Teleportation is always as sci-fi dream, but recently scientists have been able to teleport nano-sized objects across significant distances. We’re still nowhere near teleporting even the smallest, visible-to-the-naked-eye objects, but that didn’t stop a team of researchers from calculating how long it’d take to teleport an entire human being. It’s very, very long.

Students from the University of Leicester, David Starkey, Suzanne Thomas, Declan Roberts, and James Nelms, have calculated how long it would take to teleport a human. The length of time is dependent on bandwidth, and more bandwidth requires more power. So, the more power used in the process, the less time it would take to teleport. The teleportation distance isn’t far by sci-fi standards (we’re not jumping between Mass Relays here) but is significant — from a spot on Earth to an area in circular orbit directly above that initial spot.

Since we can’t teleport humans — or even a paperclip — just yet, the researchers performed a fair bit of guesswork that checks out in theory. In order to teleport a human, every piece of data that human holds would need to be broken down and transferrable — and the data that makes up humans are the DNA pairs that form genomes in every cell. The researches found that the data for each cell is 1010 bits, and space can be saved because the data from one cell can be used to recreate any other cell. However, a human’s mind isn’t nearly as easy to recreate, and that ups the total data in need of a transfer to 2.6×1042. This is a big number, but with a precise data size, the researchers were then able to calculate how long the transfer would take — just like you’d be able to estimate how long it would take to download, for example, an episode of Game of Thrones.

If the bandwidth used to perform the transfer were around 30GHz, it would take 4.85×1015 years to complete. For comparison, the universe is theorized to be around 14 billion years old, which means teleporting a human from Earth to a spot in orbit directly above would take 350,000 times longer than the universe has existed.

You would’ve died long before you reached your destination, unless of course the teleportation process also somehow preserves you. If it could preserve your data, it likely wouldn’t preserve you. So the real you would be dead anyway, and a newly minted copy would be walking around, not acting entirely like you would. You’d be zapped by teleportation rays and you’d be dead. You could call that a death ray.

Funny mad science aside, if researchers could increase the power source by a considerable amount, this would decrease the time it would take to teleport an object. However, first we’d need to figure out a way to devise a ray that could zap around 2.6×1042 worth of data out of a human. Then we could tackle making humans live longer than the universe is old, or creating a power source that could probably destroy the universe by itself.

Now read: First teleportation between macroscopic objects leads the way to a quantum internet

Research paper: Travelling by Teleportation [PDF]