Of all the concepts brought to us by science fiction, matter transportation is one of the more interesting.  It’s right up there with warp drive and time travel.  How convenient would it be to be able to transport matter over distances?  Leaving out the transportation of living biological matter, just think of the energy resources we could conserve and the waste we could avoid if only we could “beam” matter we now move around by boat, plane, truck or train.  Still, you know that if there were matter transporters operating anywhere, someone is going to crawl into one and try to beam himself coast-to-coast.  Many someones.  What are their chances for survival?

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) All rights reserved

In the Star Trek universe (of which I’ve been a fan since 1966), the process of matter transportation is described as the process by which a computer scans a person (storing all the information about the person within seconds), disrupts all the atoms within the body, turns the atoms into energy, shoots the energy to a remote location, converts the energy back into atoms, then reassembles the person exactly as they were in the remote location.

I have a few problems with that.

Leaving out the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle altogether (after all, they DO have a Heisenberg Compensator), the information from just one adult would take up billions of terabytes worth of computer storage.  One terabyte is 1000 gigabytes, as you know.  So, that much disc space would fill about 500 million Empire State Buildings.  Okay, suppose we solve that with DNA computers (and we will, eventually, you know).  The energy involved in turning  just one adult into pure energy is about 41 times the energy released by the largest nuclear device ever detonated on this planet (that would be the Tsar Bomba, 50 Megatons TNT… the bomb that decimated Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons TNT).  Okay, suppose we solve that little issue using the energy from matter/anti-matter conversion, and assume at the same time that we figure out how to contain such a reaction outside of unsurvivable pressures of gravity (I know, that’s a whopping assumption there), is it really “you” that’s reassembled, or a quantum replica?

Tsar Bomba fireball  Historical photograph, all rights reserved

And, by the way, wouldn’t a transporter like that be an immortality machine once your information became part of computer record?  The computer could take any matter and reassemble it back into your 26 year old self.  How would we ever be completely free of the Hitlers of the future?  And why not use transporters as eugenics machines?  Just edit out what you don’t like, and insert what you do.  Ta da.  Your own perfect little world, just for you.

And you know, you KNOW, some doofus is going to clone himself using a transporter.  So, if the replica is “you”, and YOU are “you”, which “you” is you?  Can’t you just imagine the ethical problems waiting to attack our descendants?

Hopefully, by the time our descendants gain the knowledge necessary to transport themselves around, they will also gain the wisdom to use it wisely.

And just think, how great was a show from 1966 that we still love it and pick it apart forty-four years later?  My deepest appreciation to all those involved in the creation, and portrayal, of Star Trek: The Original Series.