Welcome to a world of teleportation!
Where you can wake up in a remote corner of the world,
teleport to work in Tokyo,
and end your day by catching the opera in Rome!
This idea of beaming yourself from one location to another
used to be just the stuff of science fiction,
but now scientists are starting to uncover the technologies that can make it a reality.
This is WHAT IF, and here's what would happen if teleportation was possible.
The most likely way that humans will start teleporting
will be through something called quantum teleportation.
Quantum teleportation involves scanning an object
and transmitting its information to another location,
where that information is used to reassemble the object from different molecules and atoms.
The prospect of human teleportation
could lead to a pretty different looking life for you and me.
Our bridges and roads could become desolate wastelands,
dense cities might become a thing of the past,
and space exploration might accelerate at a pace that we're not ready for.
But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's look at how this would actually work.
It all starts with a little thing called quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement involves linking particles together,
and keeping them connected, even across vast distances.
When particles are "entangled,"
it means that they're forced to hold mutually exclusive states;
so if we know the state of one, then we'll know the state of the other.
Think of it like this,
if you ordered a beef burger and a chicken burger from a fast food place,
you wouldn't be able to tell which one is which without opening the boxes.
But once you open one box, you automatically know what's in the other one,
and that knowledge doesn't change, no matter how far away the other box is.
Yeah, it's complicated, but the main takeaway for us
is that once two or more particles are entangled,
we can teleport information between them.
Researchers in China have already proven this to work
by transferring properties of a particle to a satellite in space,
but how does that translate to teleporting human beings?
Well, every human body is made up of billions upon billions of atoms;
and each atom is a set of data
describing the type of atom, location, energy state, and so on.
So theoretically we should be able to scan the atomic information of a human body,
teleport it to a far-off location, and re-build the body just the way it was.
But of course, it can't be that simple!
To find out the physical state of every atom that makes you 'you,'
you'd have to disintegrate your entire body.
That means that everytime you'd teleport, you'd essentially be committing suicide,
and getting reborn on the other end.
Quantum entanglement is a finicky process, to say the least,
and no one has ever transmitted this much information,
so at this point, human teleportation would most likely be a pure suicide mission.
But the fundamental technology is there, and will only continue to develop,
so don't give up hope yet.
Maybe some day soon we'll be able to teleport across the world in seconds,
and international borders would disappear because they could no longer be enforced,
but that's a topic for another WHAT IF.