MadSci Network: Computer Science Query:

Teleportation is an intriguing technology: and the possibilities of some such Science Fiction concepts are discussed in this website: From Fantasy to fact Some scientists at IBM have been giving it the possibilities of teleportation some thought: "A fun talk on teleportation"

According to their calculations, "If we forget about recognizing atoms and measuring their velocities and just scale that to a resolution of one-atomic length in each direction that's about 10^32 bits". Recognizing atoms would multiply that by a factor to account for the type of atom -so, with about 100 possible elements, you could move that up to about 10^34 bits.

At present, we can transmit information through optical fiber at about 10 Gigabits per second - fast enough to send the information found in a full set of an encyclopedias through the fiber ... twenty times in one second! However, even at that high speed, 10^10 bits/second, it would take 10^24 seconds to transmit the information in a human body. With a year representing about 3 x 10^7 seconds, we are talking about 3 x 10^16 years (30,000 trillion years). Let's see...some estimate that the universe is about 20 billion years old, which is 2 x 10^10 ..so we are just asking someone to wait about a million times longer than the universe has existed in order to complete the transmission of one person by teleportation.

However, the situation may be a bit less extreme. When we transmit pictures over the internet, we first compress the information in the file, removing redundant information. While compressing information about a person during teleportation might be somewhat dangerous ("Oops! Sorry, we left out your left eye"), it still might be reasonable to try to compress the information in teleporting someone. Let's go to the other extreme -what would it take to just transmit the genetic information that would be required for the nucleus of the cells? That would be about 3 billion base pairs . That isn't bad - assume 2 bits for each base pair (00 = Adenine, 01= Thymine, 10 = Guanine,11=Cytosine), we need only about 6 billion bits (6 x 10^9) to store the genetic information.

That might be enough to tell the teleporter how to make a new baby you...but not the adult you, with all your memories, abilities, scars, and such. For that, you might need to know which genes are turned off and on in each cell of your body. There are about 100,000 genes (10^ 5) that could be turned off and on, and there are about 65 trillion cells (6.5 x 10^13) in the human body. So, we probably would need about 6.5 x 10^13 x 10^5 = 6.5 x 10^18 bits of information to know what genes to turn on and off in each cell of your body to teleport you. So, at 10 Gigabits per second, it would take about 6.5 x 10^7 or 65 million seconds, or about 2 years to transmit your genetic information along with which genes to turn on or off in each cell of your body. Perhaps there could be more compression beyond this...but probably not very much more.

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