Two To Beam Up

[Stephen of Borg 2]

The United States military is studying the feasibility of teleportation, "beaming up" people such as Osama Bin Laden or sending defense teams to difficult-to-reach locales.

 

The Scripps Howard News Service has picked up a story which quotes Ranney Adams, a spokesperson for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base, as saying it would be ideal if the military could send soldiers to remote spots via teleportation. "But we're not there [yet]," he added.

The Air Force spent $25,000 last year on a study of teleportation physics to consider means of transporting people and cargo through space, though physicists said that the obstacles in terms of energy expenditure and data transfer are enormous.

 

"I would say that something is wrong with the way the Air Force allocates its research money, at least on this topic," said Phil Schewe, the chief science writer at the American Institute of Physics. He noted that experts can foresee using teleportation for encrypted data, but transporting large objects, let alone living beings, is a long way off.

 

But Center for Strategic and International Studies fellow Pierre Chao said that scientific advances required risks in funding. "The devil's bargain that you're going to take if you're going to exist in that cutting-edge [scientific] world and use taxpayer dollars is that you're going to be investigating some pretty goofy things," he said.

 

The encoding of the contents of a human body would require 10 to the 28th kilobytes of computer storage capacity, or 100 quintillion commercially available hard drives. Moreover, to dematerialize one human being the way Star Trek does it "would require...the energy equivalent of 330 one-megaton thermonuclear bombs."

[Dark Reality 0]

The dematerialization is centuries ahead of us... but the real catch is rematerialization. If storage advances to the point where you can store a pattern, what's to stop you from making two of a person? With the exception of the Thomas Riker case (which is a different scenario altogether), Trek doesn't really explore this possibility very far. What may be more popular than actual teleportation would be parents making daily "backups" of their kids... and it would have to be public, non-military uses which would drive demand up and costs down, for such a technology to take hold.

 

Then you have to figure, if the military can beam up war criminals such as OBL against their will, what's to stop a pedophile from entering very specific specifications they want and beaming such children into their dens? Something would inevitably come out to protect people from transport, and everyone would get one, and transporting someone without their permission would become impossible... hence no military applications. Surely the military knows this already.

[He Who Shall Not Be Named 2]

$25K is not a lot of money.

[Kor37 9]

Actually, just last year, scientists managed to teleport a single atom from 1 point to another. Its a small step and it shows how far off teleporting a human is..................unless they get hold of some alien technology.....hmmmm.

[Captain Holland 0]

I believe it is very possible, all you would need to do, is read every molecule in what's being transported, for example a person, and save it. Then send the file to the other transporter, and then rebuild them one molecule at a time. Problem is, the only thing to do with the person that the molecules were read from, is to destroy them, unless you want two of them. Because you cannot transport the actual matter. So, basically, you die when you are transported, and your copy takes your place. I don't know about you, but I don't want to die; therefore, I'd probably never use a transporter.

[Itchygomba69 0]

The Question I have is would you do it?

 

I dont know if I would

Edited October 27, 2005 by dragonwrangler95

[Chataeya 0]

Wow! Sounds to much like the "Philadelphia Experiment " to me.