Human Space Teleportation: 'Beaming Up' Scotty Would Take 350,000 Times The Age Of The Universe

Human Space Teleportation:
'Beaming Up' Scotty Would Take
350,000 Times The Age Of The
Universe
Michael RundleHuffington Post UK Jul
31, 2013
While it takes just seconds in 'Star
Trek', academics have now
determined that it would actually
take a very long time to beam Scotty
up to the USS Enterprise. And not
because you'd have to invent a
teleporter, and somewhere to
teleport to, first.
According to a team at the University
of Leicester
, teleporting the data required to
recreate a human being with current
technology would actually take
several times the age of the universe.
Fourth year Masters physics students
James Nelms, Declan Roberts,
Suzanne Thomas and David Starkey
write in their paper, "Travelling by
Teleportation", that any transmission
of data involves a trade off between
the power used to send it versus the
time it takes to transmit.
Sending more data, or faster data,
requires more power to be
consumed.
And by working out the data involved
in recreating a human - which is
roughly 10 to the power of 10 bits
for the cells alone, and far more for
the full brain content bringing the
total to 2.6 x 10 to the power of 42
bits - they worked out how long it
would take to send the information
from Earth to a point in space.
The result? If the bandwidth used is
a reasonable 29.5 to 30 GHz, the
transfer would take about 350,000
times the current age of the universe
- which is about 13.8 billion years.
"Current means of travel remain
more feasible," said Starkey.
"We employed several
approximations to determine
the amount of data required in
bits to fully store a human
genetic code and neural
information, and the signal to
noise ratio of typical signalling
equipment. We also assumed
that the maximum data
sampling rate, the Nyquist
limit, was reached by both
transmitter and receiver.
"Our results indicate the time
scales to complete a full
teleport of an individual are a
little too lengthy at this time."
That's not to say that one day it
won't be possible. Improvements are
being made in teleportating data
from Earth to Space
, so who knows? It's just that to send
you to the Space Station without a
rocket we'll need an insane amount
of energy, lots of time, or more
probably both.