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For those that were alive in the late 1960s and early 70s, humans were going into space or landing on the Moon in real rocket ships every few months. Science Fiction was becoming popular, and it inspired many people to imagine the future. This was emphasized by a new television show, Star Trek, where these concepts were presented in a plausible way.
Faster Than Light (FTL) travel was as easy as inventing “Warp Drive”. Need to visit planets every week but Special Effects (SFX) were too costly to land a shuttlecraft? Just “beam” people to the surface and skip the expensive props.
Can we actually teleport a human being that way? It’s unlikely since we don’t have the technology, or even a good idea of how to do it yet. If you could record the location of every single atom in an object, its current electrical state, speed, and movement, it might be possible. We’ve teleported information using quantum entanglement [China, 2017] but that is not the same thing.
There’s a catch. One of the smallest animals on the planet, the amoeba, is only one cell, yet it is composed of 12,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. That’s twelve quintillion, a very large number.
Humans, on the other hand, have 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, or seven octillion—one billion times more. If we only needed one bit of computer data storage for each atom (to store the information until it was restored), you would need seven octillion data bits.
Unfortunately, there are only about 472,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of storage (estimated) in all the computers on Earth, which is about a billion times too small. Worse yet, even with our fastest computers, moving all that information would take many times the age of the entire Universe. Ouch!
We are all time travelers, moving along at a rate of one second per second. Boring, but true. There are exceptions, however.
If you were in a plane traveling at 800 km/hr. you will age more slowly because you are moving, and Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity proves we experience time more slowly when we are moving. However, being 10 km up also means you're in a weaker gravity field so you age more quickly.
As it turns out, there is a tiny difference between the faster and slower effects. If you flew 10,000,000 kilometers, you would still be less than one second older than someone who never flew...
To make some real progress, you would have to fly at a good percentage of the speed of light on around trip to a nearby star. If you took a flight to the Alpha Centauri system and back, at 90% of the speed of light a person on Earth would see that it took 4.9 years, but the person in the ship would only experience 2.1 years of elapsed time. Space-time is just one thing—there is no space without time, or time without space.
Once you were moving at 90% of light speed, the distance would only be 1.9 light years instead of 4.3 because space-time contracts at those high speeds. In other words, you experience time and distance differently at that speed. Even though it was only two years experienced on the ship, 4.9 years still passed on Earth.
If you immediately turned around and came back to Earth, about ten years would have passed though you were only four years older, so you apparently travelled through time. Unfortunately it is a one way trip, although physics doesn’t forbid it, there is no known way to go backwards through time.
There is a theory that Artificial Intelligence will be the most important thing humans ever invent. We don’t have it yet—what you hear called “A.I.” nowadays is really the manifestations of Machine Learning, Neural Networking, Computer Vision, and other systems that we’re developing on the road to true A.I.
Real A.I. is still a decade away (at least), but once we have it, we can give it the entirety of human knowledge and it can do what computers do best—sort through that data and find patterns.
Programming it to sift through everything we know, all collected into one massive database, will allow us to ask it any question, and receive an answer based on every scrap of information that exists. Pharma companies used early prototypes of AIs to search for molecular candidates to develop the COVID-19 vaccines. That’s why we got them in 300 days instead of more than two years.
An A.I. that was perfectly suited to learning could be programmed to interview every person in the world (thousands at a time-since computers are not limited in that way). It could be done in any language with perfect comprehension, collecting and sorting all of their knowledge and experience.
It could filter contradictory and unreliable data, and then use all the rest to answer any question we might ever think to ask. Could we build incredible technology like transporters, replicators, fusion reactors, and time travel machines?
When we finally have true A.I., we can ask it if it is possible to create transporter technology that would work as well as Star Trek’s version, and the answer might be yes. This is because there is so much information that has never been collected together at the same time. We might already have all the information we need to build transporters.
If it relies on the knowledge of physicists, chemists, and biologists it might turn out to be easy. If it also requires the knowledge of a painter in Spain, a sponge diver in Tahiti, and an iron foundry worker in Australia, the odds are that such information might never come together of its own accord.
Right now there is no foreseeable way to achieve teleportation or time travel in any significant way. In another decade, once we have a good working A.I., the likelihood increases significantly. Right now would be a good time to get into STEM orSTEAM careers so you can help us get there as quickly as possible.
Wouldn’t you like to “beam up” to the Moon or Mars for the weekend to visit relatives? “Energize…!”
