When I was a kid watching Star Trek reruns on TV, the one technology that I
found most inspirational, and thought I would definitely see in my lifetime, was
the transporter. In my kid brain, it seemed like a simple idea - you just take
the atoms in someone's body, and beam it to a planet using some kind of atomic
gun. What's the big deal I thought. The writers of Star Trek actually invented
this technology, as an afterthought, to save money. It was to avoid the high
expense of the special effects needed to show the enterprise, or shuttlecraft
actually landing on planets. So they just faded in and faded out characters onto
the surface of planets instead, using a creative new technology. Little did they
know that this money-saving afterthought would go on to inspire so
many little kids and generations of scientists. The big question is could
this technology actually work? If so, how would it work? but surprisingly, this
technology also opens up some profound questions for us, like what is a human
being? Are we just the sum of all our atoms? What about the soul? What happens
to it during the transportation process? Let's look at the feasibility of this
technology, and the profound questions it brings up. And let's do that right now...
Let's start off by looking at how the transportation technology on Star Trek
is supposed to work. Here's exactly what Star Trek, the next generation's technical
manual says about energizing and dematerialization. "The molecular imaging
scanners derive a real time quantum resolution pattern image of the
transport subject while the primary energizing coils and phase transition
coils convert the subject into a subatomically debonded matter stream."
The english translation of this is approximately, "the atoms in your body get
converted to their subatomic particles - protons, neutrons, and electrons, and are
transmitted in a stream of particles to the surface of a planet, or wherever
the transporter sends it, and are somehow rematerialized, or reconstituted. Let's
start with the dematerialization part. How do you dematerialize a person into not
just their atoms, but their subatomic particles, as described in the manual. The
matter in the human body is made up of molecules, which is made up of atoms.
Atoms are made up of subatomic particles. To get the subatomic particles into a
matter stream, first we have to take the molecules apart into atoms. Then we have
to take the atoms apart into their constituent neutrons, protons, and
electrons. These two steps require energy. Now, taking molecules apart requires a
lot less energy than taking the nuclei of atoms apart. Molecules can come
together and apart in normal chemical reactions. For example when you mix
baking soda and vinegar, you're taking apart atoms from molecules and putting
them together to make new molecules. But taking the nuclei apart is a whole other
ballgame. The forces holding neutrons and protons together in the nucleus, called
the "strong nuclear force'" is millions of times more powerful than the electrical
forces holding atoms together in a molecule. Let's look at how much energy
would be required if we "debonded" as the technical manual calls it, all the atoms
of the body. The body consists of about 1x10^28 atoms. Now, if you want
to turn all these atoms into neutrons protons, all the nuclear binding energy
of the strong nuclear force will need to be overcome. This turns out to be the
energy equivalent of about 20 megatons of TNT, or a very very large hydrogen
bomb. You might at this point say "why split the neutrons of atoms?" Why not just
take the atoms of the body and beam them? That's a good question.
This would take a lot less energy and would be less complicated to rematerialize
back into a human so this would probably be a better way to go, but
we're going to go strictly by the Star Trek technical manual. And "debonding" is
what it says in there. But after debonding, you would not be done. That would
not be the end of the story because now you have these subatomic particles and
now you have to transport them at very high speeds to the surface of a planet.
If you want to transport them near the speed of light, which is what appears to
happen if you watch any Star Trek episodes, let's say 99% the speed of
light, this also requires a lot of energy. This is the kind of energy that particle
accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider use to move particles. It so
happens that the energy required to move these subatomic particles is about
equivalent to the rest mass of these particles. So that's the weight of the
individual that's being transported, let's say about 100 kilograms. This is a lot of
energy, equal to about 2,000 megatons of TNT, or about four times more than all
the nuclear weapons ever tested on earth. But you can't just stop here. If you just
capture the particles and transport them to the surface, you would be transporting
a blob of particles. You also need to transport the information contained in
the human body so that those subatomic particles can be rematerialized in
exactly the same way that they were dematerialized. How much information would
this require? How much information is in the human body?
Well, if we have 1x10^28 atoms, we can make a rough estimate that
each atom can be characterized by about one kilobyte of data. this kilobyte of
data would include things like the precise location of the subatomic
particles, the energy state of the atom, the other atoms surrounding the original
atom, and other such information. So this adds up to one times ten to the 31 bytes
of data. This is a large number, a very large number. To give you an idea, the
total information stored on the Internet is estimated to be about 1x10^19
bytes. So it is a trillion times more than all the data stored on the
Internet today. Storing this amount of information and transmitting it, is not
trivial, at least not with our current technology. The fastest available
theoretical data transfer speed today is about 100 terabytes per second. At this
rate, it would take more than the age of the universe to transfer the data of the
human body. But data transfer speeds have been increasing exponentially for years
and are likely to be orders of magnitude superior in the future. So I would not
classify this current technology barrier as being impossible to overcome. Another
technical challenge is to rematerialize a person on the surface of a
planet. In order to do this, a mechanism has to exist that's able to resolve the
human body on subatomic scales. According to the Star Trek technical manual,
the transporter has a range of about 40,000 kilometers. That's about three
times the diameter of the earth. this kind of sub atomic resolution from
40,000 kilometers away, would require a resolution power 100 trillion times that
of the Hubble Space Telescope, and require a mirror that's about 50
thousand kilometers in diameter. So the challenges are immense. We have to
dematerialize 1x10^28 atoms and stream it at nearly the speed of
light, from one location to another. We have to have a second stream of
information accompanying the particle stream. And we have to be able to rematerialize
with a subatomic resolution from 40,000 kilometers away. Some of you
might have noticed that I've conveniently avoided a little thing
called the laws of quantum mechanics so far. This is a bit of a problem. The laws
of quantum mechanics are such that the process of making a measurement alters
the system. This is dramatically shown in
my video on the double-slit experiment. The
bottom line is that obtaining the precise quantum state of particles will
alter it such that we will not be able to rematerialize them exactly the
same as before measuring them. Now, will this effect the overall details of the
human being that's going to be rematerialized? I don't know for sure. I don't
think anyone knows for sure. So this is a question mark. Could changing the quantum
state by measurement, result in a completely different human being, at the
consciousness level? Maybe. These are big challenges. We're obviously not capable
of doing it currently. Will we ever be able to do it? You might be surprised to
hear me say this, but my answer is yes! I think we will be able to do this in the
future. Now I'm sure some of my viewers will accuse me of being ignorantly
optimistic! But I say never bet against human ingenuity. But more than its
feasibility, I think the concept of the transporter surprisingly opens up a
Pandora's box of some profound existential questions? If and when we are
able to do this, we are effectively killing the human being from his initial
location, and reconstituting him in a second location. Where is this human
being during the transfer process? He would be nothing more than a stream of
particles, and a stream of information. Where's the soul? Is this some kind of
purgatory for the human soul? Secondly, what constitutes a living human being? If
we transported all the atoms in exactly the right configuration, without the
information, wouldn't we have transported merely a dead body? Is the only
difference between a living human being and a dead human being, the information
contained in the information stream, that's being beamed along with the
particles? Does the essence of consciousness or the soul really just
come down to information? Third, how do we know that the reconstituted human being
is the exact same individual? He may have the exact same atoms and the same
memorie,s but is his consciousness the same? How would we know? What if we made a
copy of his information stream, and use another set of identical subatomic
particles, to create a duplicate human being? Would they be two different
individuals with the same consciousness and awareness? Or two completely
different individuals? Which one would be the original person? These are some big
spiritual questions. Star Trek mostly avoids these questions
I don't have the answers. But I think making such a transporter would perhaps
allow us to answer them, and put to rest some questions that we humans have been
asking ourselves for thousands of years. I think we will be able to do it. I
actually think that any technology that's not forbidden by conservation
laws of mass, energy and information will be a reality in our future. And I think
we'll answer some of the big questions. I may be ignorantly optimistic, but
sometimes ignorance is the only way to remain optimistic in life.
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