Research further strengthens our belief that portkeys are a very unlikely technology. Scientifically, human teleportation is not currently sensible.
One of the biggest problems with teleportation is that it requires an immense amount of energy and time to convert a person into pure information that can be used to reassemble oneself later on. This is because you would need a minimum of 2.6x1042 bits of data and 4.85x1015 years to complete the reconstruction of a human brain (Yglesias). However to account for potential errors in the transfer of data that may lead to fatal problems when reconstructing the brain on a quantum level, the amount of data necessary becomes 4.55x1042 bits (Yglesias). There is also a required transmitter power of 16000 W to dematerialize and put back together the brain (Yglesias). Also, due to the length of time it takes to teleport a human, the real person would essentially be dead by the time they would have actually been transported (Plafke). Your personality would be dead, and all that would be left is the data on who you are. Essentially, the teleported person would have your DNA, but would not be behave like the original person (Plafke). All of these factors combined make teleportation of humans basically impossible and not useful. There are much faster ways of travelling that are less dangerous and more feasible such as rockets. Perhaps teleportation may be better served with inanimate objects that would require less data and precision during reconstruction rather than actual living beings.
Another problem when considering the likelihood of teleportation is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a principle that essentially states that one can never know both the position and velocity of a particle at the same time (Buchler). However, in order for teleportation to occur, one would need to know both the position and velocity of every particle in the human body. There have been ways around this by disturbing the particle before you measure it, and then subtracting that disturbance to get the particle’s state. This is what has been used to teleport photons, and they have been able to teleport them about 1 meter. However this has only been successful about 1% of the time because the timing of the arrival of the disturbed and actual photon are hard to align. New studies have arrived that increased that percent to about 40. Although quantum physics is hard to understand for those of us who haven’t studied it, it is still understandable that the technology is developing, and at this point, has a low success rate with small particles like photons (Buchler).
A question, which may weigh ethically for some people, is whether, after all the atoms of a human are reconstructed, the soul is still the same. If a person is teleported, understandably, he or she would look the same at the initial and final destination. Physicist Michio Kaku raises the point that the deconstruction of the particles of a human is basically death, so when that person is recreated, is it the same being (Kaku 63)? Furthermore, in his book published in 2008, Physics of the Impossible, Kaku classifies teleportation as a Class I impossibility: one which will actually be possible within the next one hundred years. Yet, in his classification, he is mainly focused on the atomic level. As noted above, it could take a lot of time to teleport a human. Kaku says that before we would see a human teleported, we would see a much smaller organic structure, like a virus or gene, which would require less time (66). Kaku concludes that human teleportation is more of a Class II impossibility, meaning it “[sits] at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world” and could take thousands of years to happen, if possible (69, xvii).
Another ethical issue, if human teleportation is possible, is the potential for devastating errors. We come across glitches in the technologies we use daily very often, and a glitch in the teleportation of a human could be fatal. Early examples of science fiction dealing with teleportation of animals and humans exhibited this potential. In a story published in 1887, “The Man Without a Body,” by Edward Page Mitchell, a cat is transported successfully, but the scientist’s attempt to teleport himself failed, as only his head teleported due to the battery providing the power dying (Kaku 54). Even if actual human teleportation did not involve a battery, there are always parts of technologies that are bound to have errors. If anything goes wrong, a human may no longer exist in a liveable state, which is why it makes sense to only use teleportation for inanimate objects. This story may serve to caution against or show the impossibility of teleporting organisms as large as humans since the cat, which is much smaller than a human, is the only successful teleportation. Another form of media that shows the dangers of the teleportation of animate objects is the 1986 horror film, The Fly (55). In the movie, a magazine reporter convinces a scientist to teleport animate objects, which is against his initial goals as he knows there are more risks teleporting animate objects compared to inanimate objects. The scientist tries to teleport himself, but his particles, once broken down, also mix with a fly, causing a hybrid creature to be reconfigured. Although these example come from science fiction stories, the concept of errors in teleportation could be a real one, and could cause serious accidents if the ability to teleport a human is ever reached.
Works Cited
Buchler, Ben. “Teleportation Just Got Easier- But Not For You, Unfortunately.” Phys.org. 21 August 2013. Phys.org. Web. 11 October 2013.
Kaku, Michio. Physics of the Impossible. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Print.
“Michio Kaku: The Metaphysics of Teleportation.” Big Think. YouTube. 31 May 2011. Web Video Clip. 11 October 2013.
Plafke, James. “Human Teleportation Would Take So Long, It’d Be More Like a Death Ray.” Extreme Tech. 2 August 2013. Ziff Davis, Inc. Web. 11 October 2013.
Yglesias, Matthew. Bad News, These Physicists Say That Teleportation is Unworkable. 4 August 2013. Web. 11 October 2013.
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