One small step for teleportation
 

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science...eut/index.html

Okay, it's not much and I don't fully understand what happened, but it's interesting.

Maybe in a few centuries people will be able to teleport.

Well this is certainly a good sign. I just have speculations on teleporting people *which will most likely not be in my lifetime*. What about teleporting the SOul? Will we keep our soul intact when we teleport. Transporting a human body is quite a feat. but it is nothing without the teleporting of a soul.

I wonder what this will do to Airlines once it's done.

It is very likely that people that work on these projects are materialist, therefore your soul is a figment of your imagination, therefore none of their concern.

While this is an interesting development. I don't forsee this being viable for some time in the near future, and it will likely be only used for inanimate objects and data.

Yeah, the soul doesn't have much to do with it. But hey, maybe teleporting will help us figure out whether we have a soul or not.

This looks promising, another step towards "beaming down". They won't get human beaming for about 100 or so years more. Just in time for First Contact..... lol

Anyway, I enjoy reading stuff like this, kinda shows that humankind is still trying to invent and learn new things.

That's assuming a soul is a tangible object. I highly doubt that teleportation would affect any soul. However what needs to solved is to make sure the atoms regroup in the same formation as before on the other side. You don't want the machine to malfuntion and have your head where you ass is, your left arm as your neck or something like that.

If this ever happens and we can transport humans safely and constantly, it'll certainly revolutionize transportation. What could it do to airlines? Well they'd probably go away, or maybe stick around depending on how teleportation is done. The airlines could also maybe invest in the new technology to stay in buisness. It's up to them.

Agreed, but who would be willing to beta test the device? I mean, I wouldn't want to test the teleporter out if I found out it had horrible side effects like turning yourself inside-out, merging your clothes with your skin, or making you a human fly from outside contaminants. Plus, animal cruelty would be a very touchy subject if test animals were to be used instead.

Teleportation would be a revolution in travel, but it is definitely not going to happen in the near future. There seem to be too many things that could go wrong with its development.

They could use a human-like entity. That is to say, they could make a custom non-functioning human body as a beta-test. Another, though not recommended, alternative might be to use a clone.

I can see how using a replica would be possible, but a clone would definitely fall under the "touchy subject" category.

Those of you debating the ethics of testing this on humans probably don't grasp just how powerful such a technology would be. I'm not saying there are no ethic considerations, or that I don't care about them, but you can bet anything a lot of people won't care after seeing the applications, and that somewhere in the world a convict, an orphan or a hobo will have the privilege of becoming the first human to be teleported.

Oh, and as a physics student I find this to be pretty cool. But entaglement is still freaky. "Spooky action at a distance" indeed.

Or they could just use animals to test this. Duh.

I will try to find more articles about this, and get my physics major friend to tell me more.

Wasn't there some law that made teleportation impossible? I can't remember the name but back when Star Trek was trying to explain the Teleporter people kept bringing it up. They had to come up with some device they never really explained to get around the law and make teleportation possible.

Something about you only being able to either 1) Know where an atom is or 2) Know what it's doing. You can't do both.

But I'm probably wrong. If anyone can decipher my retarded rambling and knows what I'm trying to talk about mind explaining how it works?

Actually, you're right. The Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle doesn't allow the type of teleportation in Star Trek. I believe this was countered by the Heisenburg Converter on the show. I'm not sure if the Principle applies here, however. Maybe someone with greater scientific knowledge can offer more assistance.

That would be Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applied to position and momentum. Essentially, the more certain you are of a particle's position, the less you are of its speed, and vice versa.

I doubt this has much effect on the kind of teleportation described here.

Considering this teleportation is about information and not matter itself, I don't think it has a whole lot to do with it.

If teleportation were to transport atoms of a human being and then regroup them, that would be akin to nanotechnology, right? So I guess by then everybody would be able to have whatever they want, something like the world of Manna situation like the webmaster of Howstuffworks wrote. Probably a 100 years from now we'll only be able to teleport information or data of a particular frequency or whatsnots. But I guess by then there would be enough xenotransplantation or medical advancements to ensure we live to see human teleportation. ^_^

RacinReaver is right. The real use of this is to do quantum cryptography, not move things from place to place.

LOL "the soul".

The article mentioned that they were successful in tranfering single atoms without physical contacts. At least we know they won't accidentally combine the matter. To be able to teleport HUMANS though, they will need to know how to teleport multiple atoms/mass without displacing or seperating them.

As in, they must be sure the teleportation process won't mess up the person by misplacing certain parts of the body by a large quantity or by a little. Hell, if they misplace our DNA, that's one huge problem already.

Long was to go from this progress. Unless there were some breakthrough discovery sometime soon, I doubt we could live to see it work.

Even if it's something like transferring documents, I think that's cool. But, that sounds more like a fax machine.

Quantum Cryptography? What's that?

Didn't ya'll ever see "The Fly"? Inside-out monkeys fucking win.

The main thing I'd be concerned about is the difficulty of reconstructing the human body and organs. The brain being taken apart at the seams and resewn... I mean, there's room to fuck up there. But still, we'd test on animals long before we even try to attempt humans. Just hope some PETA freaks don't find out.

I wouldn't say a few centuries... Look at the advances we made in the 20th century. Things are moving faster and faster. We could very well get to something viable before the 22nd century is even on the stage.

My Dreams: Code making and breaking :)

Yeah, that is true, the way things are going, the speed of advanced technology is increasing every year. I just hope that we don't go over our heads and make some big mistakes because we didn't think over the consequences enough. That would be and unfortunate event...

Quantum cryptography relies on qubit representaion of information as opposed to traditional 1's and 0's. Not just that, but thanks to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, you'll know right away if someone's messing with your communication. The reason quantum teleportation doesn't violate this principle is the "spooky action" of entanglement whereby the states of two particles are related despite their physical separation. Einstein resisted this notion because it wasn't in accordance to his idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light , not even gravity. But with entanglement, things happen seemingly instantaneously. Crazy shit. :doh:

Ah, thanks. Seems easy to understanding...
... or maybe not so easy to understand. Hmmm... so qubit is stuff at a molecular level? I though Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle could only be applied to objects in motion and its supposed to say that one cannot measure accurately the momentum of a moving object or something along that line? How does the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle relate to telecommunications (or communications in this case as you've mentioned)?

A subatomic particle might exist in two physical states with different energies. The probability of each outcome is described in a wavefunction that fluctuates over time and space. So in a sense there are intermediate states.

HUP states that the uncertainties in measurements of position and momentum for a given particle are inversely proportional (meaning that to know one accurately decreases the precision of the other). It's as if there's a collapse whenever you try to observe something. Take Schrödinger's cat... a cat is placed in a sealed box connected to a contraption designed to release a deadly poison with a 50/50 chance. As far as you know the cat is either dead or alive which is kind of like envisioning it as half dead and half alive at the same time (an intermediate state). As soon as you open the box, though, your vision collapses back into hard reality.

Add entanglement to the equation and you get a much higher level of privacy than you would given present-day cryptography. The way it works is that b/c of entanglement (via photons for instance), a message can be encoded in qubits and the recipient will receive a virtual copy of it with very little error. If a spy tries to decipher it, the error will increase and he will be detected. The information actually protects itself but feedback is necessary to confirm that no eavesdropping ocurred.

With teleportation, matter is encoded rather than messages. The orginal macromolecular object doesn't move in the process. Also, they have it at a fidelity of only 0.6, so it's far from perfect.

Wow, this is interesting. To be honest, though, I'm not all that interested in the possibilities of human teleportation, as much as I am interested in the possibilities of new forms of computing. As it is, we're hitting the ceiling in terms of processing power (we've already shifted from making our processors more powerful to putting more processors on a single chip; how long until we can't feasibly put more processors on a chip?), and this could revolutionize computers.

I don't really understand what they did either, but it sounds pretty cool.

Hmmm... I don't get everything you said but yeah, I do have a better idea about HUP and all that jazz now. I like the idea of information protecting itself via proton transmission.

I Dont think it's possible, with the cells etc.
Lets just wait and see.

It's not possible.

Think about it: when you teleport a living being, you would essentially kill it in one teleporter pod and take the information from that "zapping" to rebuild it in another teleportation pod.

Every time you teleport, you would technically die. A clone of yourself would emerge from the other side.

Agh, you just beat me to the punch.

Yeah, I would never support actual human teleportation, because it KILLS YOU.

[off-topic kinda]
I remember some kid's sci-fi book I read about 10 years ago where the way people traveled was by scanning their brain, then putting that data into a robot body at the destination while their human body was in stasis at the origin. Then when the vacation's over, they send back the data.