Beam me up, Scotty!
Transporter technology is...let us say impossible, or at least so improbable as that it may as well be.
1. The heat energy needed to dematerialize a person into their quarks would be about a million times hotter then our sun.
2. The energy needed in such a machine would be several times what mankind uses total, all over Earth.
3. Our computing machines would need to be more efficient by a 1000 billion billion times at least.
4. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would make knowing the exact position and momentum of your constituent particles impossible to know.
For an in depth analysis of all these problems...and more...see the book, "The Physics of Star Trek". Though I can explain any one of those problems.
There are also...though that book did not address it, metaphysical problems with such a device.
It would not really be "you" at the other end, more just an exact copy. Now if you were at the other end...you'd have all the memories and personality and looks...you'd even think, "Dean was wrong"....but you'd still be just a copy.
I could explain that further too, if you liked.
In the realm of instantaneous transportation, think more of a punch or tunnel through the spacetime fabric.
Fold a piece of paper in half. Crease up. Look at a point on the side facing you. Now imagine how long the journey would be for an ant to walk all the way to the fold and down to the other side, just opposite of that point.
A long way.
Now take a pencil and punch a hole in the paper...through both the front and back flaps.
Now the ant need not walk to the top of the fold, he can walk through the hole.
Since our spacetime continuum is crumpled up like a piece of paper, there would be a variety of places to punch through to.
This requires technology that is too far in advance of us to reasonably expect to see this within 500 years.
And an unknown substance that as far as we know does not exist.
And an energy expenditure in excess of what the industrial plants of Earth could be expected to generate in a century.
And may not be stable, or sustainable of life.
Yet these are thought to be far, far more probable, that we might one day work the bugs out, and actually do this.
And there are no metaphysical issues of "who comes out the other end" to worry about!
Dean West
1. The heat energy needed to dematerialize a person into their quarks would be about a million times hotter then our sun.
2. The energy needed in such a machine would be several times what mankind uses total, all over Earth.
3. Our computing machines would need to be more efficient by a 1000 billion billion times at least.
4. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would make knowing the exact position and momentum of your constituent particles impossible to know.
For an in depth analysis of all these problems...and more...see the book, "The Physics of Star Trek". Though I can explain any one of those problems.
There are also...though that book did not address it, metaphysical problems with such a device.
It would not really be "you" at the other end, more just an exact copy. Now if you were at the other end...you'd have all the memories and personality and looks...you'd even think, "Dean was wrong"....but you'd still be just a copy.
I could explain that further too, if you liked.
In the realm of instantaneous transportation, think more of a punch or tunnel through the spacetime fabric.
Fold a piece of paper in half. Crease up. Look at a point on the side facing you. Now imagine how long the journey would be for an ant to walk all the way to the fold and down to the other side, just opposite of that point.
A long way.
Now take a pencil and punch a hole in the paper...through both the front and back flaps.
Now the ant need not walk to the top of the fold, he can walk through the hole.
Since our spacetime continuum is crumpled up like a piece of paper, there would be a variety of places to punch through to.
This requires technology that is too far in advance of us to reasonably expect to see this within 500 years.
And an unknown substance that as far as we know does not exist.
And an energy expenditure in excess of what the industrial plants of Earth could be expected to generate in a century.
And may not be stable, or sustainable of life.
Yet these are thought to be far, far more probable, that we might one day work the bugs out, and actually do this.
And there are no metaphysical issues of "who comes out the other end" to worry about!
Dean West
posted by Dean West @ 11:10 PM
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