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: