Teleportation: Version Control not Bandwidth Problem

NBC News has posted a very good article about a recent study which concluded that teleporting a human would take a quadrillion years. The original paper assumes we want to "recreate the human brain on a quantum level" and then transmit it with 30 GHz microwaves - in other words pretty much the way the transporters teleport people in Star Trek.

This is a good way to show that the fictional transporter is poorly engineered, but it is not how you would actually make a machine to teleport people.

Star Venom

Why are the heavens silent? Are we alone in the universe? Where is ET? Here's one possibility:

At some point around 5-10 billion years ago our galaxy was full of civilizations that traveled between the stars.

Each civilization would eventually disappear, perhaps driven to extinction by competition or perhaps evolved into something different. But they were always replaced by another civilization.

This pattern ended gradually. Over a period of 1-10 billion years, the number of new interstellar civilizations fell to zero. Intelligent life would evolve over and over again, and then disappear before spreading beyond the planet where the intelligence evolved.