Saturday 5 May 2012

Ep 145: Teleportation


Is teleportation possible in the real world, or only in the world of science fiction?

In this very special episode, Dr Boob takes the reigns and leads us on a journey through teleportation, whether or not physics allows it and even if it does, can we technologically achieve it? What are the implications if we recreate someone in another spot - what about their soul? Does such a thing exist? And even if you can technologically achieve this, is it possible to reanimate a copy of someone? What do you do with their original version, if you have simply copied them? This could be considered cloning, which brings in ethical questions.

Perhaps wormholes could be a solution to this problem, but we haven't found any yet - however they are, as physicists like to say, theoretically possible.

Tune in to this very entertaining episode (and I can say this without any false modesty as Dr Boob did it all himself) here.


If you'd like to hear more of Dr Boob on this podcast, check out our past joint episodes, mostly on the science of superheroes. He's also on twitter, so come and follow him, he needs friends!


7 comments:

  1. I think you are going about teleportation all wrong. The Star Trek idea of disassembling an entire person and reassembling him at another location has set us down the wrong path. It would be so much simpler to just encase the individual in a "transportation bubble" and transport the person as a single bit. The size and complexity of whatever is inside the "bubble" doesn't matter. . .you are always transporting the same thing, the same bubble, the same bit. Only what's encased in the bubble changes, but the transporter doesn't care as it's always transporting the same thing, the same bubble, the same bit. No disassembly/reassembly required! That's how I would do it.

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  2. David BofingerMay 07, 2012 11:59 pm

     I agree this is an alternative way to do teleportation. It has the advantage of being a much less intrusive experience for the teleportee. However, I suspect creating that bubble would require a lot of bending of space and so a lot of energy. Maybe of the order of the mass of a black hole with an event horizon the same size as the bubble. For the standard-sized teleport (large enough to carry down Blake, Avon, Vila and a couple of eskies of equipment) that might be a radius of about two metres, IIRC the energy-equivalent of a planet.

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  3. Thank you for sharing this. It was helpful. Keep sharing such things.

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  4. when i think about it, i didn't watch any movie related to the teleportation. is there any movie i can watch? and thanks for sharing this post and podcast's link. i', gonna listen to it too.

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