People who fantasize about teleportation forget something pointed out in the great SF novel Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys--teleportation KILLS YOU! What's reassembled is no longer you, it's a "new" you.
However, he does say that as far as energy matter conversion is concerned, should you have available "cheap energy" al la dilytheum crystals on the Enterprise, then Capt Picard's Earl Grey tea or Deanna Troi's marvelous ball gown is easily assembled once the item's description exists in the memory bank.
Of course the computers of 1962 when Profiles was first published were gargantuan compared to today's laptops and the memory cores of 1960s mainframes were "o" rings of magnetized steel that were the size of the "o" previously mentioned. A megabyte of memory would fill a basketball gym and now my 528 Meg memory for my digtal camera is smaller than a postage stamp!!!
Never! I don't know but ....isn't it fun to speculate?
That is why only material objects will utilize 'teleportation', instead allowing living beings to undergo it. The advantage being that not only can you teleport one object, you will also be able to create unlimited replicas of them once they have been scanned into 'memory'.
Living beings will travel through what is commonly referred to today as a 'wormhole'; bending the spacetime continuum so that one moment you are at one defined point, and the next you are in another. Hollywood special effects notwithstanding, scientists and engineers already have some understanding of how to accomplish this, which is actually easier from a technical standpoint than the requirements for teleportation. Teleportation is currently not-ready-for-primetime because of technical difficulties, while 'wormhole' travel is not because of energy demands.
That depends on your conception of the quantum-state of your soul. Mind you, the conversion of a person ENTIRELY into energy, the transmission of that energy, and re-configuration of that energy into its' original mass form is TECHNICALLY a possibility. . .transmission losses make it a chancy proposition.
OTOH, ANOTHER tack at teleportation is this: the particles which make up the atoms and molecules of your body have a overwhelmingly most probable location, where you are right now. But, potentially, each of those particles have a small possibility of being somewhere else. IF you could shift the most probable location WITHOUT losing structural coherency, you have workable teleportation.
The details, of course, are left for students with an especially alert mind to solve. . .
Once we all become interchangeable, what difference will that make?
How is this any different from what is happening to each of us on a daily basis. That is, atoms that comprise our bodies are constantly being cycled in and out of our system as we shed our skin, eat, excrete, inhale and exhale. Consider an individual that goes into a coma and wakes after 10 years. Practically every atom in his body will have been replaced. The same thing that would happen during teleportation, except at a somewhat slower rate. Are you telling me that the individual waking up would not be the same as the person that entered the coma. The same could be said about all of us, whether in a coma or not.
That's what's scary about it. The traveller wouldn't be able to maintain stream of consciousness, and the copy at the end of the journey would only have the illusion of the original's memories.
Also, after enough "jumps", errors in the copying process would accumulate to the point where the traveller is no longer a viable living being.
I'd feel much more comfortable squeezing through a friggin' wormhole connection. I might get fried by radiation in the process, but at least I'd still be ME. Not an evil impostor with a goatee!
