on the other end, but it can have the same information. A modern extension of that is 3D scanning and printing where we can scan simple objects and re-create facsimiles remotely using 3D printers. Not true teleportation but I agree with you and the OP that star-trek-style teleportation is certainly not on the horizon in 20 years or even 100 years.

a reply to: _BoneZ_

Its one thing to teleport information from one location to the next but living matters a whole other kettle of fish. How they will manage to disassemble then resemble a living biological life form at the other end seem beyond our technological understanding.

Then there is the philosophical aspects to consider where people are concerned. If you somehow manage to disassemble and then reassemble a person, is the reassemble person at the other end anything more than a copy of the original, essentially are we greater than the sum of our parts?

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
Computer power isn't the only stumbling block. If matter is converted to energy and back to matter, the energy requirements would be incredible for anything with significant mass. What are the energy requirements? The speed of light squared times the mass. The speed of light squared is a big number.

If Kantor was right, "all ya gotta do" is flip the "where am I" descriptors on a defined block of matter.

If you can't do it all simultaneously, though, it's going to be rough on animate matter...

a reply to: _BoneZ_

Sounds groovy.

But I always wondered -- unless the destination location was a fixed device/machine, wouldn't you be in serious trouble of getting smooshed as you 'appeared' in a point in space on the surface of the Earth, which is rotating at approx 1000 mph?

Sure, you'd step through the Borris-a-porter from Moscow, expecting to appear in Times Square - but that location would 'move' away from your appearance pretty damned quick and you'd end up going through a few buildings at over the speed of sound.

Or, is the assumption that teleportation end-points are 'fixed' to the Earth's rotation?

Meh, never understood how that would work...

a reply to: noonebutme

"wouldn't you be in serious trouble of getting smooshed as you 'appeared' in a point in space on the surface of the Earth, which is rotating at approx 1000 mph?"

Assuming we ever actually manage to attain the ability/technology to transport biological beings from one location to the next i imagine calculating coordinates to ensure the above does not happen would be child's play.

a reply to: Bedlam
Here's Lawrence Krauss and some other physicists discussing the feasibility of star-trek type transporters, but none of them mention what you said so they're either not aware of it or they don't think it's feasible, I'm not sure which.

The first 10 minutes are about transporter technology, after that other star trek technologies are discussed.

Lawrence Krauss (2014) "The Physics of STAR TREK!"


Krauss says the way he'd transport somebody is to make a copy elsewhere, then vaporize the original. Ouch. So he's definitely not thinking along the lines you mention.

The other physicist who consulted for the Star Trek series said if you were converted to an energy stream you'd have to be heated to millions of degrees. Again, ouch.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
a reply to: Bedlam
Here's Lawrence Krauss and some other physicists discussing the feasibility of star-trek type transporters, but none of them mention what you said so they're either not aware of it or they don't think it's feasible, I'm not sure which.

I've always had a soft spot for Kantor. Mainly because it implies magical abilities if you could figure out how to do it.

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
Computer power isn't the only stumbling block. If matter is converted to energy and back to matter, the energy requirements would be incredible for anything with significant mass. What are the energy requirements? The speed of light squared times the mass. The speed of light squared is a big number.

If Kantor was right, "all ya gotta do" is flip the "where am I" descriptors on a defined block of matter.

If you can't do it all simultaneously, though, it's going to be rough on animate matter...

Assuming that the universe is holographic in nature (yeah, I know -- big assumption), then everything we perceive as 3D matter is actually defined in the inner workings of the universe as 2D information that is "projected" (although NOT in the everyday sense of the word) in a way that our reality is perceived as having 3 dimensions of space, even though it's only 2D information. If someone can access those inner workings of the natural universe, then maybe they could change where that information is "projected".

...which is sort of what you said about "flipping the 'where I am' descriptor".

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

Kantor's conjecture is that everything is information. Every particle has a descriptor telling it where it is, what its characteristics are and so on. Energy is a catalyst for information exchange between particles.

He was able to derive interesting things from the theory, like Maxwell's equations, at least that's a first step.

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

Wouldn't that be a 3D hologram projecting a 4D reality?

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

Wouldn't that be a 3D hologram projecting a 4D reality?

Projecting 3 spatial dimensions.

a reply to: Phage

The problem is, it's turtles all the way down. Once you've got three dimensions, why stop there?

a reply to: Bedlam
If your name is Albert Cube, or A. Cube, that may be all you see so that's why some people stop there:

Non-Euclidean Space

Abbot's "Flatland" described Mr. A. Square living on an infinite Euclidean plane. But A. Square could have been living on the surface of a sphere. In that case, he'd think he was flat, and he'd see everything around him as flat, but as he explored further he'd start noticing things that didn't make sense. For instance, he might discover that if he traveled in a straight line, eventually he'd return to his starting point without turning around. Nonetheless, his direct local examination of his environment would seem to be 2D, and A. Square himself would still be 2D even though the sphere on which he lived was 3D. And if he was small and the sphere was huge, he might live his entire life and never notice that it wasn't actually a Euclidean plane.

By the same token, his cousin A. Cube could live in an infinite Euclidean flat space, but could also be living on the "surface" of a hypersphere. A. Cube would be 3 dimensional as would be all the things around him and the space in which he lived, but he might discover that if he traveled in a "straight line" in any direction far enough he'd return to his starting position without having turned around. That's the nature of the spatial "surface" of a hypersphere, just as it is for the flat surface of a regular sphere. But if the hypersphere were huge, and if A. Cube didn't wander far, he might spend his entire life thinking he was in an infinite flat Euclidean space, instead of on the finite unbounded "surface" of a hypersphere.

The actual geometry of space is far more complicated and messy. It is a "space", in the sense that geometry uses the term; it's 3 dimensional and contains 3-dimensional objects. But it is curved and warped in ways which require 4 spatial dimensions to contain. The 4th dimension exists but isn't directly apparent to the 3D objects inside that space (i.e. Mr. A. Cube and you and me) and it may take observation of unusual conditions to notice that all is not as Euclid would have predicted.