Quantum teleportation, shmontum teleportation
Since there has been a lot of work being done over the last few years on quantum computation there have been a lot of articles published along the lines of “Quantum Teleportation is here, but it’s no Star Trek.”
To which I say: Pshah! Emphatically pshah sirs!
Quantum teleportation only bares the slightest resemblance to what we think of as teleportation, I mean, there are no flashing lights! No chance to accidentally turn a man into an inside-out monkey! No levers for intuitive control over the process of recomposing a person atom-by-atom-by-atom-by- ( * 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000ish )! My point being, ladies and gentlemen, don’t worry when you read stories like this one (or this one, etc) where they very clearly say that this technology is impossibly far from transporting humans. It was never designed for that!
One of the biggest problem with QT — related to transporting real people — is that you have to have as many atoms at the end as you start with, exactly as many. And they have to be blank. And you have to “entangle” them with the original person. Which, as far as I know the only way that we’ve got to entangle atoms is to super-freeze them (to pretty close to -459°f) and turn them into a sort of super-sized cloud-atom-thing. That is to say, you have to do that to both groups of atoms, something which I don’t particularly want done to me, thank you very much.
No, I think — and it is very important to remember that I am terribly under-qualified to be even thinking, never mind talking about these things — that it is a much better idea to be exploding people. Because people are just mass and information, and mass is just energy, and information and energy are much easier to transport than mass. Of course, converting people to pure energy will probably require a heck of a lot of power, probably way more than just freezing them to near absolute zero.
But it will be hella flashy.
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