3 ms·
Fascinating. Could two cooperating civilizations a and b use this effect to create matter (perhaps even something self-replicating?) at a 3rd location in space
by Tepix 5y ago
Fascinating.
Could two cooperating civilizations a and b use this effect to create matter (perhaps even something self-replicating?) at a 3rd location in space?
incoming ascii art
(a)---(c)
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(b)
- adrian_b 5y agoIt is very unlikely that teleportation could ever be achieved by generating matter from light. There are 2 problems. First is that the energy required for generating a human-sized body is huge, several hundreds times greater than that of a nuclear bomb with the same amount of active material. Second is that even if you would be able to do that, you would make 2 bodies, one of matter and the other of antimatter and you would not be able to dispose of the antimatter one except by causing an explosion equivalent with hundreds or thousands of nuclear bombs. In general, for now it appears to be completely impossible to do teleportation towards an arbitrary place. At most, it could be imagined a method that would work between 2 large installations existing at the end points, where the destination could manufacture a replica of what was sent from local materials (e.g. by placing one atom after another until an exact replica is made; extremely unlikely, but not completely impossible).
- jamiek88 5y agoWouldn’t the no cloning theorem make an exact replica impossible?
- adrian_b 5y agoThe "no cloning theorem" refers to replicating the same quantum state. It does not apply to making a replica of a body that is composed by the same kinds of atoms linked in the same way between themselves, which can be considered as identical with the original for any practical purposes. In a very rudimentary form, such technology exists today, it is possible to remove one atom at a time from a certain position of a body and identify it with a mass spectrometer and it is possible to grow a structure a few atoms at a time. It is likely that the precision of such techniques could be improved well enough to be able to replicate some extremely small microscopic objects. The most difficult limitation to overcome is the speed of the process. To be able to make some human-sized object atom-by-atom and molecule-by-molecule in a reasonable time would require a many orders-of-magnitude higher speed than possible with the current technologies.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago> First is that the energy required for generating a human-sized body is huge, several hundreds times greater than that of a nuclear bomb I thought this was a bit short, I'm pretty sure it's closer to: 1 gram = 90000000000000 joules 1 average us man = ~89000 grams Google tells me 1 Hiroshima bomb = 63000000000000 joules So the average us man should be ~127,142 Hiroshima bombs, or ~110,000 Hiroshima bombs for the average us woman.
- adrian_b 5y agoI have said that a factor of hundreds applies for the same weight of active material. Most nuclear bombs have just a few kilograms of active material, much less than a human. Also the number that I have given was for ideal conversion and for a fusion bomb, which is more efficient per weight. The fission bombs, like that from Hiroshima, are limited by the excess energy of uranium or plutonium, which is only about 0.13% of mass compared to iron. Because we cannot actually split plutonium into iron but into nuclei with higher energy, the available energy from fission is slightly less than 0.1% of mass. Taken into account that only a fraction of the active material is consumed, let's say 10% and that the active material of a bomb is ten times lighter than a human, then an annihilated human mass would be equivalent to 100 thousand fission bombs, so your numbers match this. For a fusion bomb, the efficiency is much higher, about 0.5% of mass becomes energy and also the mass of active material can be much higher, so an equivalence with less than one thousand nuclear bombs is possible. In any case I have given just the most optimistic limit, i.e. a few hundreds nuclear bombs of maximum energy, with smaller bombs, of course you need more.
- goohle 5y agoThis amount of energy is required to CREATE mass from scratch. IMHO, it's much easier to use transmutation of atoms to print an object layer by layer instead.
- throw1234651234 5y agoTeleportation has that issue of "the reprinted is not the original" - ironically, turning someone into light and then re-assembling them into matter seems closer to "true sci-fi" teleportation. Of course, it still wouldn't be the same person since you essentially converted all the constituents, kind of like melting down a sword and reforging.
- rockbruno 5y agoGiven that we don't know how sentience works, I like to think that you could achieve true teleportation if it turns out that the "you" are not the connections of your brain, but something else that exists in a fourth dimension.
- whatshisface 5y agoI have seen a few science fiction stories where everyone is happily running teleporters until someone accidentally turns off or breaks the part of the machine that annihilates the guy standing on the sending terminal.
- Tepix 5y agoThe idea would be to build a nanoassembler that can receive instructions via light.
- tiborsaas 5y agoImagine engineering teams from different civilizations trying to collaborate to the precision of a few atoms :) That's a sci-fi I'd watch.