Physicists Say That Teleportation is Unworkable

This joke of a paper is from 2012. They address satellite communication speed and power requirements without even considering the fundamental issue of we can't synthesize life yet.

Additionally their statement 'A cell contains enough information to replicate any other type of cell in the body' could not be more incorrect. Clearly they have never heard of epigenetics or other molecular changes unique to specific cells.

Also, even if the above were possible, why would we waste time communicating in this ridiculously horrible way? We could just send a hard drive containing the genetic information of billions of people in a tiny rocket rather than whatever communication method they propose.

All this would be okay if they were at least trying to make a statement or explore some futuristic dream seriously, but they're not. All they do is calculate the time it would take for 6 billion bits to be sent on a 0.5 GHz band with error checking, absolute crap. This is the scientific equivalent of linkbaiting.

Source: https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view...

Edit: I now see why this was published. This is a fake undergraduate journal at the University of Leicester. Where undergrads write bull articles like this so they can pad their resume for graduate school applications. It's absolute disgrace to write an article about this. This isn't even peer reviewed by faculty, students peer review each other. These aren't experienced researchers, they haven't even gotten their degrees yet.

Quantum teleportation essentially is teleportation as long as you avoid the philosophical issues (e.g., is a reconstructed person the same person anymore?) and just stick to the scientific questions.

The Bekenstein Bound is a very high upper bound on the maximum information contained within a given volume. Black holes are maximal entropy objects, and since entropy is just the log of the number of states of a system (states = information), roughly speaking, that's how the bound is calculated.

But everyday life isn't nearly as high in entropy as a black hole, so it's likely that the amount of information representing a person is significantly less than what the bound suggests. However, I have doubts about whether you can actually use that bound on something that isn't a blackhole. A wavefunction (which is, theoretically, all the information necessary to completely describe a system) is a multi-particle function (more specifically, a function of a configuration space). For example, you can talk about the wavefunction of an electron, but that's just an approximation. To completely describe the electron's behavior, you need the wavefunction as a function of the electron and its surrounding particles. The further away the surrounding particles are, the less of an influence they will have on the behavior of the electron, but the influence is still there. So really, you'd need a wavefunction of everything extant to exactly describe the electron... Anyway, the question of whether there is a "universal wavefunction" seems to be debated among physicists, and I'm not one anyway, so who knows...

Getting back on topic, I'll just assume that the wavefunction of all particles constituting a person is enough information to completely specify them and proceed with that as a given. That being the case, there is something called the "no-cloning theorem" that forbids the duplication of a quantum state. So the good news is that there's no way for teleportation to screw up and create two of you! Quantum states can only be moved, which is what quantum teleportation is. The problem is that this teleportation also requires a classical channel (aka an optical fiber) to complete the transfer of state. So, you still can't teleport anything faster than the speed of light. Which isn't much of a problem on earth, but you still can't get to Pluto instantly. This assumes of course that someone far in the future has figured out a way to quickly ascertain the quantum state of macroscopic objects, which is unlikely to ever happen.

Interestingly, in the long run this probably doesn't "matter" for anyone else or even your role in the universe, because there's still a perfect copy of you doing exactly what you would have done, so it's like you didn't die. But you did still die... and dying is rather scary for most people.

I am ridiculously unqualified to comment on this topic, but the article seemed to start out on the wrong hypothesis from the beginning. It seems to me that if teleportation is going to work, it has to be an actual transfer of matter. I can't foresee us ever understanding the "state" of a human being enough to serialize it to "information" and convert it back.

It seems far more likely that we'll discover a means of moving matter than we will of de/rematerializing.

"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

We've got a long way to go before we can start having conversations like "I can't teleport over, I only have 2.6x10^38b left on my mobile plan!"

If we followed the information bottleneck, we wouldn't be able to move at all. Since we can move faster than teleportation suggests, then I think it's fair to say that there can theoretically be other means of doing it.