10^28 kilobytes will be required to teleport an entire human being [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

10^28 kilobytes will be required to teleport an entire human being [pdf]

fas.org

18 pointsalbybisy12 comments

For the curious, this is about 8,470,329.47 yottabytes.

For the even more curious, a scale to think about from wikipedia[1]: In 2010, it was estimated that storing a yottabyte on terabyte-size hard drives would require one million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte#Examples

To put this in another term, on a Google Fiber connection (1000 gbit/s) it would take 2477 trillion years to transfer one human.

That number of years is around 176,928 ages of the universes

uhm... does this mean I'm moving all those bytes when I'll get up from the chair?

Sounds like we just need better compression algorithm.

Has anyone figured out yet which parts of a human can be compressed in a lossy way without anyone (especially yourself) noticing?

Well, you could always go with "most of the body". I mean, the peripheral parts could be almost regrown from source, with the additional benefit of leaving behind many years of injuries you've picked up. My knee certainly agrees with this sentiment right now :)

Oh well; you probably don't want to be teleported (cloned and killed) anyway.

Only if you speak about teleportation as cloning and killing. But if you speak about kind of a wormhole teleportation (which the paper mentions among other things), then it doesn't really pose any philosophical dilemma.

It has been established that Star Trek teleportation was cloning and killing.

But this may not be a problem: either people have a soul or they don't.

- if they don't have a soul, then I don't see how cloning and killing could be a problem.

- if they do have a soul, then in the killing part the soul is detached from the destroyed body. And in the cloning part, some soul should attach to the created body.

The question is then whether the original soul reattach to the clone or another soul? It seems likely that the original soul reattach to the clone, because they are better atuned, than another soul.

Now, where you could have a problem, is if another soul get attached to the clone. Some episodes of ST TOS and of ST VOY explored the problem (soul splitting, interferences with souls from parallel universes, etc). But this doesn't seem to be the normal use case.

Of course, we won't know what happens in our universes until we try it. Go science!

If people don't have a soul, it still is a problem, because you are still killing a person. Why should I care that my exact clone will be living my life, if I'll be vaporized? And consider another scenario, as described in "Into the Silent Land" - what if there's a malfunction and the clone is created, but I am not immediately destroyed - should I then voluntarily agree to be killed just to make sure there's only one of myself?

Have we decided on DRM yet ?

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