Teleportation

A new book has been written that claims that, one way or another, teleportation will affect humanity in the future.

Alone among popular SF franchises, Star Trek has been the sole exponent of teleportation as a device to help humanity. But, does reality comport with Trek's vision? Quite possibly, teleportation might be developed. But, assuming that teleportation will be developed, will the process necessarily result in successful transportation of individual personalities? The jury is very much out.

(Excerpt)

In his new book, Teleportation - The Impossible Leap, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., writer David Darling contends that ""One way or another, teleportation is going to play a major role in all our futures. It will be a fundamental process at the heart of quantum computers, which will themselves radically change the world." Darling suggests that some form of classical teleportation and replication for inanimate objects also seems inevitable. But whether humans can make the leap, well, that remains to be seen. Teleporting a person would require a machine that isolates, appraises, and keeps track of over a trillion trillion atoms that constitute the human body, then sends that data to another locale for reassembly--and hopefully without mussing up your physical and mental makeup.

(End Of Excerpt)

See source below.

"Mussing up your physical and mental makeup"? That's a mild way of putting it! Teleportation, badly accomplished, would only kill the original subject. Note that the article mentions "data". As I've said, it is matter, not data, that is transferred by Trek-universe teleportation devices. Because of certain philosophical and logical issues, I certainly hope that it isn't just data that is transmitted, since data can be duplicated. Since individual personalities cannot be duplicated, the ability of data to be transmitted means that data cannot be the thing that is associated with our own unique personality, and thus if only data is transmitted, and the original is destroyed, then the unique personality that is YOU is destroyed in the teleportation process. I hope that the author of the book, at least, realizes this.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode about Thomas Riker, apparently data was reflected during transportation and caused a duplicate to be created. This event is consistent with my theory that the original atoms, and not just their data, must be transferred for the real personality to continue to exist (the real personality was William T. Riker in that episode, who had the actual atoms of the pre-transported individual). By contrast, in the original Star Trek, the transporter accident involving a "vicious Kirk" and a "mild Kirk" poses significant problems. Trek's theory of teleportation is a thicket of extremely difficult problems that are nontechnical as much as technical.

Source: Link.