Teleportation, how would it work exactly?

[theklng]

teleportation/teletransportation has been in theoretical existence since the discovery of quantum physics. i reckon back some 10 years ago they experimented with it and managed to teleport small scale items such as lego bricks.

what i mean to say by this is that all sci-fi book concepts of this are obsolete as the theory effectively works. there's a good documentary on this out there, about niels bohr, his discoveries and experimental physics. for those interested, it is definitely worth checking out to get the basic idea of what quantum physics can do.

 

[Abedeus]

Spoiler: snip

course there's always the idea of a sub-space or a hyperspace. Kind of an alternate dimension that could be reached into where traveling a few feet would translate to traveling a few thousand miles in regular space. Not quite teleportation, but kind of close. In one of the X-men series they revealed that this was basically how Nightcrawlers teleporting worked, he'd shift to an alternate dimension, move a bit, and come back. Of course it was revealed that it was a horrifying hell dimension, but hey, it worked.

There's also the idea that's been mentioned, I do believe, about folding space, which would essentially involve causing two points in space time to temporarily exist in the same place at the same time, then they seperate, leaving the ship or person to go from point A to point B instantaneously. Of course the problem with this is that you probably end up piercing an alternate dimension at the same time here, and you end up with Event Horizon, where you open a gate to hell. Congratulations.

There was also a book that I read forever ago that talked about teleportation as not really moving you from point to point, but rather shifting you off to an identical alternate dimension where you haven't actually moved, but where everything is the same and your location is just different. Like if you went to another world where everything was the same and the only difference was that your keyboard was an inch to the left. Can't really think of a better example for it though.

You have just given me an awesome, although not too original idea.

Shadow Plane travel.

In Forgotten Realms, there is a spell that can allow you to travel enormous distances in a short time. It's not teleportation, it's not instant, but since you don't teleport, it can't be blocked by most of the spells.

The only dangers are getting off the trail (and getting lost in other plane... or traveling beyond your own for eternity) and monsters native to Shadow Plane. Both solved by a powerful enough mage.

 

[Impuls]

Hmm, i don't know if someone else has said this already but maybe you should watch the movie "What the beep do we know?"

There is a part in it where they are referring to cells shifting to another dimension each nanosecond or something like that. It is really interesting to watch.

 

[Rocksa]

Hmm, i don't know if someone else has said this already but maybe you should watch the movie "What the beep do we know?"

There is a part in it where they are referring to cells shifting to another dimension each nanosecond or something like that. It is really interesting to watch.

That movie was awesome, but at the same time it was so much new age claptrap. I mean the science they presented was real stuff, all quantum physics basically, but the presentation came off as Quantum Physics explained by your stoner friend.

"so, like, your hand is totally huge, but it's small too, and like, what if the universe was made of energy like you are and you only don't fall through stuff because your cells emit this magnetic field. Dude, pass the cheetos"

 

[caledonia]

From Cracked:

Why we thought we wanted it:
Here's a technology that'd make the flying car and the jetpack both look like that retarded Flintstones car you drive with your feet. We're talking instant transport to anywhere, any time. You can live on the beach in Hawaii and live in New York. Sit there in the morning and sip coffee until about five seconds before the meeting is set to start, then step into your transport and there you are, in the conference room.

Why we were wrong:
Many later science fiction writers have declared that a device that can disassemble and reassemble a human molecule-by-molecule would be patently unsafe (the most famous and grotesque portrayal of a teleporter accident came, of course, in the film Spaceballs). But, even if they get the bugs worked out (what method of transportation is perfectly safe, after all?) there is a much larger and much weirder issue.

A teleporter wouldn't actually break down your atoms and then shoot those same atoms thousands of miles through the air; even if it were possible, there'd be no reason to do it. It would instead just grab Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms from out of the air and assemble you out of those (one Hydrogen atom is the same as another, after all).

In other words, teleporters would work more like fax machines than mail. It transmits a signal and the machine on the other end spits out a copy. Only instead of a copy of a letter, it's a copy of a person, right down to all their thoughts and memories and here the original is destroyed. This was demonstrated in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Episode 250 ("Second Chances", aired May 24, 1993, Stardate 46915.2) where they failed to destroy the original Will Riker and were left with two of him.

Are you grasping the weirdness of this? The original is destroyed. That means when you step into a teleporter, you die. But, the rest of the world won't know you died, because a copy of you will step out of the other end of the machine. It won't be you, though, it'll be another you that happens to share your memories. To the outside observer the thing will always work fine, and the thing that steps out of the receiving end will think it worked fine. The one person who knows it didn't worked fine, can't tell anyone because they fucking died via total atomization the moment they stepped into the machine.

So, the first time Captain Kirk used the teleportation device to beam down to an alien planet, he was basically resigning himself to an immediate death and hoping that his twin would carry out the mission for him.