Comment on Shipping costs will no longer exist if teleportation is invented.

• squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Again, the 1kg of carbon was only used to come up with the rough amount of atoms for 1kg of weight.

  Last I checked, humans, same as most other things, don’t just consist of pure carbon. Also, you need to include position data as well, so even in our 1kg of carbon no two atoms are exactly the same since no two atoms are at the same exact position and same exact rotation. And no two atoms are bonded to the same exact atoms.

  If you send just the data of “dump 1kg of carbon atoms there”, you will turn a diamond into carbon dust when teleporting it. I don’t want to see the result of what happens if you teleport a human that way.

  And you actually don’t only have to take the atomic properties into consideration but also the subatomic ones. The 1 byte per atom was already purpousely a ridiculously low guess. It’s much more likely you need data in the order of megabytes per atom.

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  Sci fi makes teleportation look easy. Press a button, disappear here, reappear there.

  In reality, every single component of teleportation is so hard that we don’t even have a clue how this could theoretically be done with future tech. We don’t have a way to scan anything (let alone a human being) with nearly the level of detail that we’d need. We don’t have a way to deconstruct the item that is supposed to be sent. We have neither a way to store nor to send the enormous amounts of data required. And we have no concept of a clue how to do the reconstruction.

  Just to visualize this a bit better: it will be much, much easier to clone objects than to teleport them, because teleporting is cloning plus deconstruction.

  So if you understand that creating objects out of thin air is resource-intensive, then that necessarily means that teleportation will be even more difficult and expensive than just cloning objects.

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