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What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest? (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

we need teleportation frankly

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's quite the question to ask, but as far I can tell it only works with quantum information. Sending a body would be like you trying to fit into a fiber cable to be bounced inside of beneath the Atlantic to avoid the otherwise long flight.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

From what I know of sci-fi, teleportation is often a machine that scans, destroys, and replicates the particles in your body at a secondary location.

So if we could figure out scanning and printing at the atomic scale, with zero defects, and pair it with sending information at near instant speeds via quantum teleportation, we could have a teleporter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Quantum “teleportation” is not capable of sending information FTL. Quantum entanglement means that the wave functions of two or more particles (in essence, the information possessed by the particles) are correlated, but the information must be encoded by a device at the midpoint between the two observers and sent to the observers at a speed not exceeding the speed of light.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

... if we could figure out scanning and printing at the atomic scale, with zero defects

I think this is a bigger issue currently than sending large amounts of data across the globe. Though I wonder how much data a full copy would demand.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You just made me curious and we're not alone in wondering

To have a scanner that can record the position of every atom in the body to an accuracy of the order of the size of a hydrogen atom would require position accuracy of about 10-10 meters. To get that accuracy over a distance of order 1 meter, this would require 30 decimal digits, which would be about 100 binary digits per atom. However, there would be a lot of redundancy in this data, so let’s be optimistic and assume you could compress this down to 1 bit per atom, so we still need approximately 1027 bits of data to just specify the positions of all the atoms in a human body. According to Wikipedia (Exabyte), the approximate data storage capacity of all the computers and storage devices in the world today is roughly 1 zettabyte = 1021 bytes = 1022 bits. Therefore, the data for the scan of one human would require at least 10,000 times the total storage of all the data stored on Earth right now.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/05/is-teleportation-possible.html

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I was getting incredibly confused because the copy/paste didn't copy the superscript for the exponents. I was like, "there's definitely more than 1027 atoms in the body.. wait, how are there supposedly only 1021 bytes of storage in the whole world? Oooh.."

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Now I'm wondering how long it would realistically take for that to become a not-insane demand. I know data storage multiplies pretty rapidly, but not that rapidly, so are we talking decades or centuries?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

Apparently we can already do it, a gram of dna can store 215 petabytes and we can encode to dna at 18Mbps.

Gonna be a long upload.