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.

First, the human brain is not that complicated. You don't need the quantum state of every electron, you just need the meaningful information in 100 billion neurons, a trillion glial cells and 100 trillion synapses. This information could theoretically be beamed by 30 GHz microwaves in a matter of seconds.

FedEx has enough bandwidth to teleport hundreds of millions of people every day, if you digitized them Star Trek style but then delivered them on memory cards instead of broadcasting them by radio. By the end of this century we'll be able to fit a whole digitized person on one little chip, so instead of beaming up a whole person, why not use the person's body as rocket fuel to launch his chip into orbit where the starship can pick him up?

Which brings us to the big problem with Star Trek's transporters: they kill all of the people who pass through them and replace them with copies - who are later killed and replaced with other copies when they are "transported" again. You don't use the transporter. It uses you.

If you are recreating people on a quantum level, you have no choice but to kill them because quantum mechanics do not allow you to make a perfect copy without destroying the original. But since we don't need a perfect quantum copy, we can teleport people without vaporizing them.

It is a simple version control problem if you have three common sci-fi technologies: 

• artificial human bodies
• brain scanner/rewriter
• suspended animation

Have a blank "empty" body prepared at your teleport destination. Scan your brain and then go into suspended animation. Write the contents of your brain to the blank body. Now the copy of you can do whatever you want, because it thinks like you. Then you scan the copy's brain, put the copy into suspended animation, and write the updated scan to your original body. When you wake up you will have all of the experience gained by the copy. Before you die, do another brain scan and send it to your copy, who will wake up with all of your experience and the remainder of its own life to boot.

There are ethical issues with this technique, but they are more easily overcome than the transporter slaughterhouse. The copy is almost certainly a person with the same right to exist that you have. It must have no mind of it's own until your scan is written to it, and it must have a reasonable quality and duration of life wherever it is. You must take responsibility for the copy, which is essentially a whole second life for you, plus the cost of suspended animation for both you and the copy.

The very simple version control system where only one copy of you is conscious avoids many ethical problems that routinely arise with teleportation, cloning and rewriting brains. The copy thinks just like you do, so you can trust it to make decisions that will have a profound effect on you when you wake up with its experience, and it can trust you.