Teleportation: Transporter vs. Multi-Spatial Transverse System

[Whitestar]

In Star Trek, the transporter is perhaps the most famous of all the technologies onboard the starship Enterprise. It's also the most absurd one of all because it involves separating crew members at the atomic level, converting them into energy, and the process is reversed at the appointed destination. In the excellent book entitled, "The Physics of Star Trek", author Lawrence Krauss explains why the transporter will never work in real life:

 

"If you want to zap 10 to the 28 power of atoms, you have quite a challenge on your hands. Say, for example, that you simply want to turn all this material into pure energy. How much energy would result? Well, Einstein's formula E = MC2 tells us. If one suddenly transformed 50 kilograms (a light adult) of material into energy, one would release the energy equivalent of somewhere in excess of a thousand 1-megaton hydrogen bombs. It is hard to imagine how to do this in an environmentally friendly fashion. Finally, the binding energy that holds together the elementary particles, called quarks, which make up the protons and neutrons themselves is yet larger than that holding together the protons and neutrons in nuclei. In fact, it is currently believed, based on all calculations we can perform with the theory describing the interactions of quarks that it would take an infinite amount of energy to completely separate the quarks making up each proton and or neutron. Based on this argument, you might expect that breaking matter completely apart into quarks, its fundamental constituents, would be impossible and it is, at least at room temperature. However, the same theory that describes the interactions of quarks inside protons and neutrons tells us that if we were to heat up the nuclei to about 1,000 billion degrees (about a million times hotter than the temperature at the core of the Sun), then not only would the quarks inside lose their binding energies but at around this temperature matter will suddenly lose almost all of its mass. Matter will turn into radiation or, in the language of the transporter, matter will dematerialize."

 

Krauss goes on about another problem with the transporter, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which states that one can measure an atom's position and velocity at 100% accuracy, but never both at the same time. To observe one cancels out the other and vice-versa. Simply put, you can't observe something without interfering with it. Sort of like playing soccer or shooting pool.

 

Here is another quote from him on transporters:

 

"In order to transport a crew member back to the ship, the sensors aboard the Enterprise have to be able to spot the crew member on the planet below. More than that, they need to scan the individual prior to dematerialization and matter-stream transport. So the Enterprise must have a telecope powerful enough to resolve objects on and often under a planet's surface at atomic resolution. In fact, we are told that normal operating range for the transporter is approximately 40,000 kilometers, or about three times the Earth's diameter. This is the number we shall use for the following estimate. Everyone has seen photographs of the domes of the world's great telescopes, like the Keck telescope in Hawaii (the world's largest), or the Mt. Palomar telescope in California. Have you ever wondered why bigger and bigger telescopes are designed? Just as larger accelerators are needed if we wish to probe the structure of matter on ever smaller scales, larger telescopes if we want to resolve celestial objects that are fainter and farther away. The reasoning is simple: Because of the wave nature of light, anytime it passes through an opening it tends to diffract, or spread out a little bit. When the light from a distant point source goes through the telescopic lens, the image will be spread out somewhat, so that instead of seeing a point source, you will see a small, blurred disk of light. Now, if two point sources are closer together across the line of sight than the size of their respective disks, it will be impossible to resolve them as separate objects, since their disk will overlap in the observed image. Astronomers call such disks "seeing disks". The bigger the lens, the smaller the seeing disk. Thus, to resolve smaller and smaller objects, telecopes must have bigger and bigger lenses. We should therefore not be too disheartened by the apparent impossibility of the building a device to perform the necessary functions. Or, to put it less negatively, building a transporter would require us to heat up matter to a temperature a million times the temperature at the center of the Sun, expend more energy in a single machine than all of humanity presently uses, build telescopes larger than the size of the Earth, improve present computers by a factor of 1,000 billion billion, and avoid the laws of quantum mechanics. It's no wonder that Lt. Barclay was terrified of beaming! I think Gene Roddenberry, if faced with this challenge in real life, would probably choose instead to budget for a landable starship."

 

Renowned science fiction writer Larry Niven expressed his views on the transporter:

 

"I don't believe in bending space to order, and I wouldn't ride in a machine that annihilates me here, then beams away data that allows me to be exactly recreated somewhere else."

 

Mr. Niven has wrote his theory on teleportation in one of his stories:

 

"But I needed a theory that would allow instantaneous transportation and would still leave a passenger intact. What I came up with was a kind of super-neutrino. The displacement booth converts its cargo into an elementary particle of no rest mass, a relativistic mass equal to the weight of the cargo (for conservation of matter), an internal structure complex enough to carry the quantum states of every elementary particle in the cargo, and a neutrino's ability to penetrate almost any barrier. I called it a transition particle."

 

Unlike the transporter which converts people into energy, Niven's theory involves converting people into another state of matter. While this may initially sound good, it still would kill the person undergoing the process. But there may be another way to theoretically create a teleportation device: a multi-spatial transverse system.

 

In 1998, the UPN network aired a tv movie entitled, "Warlord: Battle For The Galaxy", starring Rod Taylor (H.G. Wells's Time Machine from 1960). Anyway, Taylor played a soon-to-be-retired General in charge of a starship that was equipped with a teleportation device called the multi-spatial transverse system that worked by bending and folding space around the people traveling in it. It was mentioned that an older and primitive teleporter worked by scrambling peoples molecules, but there were too many accidents.

 

This new form of teleportation was proven to be far more reliable and safer. There is a scene where his crew teleported from their bridge and the space around the crew began to get distorted. Anyone within the distortion field is safe because they are within an invisible force field. The distortion takes place outside of the force field. However, any attempt to step outside of the force field as the teleportation process in operation, the results would be most unpleasant. One minute they were on the bridge and the next, they were on the surface of a planet on a specific floor in a building.

 

I must admit that I'm not very optimistic about teleportation, but I can safely say that it definitely will not be the Star Trek transporter way. Personally, I don't like the idea of having my atoms scattered about, being converted into energy and vice-versa because the process would kill me and create a clone at the destination. I'm more willing to bet that the multi-spatial transverse system is a far more realistic and plausble theory, considering that it is a variation of wormhole theory.

 

What does everybody else thinks?

 

Whitestar

[swansont]

Or' date=' to put it less negatively, building a transporter would require us to heat up matter to a temperature a million times the temperature at the center of the Sun, expend more energy in a single machine than all of humanity presently uses, build telescopes larger than the size of the Earth, improve present computers by a factor of 1,000 billion billion, and avoid the laws of quantum mechanics. It's no wonder that Lt. Barclay was terrified of beaming! I think Gene Roddenberry, if faced with this challenge in real life, would probably choose instead to budget for a landable starship."[/color']

 

What does everybody else thinks?

 

 

I think it is called science fiction, and rightly so.

[Whitestar]

I think it is called science fiction[/i'], and rightly so.

 

True, but science fiction has a habit of eventually becoming science fact, whereas fantasy has no chance of becoming reality.

 

Whitestar

[JaKiri]

True, but science fiction has a habit of eventually becoming science fact, whereas fantasy has no chance of becoming reality

 

It really doesn't. There are some examples of things from science fiction books that now exist, that didn't at the time, (ignoring hard sci-fi, which is based on existing science) but to say that it makes a habit of it ignores that the cases in which this happens are the vast exception.

[padren]

If there ever is transportation, I would bet it would be analog. Too much data to digitize, too much energy to reconstruct the matter, too little time to do it all in. Trying to keep the top half of a person's atoms in perfect frozen state (including not reacting to light, or giving off heat) while you continue to materialize the rest of them would be exceptionally challenging.