A letter to the editors of Scientific American has interested me in conducting an experiment in what intelligent people believe. Emotionally, it seems to me that intelligence is a defense against insanity and belief in nonsense. Intellectually, I am reluctantly forced to realize that intelligent people can be insane and can believe in nonsense.
I have great respect for the intelligence of most of you who post at this site, making me think that this is a great place to try this experiment.
Please stop when asked your opinion, answering it in your mind without reading further. Then read on and consider the same question again. I am interested in knowing how many (if any) change their minds.
I have enjoyed science fiction, fantasy, and occult fiction for most of my life. However, I always tried to draw the line between what might be possible in the future and what just ain’t gonna happen. The Star Trek Transporter and the Teleportation device in “The Fly” made wonderful fiction, but I never believed such devices were possible.
Do you believe that such a device is possible to some advanced technology?
The writer of the letter to SciAm pointed out that here are something like 1.000E24 atoms in a few grams of matter (1 followed by 24 zeros). Now a matter transporter would require scanning and recording the details of the object to be transported. Perhaps 100 basic machine language instructions per atom would be required. This is probably an underestimate for something as complex as a human being.
Say we want to teleport a human being weighing 70 kilograms (about 150 pounds) or 70,000 grams. At 1.00E24 atoms for a few grams, estimate 10,000*1.000E24 or 1.000E28 atoms. At 100 instructions per atom, this is 1.000E30 instructions. Now how fast do you expect computers to get?
Let us work the problem backwards for a while. Assume that future computers use a million CPU’s working in parallel. Now each computer needs to do 1.000E24 computations. If we want to get the job done in a year, the CPU would have to do about 3.17E16 instructions per second, or one instruction in 3.156E-17 seconds. This is the time it takes light to travel about 3.719E-7 inches. I just do not expect computers to get any where near that fast.
So, it seems that it would take more than a year to do the computer processing required to record the necessary data prior to teleporting a human being. The letter writer was more pessimistic, he estimated 22 million years for the computations. I also happen to be pessimistic about the possibility of building the device which uses this data to do the job, but that requires a more esoteric analysis. Just considering the processing time, it does not look possible.
Before reading the letter in SciAm, I was not a believer. I certainly am not one now.
How about the rest of you? Any believers in teleportation who changed their mind? Any who didn’t change their mind? How many never did believe it was possible?
I have great respect for the intelligence of most of you who post at this site, making me think that this is a great place to try this experiment.
Please stop when asked your opinion, answering it in your mind without reading further. Then read on and consider the same question again. I am interested in knowing how many (if any) change their minds.
I have enjoyed science fiction, fantasy, and occult fiction for most of my life. However, I always tried to draw the line between what might be possible in the future and what just ain’t gonna happen. The Star Trek Transporter and the Teleportation device in “The Fly” made wonderful fiction, but I never believed such devices were possible.
Do you believe that such a device is possible to some advanced technology?
The writer of the letter to SciAm pointed out that here are something like 1.000E24 atoms in a few grams of matter (1 followed by 24 zeros). Now a matter transporter would require scanning and recording the details of the object to be transported. Perhaps 100 basic machine language instructions per atom would be required. This is probably an underestimate for something as complex as a human being.
Say we want to teleport a human being weighing 70 kilograms (about 150 pounds) or 70,000 grams. At 1.00E24 atoms for a few grams, estimate 10,000*1.000E24 or 1.000E28 atoms. At 100 instructions per atom, this is 1.000E30 instructions. Now how fast do you expect computers to get?
Let us work the problem backwards for a while. Assume that future computers use a million CPU’s working in parallel. Now each computer needs to do 1.000E24 computations. If we want to get the job done in a year, the CPU would have to do about 3.17E16 instructions per second, or one instruction in 3.156E-17 seconds. This is the time it takes light to travel about 3.719E-7 inches. I just do not expect computers to get any where near that fast.
So, it seems that it would take more than a year to do the computer processing required to record the necessary data prior to teleporting a human being. The letter writer was more pessimistic, he estimated 22 million years for the computations. I also happen to be pessimistic about the possibility of building the device which uses this data to do the job, but that requires a more esoteric analysis. Just considering the processing time, it does not look possible.
Before reading the letter in SciAm, I was not a believer. I certainly am not one now.
How about the rest of you? Any believers in teleportation who changed their mind? Any who didn’t change their mind? How many never did believe it was possible?