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What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest? (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by _number8_@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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we need teleportation frankly

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[-] Deceptichum@kbin.social 3 points 10 months ago

How’s quantum teleportation work in this universe? Because that’s apparently a thing already.

[-] berg@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago

That's quite the question to ask, but as far I can tell it only works with quantum information. Sending a body would be like you trying to fit into a fiber cable to be bounced inside of beneath the Atlantic to avoid the otherwise long flight.

[-] Deceptichum@kbin.social 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

From what I know of sci-fi, teleportation is often a machine that scans, destroys, and replicates the particles in your body at a secondary location.

So if we could figure out scanning and printing at the atomic scale, with zero defects, and pair it with sending information at near instant speeds via quantum teleportation, we could have a teleporter.

[-] berg@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

... if we could figure out scanning and printing at the atomic scale, with zero defects

I think this is a bigger issue currently than sending large amounts of data across the globe. Though I wonder how much data a full copy would demand.

[-] Deceptichum@kbin.social 6 points 10 months ago

You just made me curious and we're not alone in wondering

To have a scanner that can record the position of every atom in the body to an accuracy of the order of the size of a hydrogen atom would require position accuracy of about 10-10 meters. To get that accuracy over a distance of order 1 meter, this would require 30 decimal digits, which would be about 100 binary digits per atom. However, there would be a lot of redundancy in this data, so let’s be optimistic and assume you could compress this down to 1 bit per atom, so we still need approximately 1027 bits of data to just specify the positions of all the atoms in a human body. According to Wikipedia (Exabyte), the approximate data storage capacity of all the computers and storage devices in the world today is roughly 1 zettabyte = 1021 bytes = 1022 bits. Therefore, the data for the scan of one human would require at least 10,000 times the total storage of all the data stored on Earth right now.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/05/is-teleportation-possible.html

[-] papalonian@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

I was getting incredibly confused because the copy/paste didn't copy the superscript for the exponents. I was like, "there's definitely more than 1027 atoms in the body.. wait, how are there supposedly only 1021 bytes of storage in the whole world? Oooh.."

[-] berg@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

Ah, that would take a while to send 😁

[-] Xariphon@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago

Now I'm wondering how long it would realistically take for that to become a not-insane demand. I know data storage multiplies pretty rapidly, but not that rapidly, so are we talking decades or centuries?

[-] Deceptichum@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Apparently we can already do it, a gram of dna can store 215 petabytes and we can encode to dna at 18Mbps.

Gonna be a long upload.

[-] QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Quantum “teleportation” is not capable of sending information FTL. Quantum entanglement means that the wave functions of two or more particles (in essence, the information possessed by the particles) are correlated, but the information must be encoded by a device at the midpoint between the two observers and sent to the observers at a speed not exceeding the speed of light.

[-] Slotos@feddit.nl 1 points 10 months ago

Teleportation in that term means “make a thing disappear in one place and appear in another”. No “immediate” is ever implied.

Wikipedia article has a great diagram on the topic. Add an article on “no cloning theorem” to understand why “teleportation” is a fitting term. I recommend reading both without expectation, just read through the steps as if you’re learning a new math tool.

In short, quantum teleportation is a way to take a quantum state (which are fundamentally unforgeable - you can’t simply create a clone of a particle), destroy it, extracting classically communicable data, and they recreate it in another location.

this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024

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