Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, sweepstakes, and more!
The Real Problems with Teleportation (It Isn't the Flies)
With The Fly now streaming on Peacock, let's take a look at the science behind teleportation.
Teleportation is a staple of science fiction, a mainstay of the genre showing up in everything from Star Trek to The Fly (streaming now on Peacock). In the former, teleportation is a mature technology which transports thousands of people across distances great and small every day. In the latter, it’s a fledgling technology capable of making horrific mistakes, like turning a baboon inside out and mashing the DNA of a fly into that of a perfectly good Jeff Goldblum.
Goldblum plays Seth Brundle, a scientist working on something that will “change the world and human life as we know it.” His efforts are driven in part by a lifelong battle with motion sickness. Brundle dislikes traveling in vehicles, prompting him to invent a pair of telepods controlled by a central computer and designed to teleport objects instantaneously from one place to another.
Brundle crosses paths with journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) and takes her back to his laboratory/home to show her his invention. He asks for something personal, something unique to her, and Quaife offers up a stocking. A few moments later, the stocking has been transported 15 feet across the room, “Disintegrated there and reintegrated there. Sort of,” Brundle says.
The telepods work perfectly well with inanimate objects, but the machine gets mixed up when dealing with living flesh. Brundle has solved the problem of moving matter between two points in space but his machine can’t accurately reconstruct that matter on the other side. It’s the same problem that gets him into personal trouble with a housefly later on, and it’s one of the main problems with real-world teleportation.
Even Teleportation Can’t Break the Laws of Physics
If teleportation is ever meaningfully achieved in the real world, it’s likely to look very different from its fictional counterpart. The first big change will be in the speed of transit. No matter how your teleporter works, you can’t teleport anything faster than the speed of light.
The light-speed limitation wouldn’t be a problem when teleporting relatively short distances, like between two points on the Earth or even between the Earth and nearby space. The light time between Earth and the Moon is about 1.3 seconds, fast enough to be effectively instant, but things get hairier when traveling to more distant locales. A teleporter traveling between here and Mars, for instance, would spend between 4 minutes and 24 minutes between telepods, depending on where the planets are in their orbits.
There are other limitations, too, depending on what form of teleportation we’re dealing with. If the teleporter is moving your actual matter from one place to another, it will be even slower because particles with mass cannot achieve light speed. There’s also the problem of physical barriers. With a few exceptions for things like neutrinos, most particles don’t travel through solid barriers very well, so your teleporter would only really work with a direct line of sight between departure and destination points.
Perhaps the better method would be to transform an object or a person into information, beam that information as a stream of massless photons at the speed of light, then reconstitute the information back into its original form on the other end.
How Real-World Teleportation Might Work
This form of teleportation, the only one which really approaches our sci-fi dreams, wouldn’t teleport the physical “you” but the information of “you.” The question then becomes what level of fidelity we need to make sure that “you” end up in the new location.
Is it enough to reconstruct a copy of the atoms and molecules, to reorient the right cells in the right locations, or does the source of the self lie somewhere deeper? Do we also have to know the quantum state of each particle in order to capture whatever it is that makes us who we are? How deep do we have to drill in order to preserve everything that makes a person unique?
Even if we assume we only need to know the position of each atom in the body, the amount of information you would need to capture the entirety of a human being is staggering. Even if we assume a significant level of data compression, one bit of information for each atom, storing the information for an entire person would require a computer with thousands of times the storage capacity of all the world’s computers combined.
Assuming we built a computer large enough and powerful enough to handle all of that data, the transmission times would leave a little to be desired. A group of students from the University of Leicester crunched the numbers and found that you couldn’t transmit the data at more than 30 gigahertz and that it would take nearly 5 quadrillion years to complete the transmission. Barring some very significant technological leaps, we’re not likely to have telepods of our own in the foreseeable future. If you could ask Seth Brundle, he might say that’s for the best.
Catch The Fly streaming now on Peacock.
