CtNightrider: Jason X35: Protheans:their two different things....slipspace is what they use to accelerate a ship past the speed of lght which if you didnt enter a wormhole of some kind your vessel is larger(as you get to the speed of light it grows in size) and would crash into something on its way(einsteins theory). teleportation is when you dissasamble something atom by atom, move it and then assamble it again somewhere else which we have a smaller version of this although all they can teleport is a piece of paper across the room
Point being, to disassemble a person and reassemble them is entirely different from doing to to an inanimate object. It doesn't matter if the electrons of paper are messed up when they get to the other side, but do that with a person, and maybe their heart won't work. Or they have memory loss. Or they just plain die. While physics may change in the future...currently they rule true teleportation impossible. The kind where the starting and ending objects are molecularly the same.
in theory im pretty sure you could do it. but the amount of data you would need to store is so vast its not practical. even if you were to just take all of the element location data of lets say a rock, and then send that to mars and have them make one. it would require like billions of petabytes of data. theres a good chance it would be cheaper to just send the rock to mars. and theres even more data and more accuracy needed for a person.
i dont think the uncertainty principal would apply because you would only need to store the location of each molecule/element. subatomic particles wouldnt be important.
That's true when you look at the big picture. But when you start to look at how molecules interact with one another, especially within the human body, then the precise location of each subatomic particle would be important. Mess that up and all of a sudden the hemoglobin in the human body no longer functions the way it should and the human dies. Or perhaps these subatomic uncertainties result in genetic discrepancies in the host...perhaps even cancer years later.
In short, the subatomic is very important in organic compositions. So sure, we could transport a rock, or a piece of paper, but to do so with a person, we would need to know everything about the person. Like the number of electrons on any atom, or how the atoms are paired. When it comes to the interactions, what energy levels are the electrons in? What spin do they have? Knowing these determines how the atom (or ion) interacts with other particles, and therefore drives the chemical reactions in the human body. So while the vast amount of information would be impractical, actually knowing the information is impossible.
On a side note, I should mention that I'm uncomfortable with the concept of teleportation. It would require the destruction of the original body, or at least the deconstruction of it. Doe that mean that the person at the other end is just a copy of you? Are you killed every time your particles are copied? When it comes down to it, what about the soul? If it does in fact exist (in some physical sense), can this be copied? To me, there are far too many questions left unanswered before I would ask Scotty to beam me up.