Transporting a falling object.

[Agen]

If someone would jump out of an airplane and fall for, let say one minute, his/her speed would be great. But if someone would use a machine to transport him/her to 1 cm above the surface of the earth, would he/she still get killed? If you transport him/her, would his/her kinetic energy also be transported and his/her speed would still be fast enought to kill him/her?

[ronthepon]

How does the transporter machine work? The person will die if the speed is great.

 

Now, it depends on the transporter machine on wether the person will have the speed or not, when it gets him one centimetre above the earth.

[Agen]

Lets just say that the machine will transport all of his molecules and atoms instantly and exactly as they where when he person was falling. I see no reason why his speed would be zeroed.

[ronthepon]

So it is teleportation, in other words.

 

If it like:

the machine will transport all of his molecules and atoms instantly and exactly as they were

Then there is really no reason to believe that the velocities will be zeroed.

 

You realise that this is all fictional hypothesising, don't you?

 

Teleportation is nothing but fantasy, and I have not come across any truly viable method to perform teloeportation by actually 'transporting' the molecules.

[Mercedes Benzene]

Teleportation is nothing but fantasy, and I have not come across any truly viable method to perform teloeportation by actually 'transporting' the molecules.

 

But they did it in that one movie: Willy Wonka!!

pfftt. :eek: :)

[CraigD]

Lets just say that the machine will transport all of his molecules and atoms instantly and exactly as they where when he person was falling. I see no reason why his speed would be zeroed.

Preamble: I don’t intend to give a personal opinion, just summarize the consensus of scientists and technologists on the subject of “matter teleporting” machines – “teleporters”.

 

Teleporters come in 4 major varieties, defined by 2 2-state categories

• Perfect duplication - no change in quantum numbers of any particle, other than position)
  
• ”Good enough” duplication – “teleported” article is enough like original to do what
• Transmission speed limited to the speed of light (eg: radio signal)
  
• Instantaneous (eg: ansible)
  

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle places limitations on the precision of measuring position and momentum that make “perfect duplication” a physical impossibility. Likewise actual quantum theory strongly suggest that “ansibles” permitting information to be transmitted faster than the speed of light are physically impossible.

 

Lightspeed/good enough teleporters of a sort have been around for over a century. Using modern technology a digital image of the design of an object obtained by measuring that object, transmitted by radio to a factory capable of making a copy of the object, is a teleporter of this sort.

 

The image invoked by the term “teleporter” for most people is of the “transporter” from the Star Trek TV series and movies, which can move a living human being from one location to another over any distance from a few meters to many hundreds of kilometer. This fictional device is shown moving people from a fast-moving spacecraft to a standstill on the surface of a planet, clearly able to change the teleported objects collective velocity as easily as its position.

 

Whether such a device is in principle possible depends on how accurately a human being must be duplicated to be “good enough” to have all the qualities of the original person. Current speculative theories disagree on this question, some suggesting that a “resolution” sufficient to assure that individual cells are arranged in a merely close approximation of their original arrangement, with approximately the same important proteins and chemical levels would work, while others suggest that the resolution would have to be much finer, to the level of individual atoms. Without somehow cooling the person to near absolute zero, somehow without fatally injuring them, this level of resolution is physically impossible.

[Qfwfq]

Lets just say that the machine will transport all of his molecules and atoms instantly and exactly as they where when he person was falling. I see no reason why his speed would be zeroed.

If I understand what you're trying to say, wouldn't that be as if the plane were flying just above the surface instead of higher up?

 

It takes a while for the body to loose the horizontal velocity, and I wouldn't like to be rubbing against the ground like that. The fastest I've ever fallen to the ground at was when I slipped with a motorbike at some 80 km/h and it wasn't exatly amusing. It took ages before I actually stopped; all along it seemed I almost had but, nope, yet more sliding along....

[Agen]

Eee... no I said that the person had already jumped out of the plane and had fallen for a minute, in that case there should'nt be much horizontal velocity.

[Janus]

If someone would jump out of an airplane and fall for, let say one minute, his/her speed would be great. But if someone would use a machine to transport him/her to 1 cm above the surface of the earth, would he/she still get killed? If you transport him/her, would his/her kinetic energy also be transported and his/her speed would still be fast enought to kill him/her?

 

What you are basically asking is whether such teleportation would adhere to the law of conservation of momentum.

 

If the conservation of momentum holds, then yes, his kinetic energy would have to go with him. Not only that, but if the conservation of energy holds, his gravitational potential energy would also have to come with him.

 

This potential energy could then manifest itself in a couple of ways:

It could be disipated as heat, meaning the persons temperature would rise to compensate.

Or it could just be converted to kinetic energy by adding to the person's existing downward velocity. (The person would hit the ground with the same velocity as he would have if he continued his fall). An interesting point about this is that if he would have continued falling naturally, due to air friction, he could only hit at terminal velocity. By teleporting him, you bypass the air and he will hit with the velocity he would have had if he had fallen through a vacuum. IOW, He would hit the ground harder if you teleport him than he would if you let him continue his fall.

 

In this second case, it would then not matter whether the person jumped from the plane first. (ignoring his horizontal component). In fact, a person standing on a mountain top trying to teleport to sea level would arrive with the same velocity as someone who fell formt he same height.

 

Going the other way creates another problem. Where does the energy needed to teleport from Sea level to mountain top come from?

 

All of this is just pure speculation however, because we don't have any idea of how such a teleportation system would actually function.

[Qfwfq]

Eee... no I said that the person had already jumped out of the plane and had fallen for a minute, in that case there should'nt be much horizontal velocity.

Then it would simply be as if the plane were flying at a hight equal to how far vertically the person drops during that minute.

[myspip90]

He should die...

Imagine this equivalent scenario:

The guy falls for one minute, and after that minute he is 1 cm above the ground. So he reaches ground slightly after one minute from the moments he starts falling...