Beam Me Up Scotty

[PiSquare]

Yes, I confess! I watched the latest Star Trek movie and I am forever hooked on the 'Beam' technology. "Beam me up Scotty" was first introduced to the world in 1966 and it is entertaining and enlightening to see how the technology of the Starship Enterprise advanced, always a few steps (or decades) ahead of our real-world technology. Or not? 

 

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that, whatever is shown in movies, is also in the process of being developed in the real-world or already in use for top secret projects. With all the previous series and feature films I thought life on earth as depicted by the Star Trek cast is just a small speck of dust on the horizon, but while watching the latest movie it hit me like a lightning bolt - we are not too far away from gliding above the earth's surface in aerodynamic auto-mobiles, living in cities strictly regulated by zero-tolerance rules where nothing escapes the eye of Big Brother, transporting (or 'beaming') from one city to another or from earth to some huge satellite station, and embarking on journeys to explore other galaxies.

 

Will I see and experience this in my lifetime? You bet I will! 

[Buffy]

It's always good to hope and even work toward making it happen, but...

 

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that, whatever is shown in movies, is also in the process of being developed in the real-world or already in use for top secret projects. 

 

...no, don't do that...

 

 

 

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable, :phones:

Buffy

[PiSquare]

Given, it might be true that there would be no need for 'flying' cars, but I am not yet convinced when it comes to public transport. Have a look at this article - a precursor to the concept 'low-flying', perhaps?

[ErlyRisa]

The flying car thing - actually may NEED to be done...

 

A - A Vehicle conceived from wheels, through its evolution (cart, buggy, car, f1, etc) requires comfort for women, therefore

we invented tyres - we ain't got the oil for it anymore.

B - A well groomed road with a hockey puck vehicle is more efficient than rolling wheels.

C - On the whole - employment wise for the next generation...they are going to need something todo: Hummers are not the answer - I can make one out of wood - no offence to the designers -> for the price of a Honda Civic.

D - The new generation have seen things on the Xbox/Playstation/Wii --> a 4 wheeled vehicle is so fricken YAWN.

 

and finally, there have, and are materials available today, and methods to shape and produce the most wonderous of toys - > barring the establishment and their psyche for not being able to procure or have the imagination to be able to conceive anything other than another LAW --> you can always build a Luftballoon out of Hemp Cloth and a heat source! - hell I want 99 of them!

 

 

-Teleportation: Even if the formula for it were open source (which it technically is - to any half brained physicist it is) -> would it not be chaos?

-True, we started with smell language, then touch, then sound, sight etc  eg. Morse, then Phone, then TV, then Internet, then Beam me up Scotty

--you know all those systems are actually a service - are you sure you want to trust Scotty with the beaming procedure - what happens if the Verizon is the holder of your credit card info and something happens halfway in the transaction?, personally I wouldn't even trust another technicians, formula, to build one in the first place, I would rather figure it out for myself and run the experiment myself, without any external influence...sort of like trusting an aerodynamic formula from the internet to build your plane....better go to a university first. Amazingly enough, so far engineers have been nice enough to build us computers and the internet - Why? I am unsure, personally if I had that kind of intelligence I would have built a spaceship and left everyone behind to re-invent the wooden cart.

 

Am I making sence guys?

[CraigD]

Yes, I confess! I watched the latest Star Trek movie and I am forever hooked on the 'Beam' technology. "Beam me up Scotty" was first introduced to the world in 1966 and it is entertaining and enlightening to see how the technology of the Starship Enterprise advanced, always a few steps (or decades) ahead of our real-world technology. Or not?

I was born in 1960, and like many of my generation, faithfully, one might even say fanatically watched each episode of Star Trek on TV. In my early teens, I was more-or-less a Trekie, having a modest library of “technical” manuals, models, etc.

 

Transporters delighted me, and at until my education introduced me to post 1900 physics, seemed plausible, even inevitable, to me. The technical impossibility of transporters, due to the uncertainty principle, was by the mid 1970s well known in technical treckie fandom, having been enshrined in a fictional transporter subdevice called, tongue-in-cheek, “the Heisenberg compensator”. Perhaps the pithiest acknowledgements of this came decades later in an interview with STTNG graphics lead designer and fandom guru Michael Okuda, who when asked "how does the Heisenberg compensator work?", responded “it works very well, thank you”.

 

In my experience, most physics literate STrek wonks end their serious “could it, in principle, work” consideration of transporters with their violation of the uncertainty principle. I think it’s fun – and scientifically defensible – to assume a workaround of this failure (for example, assume that every particle in every atom of every molecule in or that will every be in the important parts of the person to be transported has been carefully replaced with one of a pair of artificially generated particles, where the other particle has been saved and physically moved to the “receiving” end of the transported beaming) and consider, then, more practical problems involved in building a transporter.

 

The main problem is that that there are a lot of particles the object to be transported (a human body) – about 10²⁸ atoms. Even if you have a technology that can measure the position and velocity of every atom (let’s assume “quantum consciousness” theories are incorrect, and the transporter only has to work to atomic, not sub-atomic, resolution) Let’s assume the state of each atom can be sufficiently stored in 26 bytes (3x4 bytes position, 3x4 bytes velocity, 2 byte describing the atom), so there’s 2.6 x 10 ²⁹ bytes of data to be sent. The fastest data transfer rate demonstrated to date approaches to within a tenth of 10¹⁴ bytes/s (about 1,000,000 times the highest performance everyday hardware’s). At this rate, it would take about 100,000,000 years to transfer the needed data.

 

Of course, as in present day data communication, we can assume the data transfer would be done using many paths, in parallel. For example, if 10⁹ (one billion) channels were used, the transfer would take about 26 days.

 

A problem, of course, every atom of a human body doesn’t remains unchanging for anywhere near this long. Taking as correct our assumption of 4-byte numbers being enough to store a component of the position of an atom, and that the maximum speed of an atom in a human body is about 1000 m/s, we need our transporter to take a “snapshot” – transfer all the data, in about 10^-13 seconds. For this, we’d need to have about 10²⁸ channels.

 

10²⁸ is a big number, about 1,000,000 times the total number of bytes of storage in the world.

 

This leads me to guess that transporters like those in STrek, even with a working “Heisenberg compensator” scheme, won’t be possible in a technological setting even vaguely resembling the shows'.

 

Another piece of STrek fandom lore worth knowing on the subject of transporters is that they were invented by the folk that made the first, pilot episode (The Cage) because they didn’t have enough money and time to do what they’d originally planned, which was to show a shuttlecraft flying from the Enterprise to the surface of Talos IV. A bit of experimentation with a camera, lights, aluminum powder, and conventional film fade in/out techniques, and they had the quicker to make, less expensive special effect fans came to know and delight in.

 

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that, whatever is shown in movies, is also in the process of being developed in the real-world or already in use for top secret projects.

I don’t see how you can actually have thought this belief through, PiSquare! Or are you joking provocatively with us?

 

Some of the most famous SF movies in history (for example, 1977’s Star Wars) were made with conscious knowledge that what was being show isn’t physically possible. Do you believe that any science or engineering enterprise, secret or otherwise, would be funded and staffed to do something that anyone capable of such an enterprise knows with near certainty is impossible?

 

Some movies (for example, 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) were made with a conscious effort to depict and encourage near-future-possible science and technology. Others were and continue to be made for pure, escapist entertainment.

[Alex358]

I am more inclined to believe that conceptually, science fiction writers imagine what a future techno gadget would be like (for use in their writings) and then because many innovative minds run along the same lines, the items are then created when the need is realized. Coincidence or not really; but also not a conspiracy in my mind.

[Jewbacca92]

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable, :phones:

Buffy

Well, some faithful scientist out there has accomplished the impossible. This was only the teleportation of data, but it can be theorized that matter is data at the atomic/sub-atomic level.

 

http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/30/physicists-claim-reliability-breakthrough-in-quantum-teleportati/

[Kelzan]

As much as I'd like to see a transporter I do not see it happening in our lifetime and it may well be impossible. I can't say for sure it is because things once thought impossible are reality today and as our understanding of the way the universe works improves new things become possible. But not everything imagined in science fiction is possible.

 

I think AI is inevitable and that machines will eventually be able to do all physical tasks a human can do and do them better and someday be cheap enough so that the average middle class home can afford one or more.  Household chores will be something people do not have to do anymore if they have a helper-bot, and these bots will be able to respond to verbal commands and learn from experience.

 

FTL travel may also be impossible but humanity will colonize the solar system.