Science & Technology

Is teleportation really possible ?

By T.K. Randall
July 31, 2013 ·  26 comments

Image Credit: Paramount Pictures A staple of science fiction series 'Star Trek', the ability to teleport someone from one point in space to another is something that many believe to be impossible due to the amount of energy needed and because it is questionable whether or not a human could actually survive such a trip. Now four physics students at the University of Leicester have thrown a further spanner in the works by attempting to calculate just how long it would take to cycle through a single teleport.

Assuming that the teleportation process would require a person to be represented as transferable data, the total amount of bits needed would add up to a number 43 digits long. Communicating this data to the target location would then take an estimated 4,850,000,000,000,000 years, equivalent to 350,000 times the entire age of the universe.[!gad]A staple of science fiction series 'Star Trek', the ability to teleport someone from one point in space to another is something that many believe to be impossible due to the amount of energy needed and because it is questionable whether or not a human could actually survive such a trip. Now four physics students at the University of Leicester have thrown a further spanner in the works by attempting to calculate just how long it would take to cycle through a single teleport.

Assuming that the teleportation process would require a person to be represented as transferable data, the total amount of bits needed would add up to a number 43 digits long. Communicating this data to the target location would then take an estimated 4,850,000,000,000,000 years, equivalent to 350,000 times the entire age of the universe.

Source: Red Orbit | Comments (26)

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