Introductory Notes
- For the video see YouTube: Teleporters: The Death Machines You Don't Want.
- The presenter seems rational and energetic, if somewhat cocky, but the Bing AI can’t tell me who he is! A commentator refers to him as ‘Simon’.
- Below, I’ve provided:-
- A fairly full Summary1 of the Video, with my comments as footnotes.
- Some overall Remarks and some further reading.
- Selected YouTube Comments, with my comments as footnotes.
- A Full Transcript.
Summary
- Ship of Theseus2: Considered from the point of just replacing its timbers – just how long does it remain the same ship? There’s no definitive answer, says the speaker.
- Now consider you – if you were fully disassembled and reassembled would you still be the same person? Regardless of the philosophy of being and human consciousness, would you even want to subject yourself to that torture3? More importantly, would such technology even be possible? Well, No, of course not – but let’s dive deeper.
- The cognates of ‘Teleportation’ date back to at least 1878 but despite being a popular convention of science fiction it wasn’t until the original Star Trek series that it really rose to prominence. Star Trek had some innovative ideas that have been picked up (cell phones) but no progress on Teleporters! Probably because the technology is impossible, but there’s another issue with the way they ‘work’ and is the reason you’d never want to step inside one of these death machines.
- How are teleporters supposed to work? Some inconsistency even within the Star Trek franchise, but essentially … Take a snapshot of every (subatomic) particle in your body and then4 rip it all apart and then rebuild you atom by atom at the target location, which is where the inconsistencies begin. It’s unclear whether the original matter is being transmitted by the transporter beam and then reassembled or whether it’s only the information that’s sent and the person is assembled using stray atoms available in the area. The first option is normally understood, which is why transporters don’t work if the ship’s shields are on, except when needed by the plot!
- There have been cases where the transporter malfunctions and creates two copies, which implies the second option since the molecules from one body couldn’t possibly create two identical full-sized humans.
- Regardless of the method, the end result is the same: your body is ripped apart atom by atom and a copy of you5 is built somewhere else. This – allegedly – only takes seconds despite creating a complete person with all their memories6; not to mention their clothes and electronic gadgets.
- But … there are so many problems with the idea of teleportation. Imagine a short hop from an orbiting spaceship to the planet’s surface, to reduce transmission time restricted by the speed of light. Now the traditional method – where your matter is broken down and transported. According to the US Airforce Research Laboratory, this would take the annual output of 75 nuclear power stations and would require heating to a million times the core temperature of the Sun – the energy required for quarks to lose their binding energy and become massless so they could be beamed at the speed of light7.
- We’re trying to beam matter, which has a habit of interacting with other matter – so that the matter that once made up you isn’t likely to arrive intact8. But ignoring this problem …
- When it comes to reassembly, there’s the human brain, which is incredibly complicated9. We’re nowhere near being able to upload human consciousness into a machine, and this is a prerequisite baby-step. Also, rather than recreating digitally, you’d have to rebuild it atom by atom10.
- The same’s true of your entire body, and there’s a massive amount of information that would need to be transferred, given that the average human body is made up of 37.2 trillion cells, each of which contains 100 trillion atoms. According to Journal of Physics: Special Topics, the amount of information to be transferred is 2.6 x 10^42 bits. How long? With current technology (30 GHz Microwave satellite) it’d take 4.85 x 10^15 years. No doubt improvements are possible, but this is only a small part of the problem.
- Even after transmitting and putting back together, we’ve just created the world’s most technologically-advanced corpse. You’d need to develop a way to animate it11.
- But … what about Quantum Teleportation? This doesn’t transfer matter but information via quantum entanglement. The current distance record is 1,400 kilometres from the Earth’s surface to an orbiting satellite. This is controversial: the teleportation is not instantaneous. While the quantum information is received instantaneously, it still requires two bits of information12 to be transmitted by traditional routes to be fully understood. While not perfect it’s a great improvement and is the guiding principle behind quantum computing.
- More recent controversies concerning quantum teleportation centre around two teams of researchers. Both have successfully demonstrated QT but both seem to undermine the credibility of the other’s research.
- Conclusion: teleporters in science fiction are simply a plot device to avoid long and tedious travel journeys. They don’t hold up to basic scrutiny. Even if the process worked, he’d rather walk than endure it.
Remarks & Further Reading
YouTube Comments14
- Regarding the initial question about the ship, the same thing happens to us humans already. Our cells keep replacing themselves until none of the original cells that you were born with exist. So when someone that knew you in your childhood meets you later in life and says "gee, I didn't recognize you, you look like a different person15"... they a right, you really are a different person. You yourself might remember the person you used to be but you simply aren't that person anymore16.
- In the Star Trek TNG episode "Realm of Fear", Lt. Barclay is transported and the audience gets to see how it is inside the transporter beam. As it is presented, it seems the person is never disassembled but remains intact and conscious as the scenery around changes from the origin to the arriving points. It is as if there is a "tunnel" that the person goes through. This is more consistent with the concept of a wormhole17. Maybe Simon could explore this in a future episode.
- Does no one remember the movie "The Fly18"? It's a really good example of how bad things can go even if a Teleporter were possible and worked (mostly) correctly.
- Even if the teleported you has the same memories as the original you, the original you essentially dies and ceases to exist. So, even though the teleported you is an exact copy, the original you walked into the teleporter to your death. The new you has the memories of your whole life, but is another wholly different person. The original you never wakes up from your disassembly (death). I wouldn't get teleported because I don't want to die, even if the teleported me goes on living as me19.
- I remember reading a book that really made me think about teleportation being horrifying. It was written by Dean Koontz I believe, and in it people started experiencing "transcription errors" such as arriving with something like the zipper from their pants being now a part of their body, or exhibiting health problems because small blood vessels were re-created slightly off and no longer met up and circulated correctly. It was described as being similar to how if you photocopy something the copy is never as crisp and accurate as the original, and was further complicated by repeated use, because you are then making a "copy of a copy of a copy20". While it never even got into the issue of consciousness at all, it was still quite scary in the way they presented the problems they did have with it.
- Funny thing about perfect/flawless teleportation; once you have gotten teleported, you are absolutely convinced it is safe. Despite you, actually dying and a clone being in the new location thinking it is the original. Since the clone remembers being teleported (but not the dying part) he thinks it is safe and will actually transfer the whole consciousness.... And everybody except the most paranoid people would constantly die and be replaced by clones. All while being 100% sure they are still the person that they were when they got first teleported. Now, to creep you out. When you follow that logic, who can guarantee, that the same thing doesn’t happen to you while you sleep21. Your Monday you goes to bed, dies in the night and your Tuesdays you wakes up.
- The worst part about the whole thing is, even if all works perfectly right, how would anyone know it’s still "you"? The person that exits the teleporter has all the memories of the teleported person, acts the same, feels the same, and of course thinks he is you. But you could be dead. Your consciousness could be gone and replaced by a completely identical22 one that thinks nothing happened.
Transcript
- Introduction:
- 0:00:The ship of Theseus is a nearly 2 000 year old thought experiment that still intrigues people to this day. The premise is that you begin with a wooden ship but over time barriers boards from the ship get replaced at what point is it no longer the original ship or can you replace every single component and still consider it to be that original same boat? It's a philosophical question that doesn't really have a definitive answer.
- 0:22: However what if we change the experiment so that it's no longer a ship but rather it is you? If you are fully disassembled and reassembled would you still be the same person? Regardless of the philosophical implications surrounding the nature of being and consciousness of humans would you even want to subject yourself to that torture and more importantly is this technology even possible? Well, no of course it's not but let's dive deeper shall we?
- History:
- 0:55: The words teleport and teleportation date back all the way to at least 1878. Despite being a popular Convention of Science Fiction it wasn't until the original Star Trek series that it really rose to prominence in the public consciousness. Who can forget all the iconic scenes of Captain Kirk pressing his communicator and saying beam me up Scotty – something that was actually never said in the show since Mr Scott was the chief engineer and usually had better things to do than operate the teleporters himself like a plebeian – but put those pedantic ramblings aside. It's important to note that despite being such a main part of the show, the teleporters were never intended to exist. They were actually a late addition to cut down on costs and the amount of wasted time showing scenes of either the Enterprise or a shuttle landing on planet and then Star Trek Enterprise came along and you know what they thought – they thought we could bore people with extended sequences of shuttlecraft because they looked good. When filming began the intention was for the crew to just fly a shuttle down each time but the model wasn't ready in time so the teleporters were introduced instead. The fact that they were never intended to be a part of the show is a good indication that they probably weren't very well thought out.
- 2:05: From cell phones to cloaking devices Star Trek has been a source of inspiration for researchers and inventors yet little work has been done with regards to teleporters is it because the technology is impossible well yeah probably but there's another issue with the way teleporters work and it's the reason that you would definitely never want to step inside one of these death machines.
- Teleporter design :
- 2:25: Even looking only at Star Trek Canon, the inner workings of a teleporter are inconsistent. Despite this we have an understanding of how they at least are generally supposed to work. The teleporter essentially takes a snapshot of every particle in your body down to the subatomic level and then rips it all apart. You'll then be rebuilt atom by atom at the Target location and this is already where the inconsistencies begin. It's generally unclear whether or not the original matter is being transmitted via the transporter beam to be reassembled or whether only the information is being sent and the person or object is being assembled using stray atoms that exist in the area. The most common interpretation is that the matter is being physically transported in the beam, which is why Transporters don't work if the ship's Shields are on except when they do because the plot needs it to happen. However, since there have been inconsistencies where a transporter malfunctioned and created two copies of the person being transported it stands to reason that they may just be using ambient particles instead. After all, all of the molecules from one human body couldn't possibly create two identical full-sized humans.
- 3:35: Now regardless of which way this is allegedly being accomplished the end result will be the same your body is ripped apart atom by atom and then a copy of you is built somewhere else. It is a process that inexplicably only takes seconds despite creating a perfect clone complete with all the original person's memories. I heard it also recreates the clothes and all of the super-complicated electronics that always function perfectly after a transport and to be honest it's kind of fair because recreating a phasor or a communicator is likely to be a lot easier than recreating a human brain with its memories intact .
- Why This Will Never Happen:
- 4:10: There are so so so many problems with the concept of teleportation. Let's assume you're just trying to travel a short distance like from an orbiting spaceship to the planet's surface by minimizing the range this reduces how long the process would take as the matter still needs to move through space and is thus bound by the speed of light if it's such short distances this issue would be relatively negligible.
- 4:33: Let's assume the more traditional approach to teleportation in which you are broken down and that physical matter is transported. According to research from the U.S Air Force Research Laboratory – because of course the military would be interested in this technology – it showed that to dematerialize a human body would require 330 Megatons of energy the process would also involve heating the person to a million times the core temperature of the Sun a temperature required for quarks to lose their binding energy and become massless so they could be beamed at the speed of light and already this is starting to sound well less than pleasant for the person being teleported but what exactly is 330 megatons of energy. That comes out to roughly 385 million megawatt hours which is the complete annual output of about 75 nuclear power stations. This is – as you imagined – a massive amount of energy and we haven't even tried to put you back together yet.
- 5:28: First we have to get you to your desired location and honestly good luck with that. The problem is we're trying to send matter and matter has this nasty tendency to interact with other matter. Even breaking down everything into massless quarks there's a good chance that all of that matter that once made you up isn't going to arrive intact.
- 5:50: Now for the sake of the argument let's just say that all the little particles that used to be you have safely beamed from the planet surface to the transporter and at this point we encounter a number of issues that have already been addressed on this channel in other topics. First of all, there's the human brain, which is really the ability to upload human consciousness into a machine and given the way transporter technology works that would be one of the many prerequisite baby steps required to make this happen. Not only would we need to be able to scan a perfect copy of your brain remotely but rather than replicating it digitally would have to rebuild it atom by atom. The same is true of your entire body and that is just an absolutely massive amount of information that would need to be transferred. A human's body is made up of roughly 37.2 trillion cells each cell contains 100 trillion atoms.
- 6:45: According to research published by the Journal of Physics Special Topics, the total amount of information that would need to be transferred is 2.6 tredicilian bits. Since you probably never heard of that word before that's 2.6 times 10 to the power of 42 bits of information that would need to be transferred. A lot! It's really a lot! So how long would that take with current technology? It's gonna take a while! The standard for satellite communications is the 30 gigahertz microwave band. That's not to say higher bandwidth solutions won't be implemented but the improvements would need to be utterly ridiculous and with current technology transmitting that amount of data would take 4.85 quadrillion years which is about 350 000 times longer than the universe has existed. This would require our existing storage and transfer capability to multiply 100 times per decade for the next two to three hundred years and that's just to store and transfer that amount of data effectively. It doesn't make any other part of it remotely possible and there's still more problems as well.
- 7:48: Let's say you successfully dismantle a person into subatomic particles, transport them somewhere and then carefully put everything back together the way it was. Well congratulations! You have just built the world's most technologically advanced corpse! To be fair, seeing as the original copy is dead as well this does make the whole process seem a bit more genuine but if this technology is going to have a use beyond expediting funeral proceedings there needs to be a way to animate that body. Just like you can't simply sew together a bunch of human parts and have it magically spring to life as a fully functional person, you can't just stack a bunch of atoms in the correct configuration and have it imbibed with life. Oh you would need to develop a way to bring those wretched homunculi to the world of the living and that technology would almost certainly have much better use than transporting you directly from your ship to a planet's surface so that you can avoid having to find parking.
- Quantum Teleportation
- 8:40: But as with many things science has given us a silver lining in the form of quantum teleportation. Quantum teleportation is not a way to transport matter from one place to another but rather a means to transport information by using quantum entanglement. The principle was first proposed by Einstein and everything was theoretical until 1993 when physicist Asher appears and a team of five other researchers began experiments with quantum teleportation. The name came from co-author Charles Bennett despite the teleportation not involving matter which is how people generally think of the word. So, since their original research, many experiments have been conducted with increased complexity of what was being transported as well as the distance involved. The current record for distance is 1,400 kilometres from Earth's surface to the mightiest satellite orbiting Earth.
- 9:29: However, much of this research remains the subject of a lot of controversy. To start the teleportation is not instantaneous. Though the quantum information from the entangled particles is received instantly, it still requires two bits of data to be transmitted through traditional means to be fully understood. It's not perfect but it's still more efficient and it is the guiding principle behind Quantum Computing.
- 9:49: Much of the other more recent controversy around quantum teleportation is centered around two different teams of researchers. Both have successfully demonstrated the application of quantum teleportation but both teams seem set on undermining the credibility of each other's research. They achieve the same end goal using different methods so the two teams are intent on showing that their method is superior and the other one is nonsense. Yep, scientists working in advanced fields for the betterment of humanity can be apparently just as petty as everybody else.
- Conclusion:
- 10:17: So, teleportation of matter will never be real and it was never really intended to be. Star Trek only introduced teleporters to their ships due to budgetary concerns but – even in other fiction – teleporters are a function of writing rather than of science. The idea of teleporters is merely a means to keep the story flowing rather than subjecting readers to chapter after chapter of some adventurer in their space shuttle talking to themselves and eating dehydrated food while slowly flying to the destination. Teleporters allow the plot to happen at an enjoyable pace without all of that pesky realism getting in the way.
- 10:50: No depiction of a teleporter in science fiction holds up to even the most basic level of scrutiny and, honestly, that's totally fine. It's probably for the best if these devices remain impossible. After all, if the guiding principle behind this futuristic technology is to expose your body to a million times the temperature of the Sun to dissolve you into subatomic particles and then rebuild you from scratch well – honestly – I’d rather walk, thank you very much.
Comment:
For the video see YouTube: Teleporters: The Death Machines You Don't Want.
In-Page Footnotes
Footnote 1:
- Before realising there was an automated Transcript, which is copyable, I made my own Summary of what the presenter has to say on this topic, though I ignored the natter about Star Trek unless it was philosophically interesting.
- My version is more focused and easier to add comments to.
Footnote 2:
- See my Note on The Ship of Theseus.
- The author doesn’t really engage with this TE – in particular with the use of the discarded planks, which might be an analogue of teleportation.
- All he’s considering is the persistence or otherwise of artifacts.
Footnote 3:
- This is a little bit glib, but if teleportation were to be as portrayed – where you gradually ‘dematerialise’ – it would be torture because – as is demonstrated – you’d be ripped apart.
- What’s useful about this video is that it points out (a version of) just what would be needed for teleportation to become a reality.
- The assumption in general philosophical accounts that you can just be ‘scanned’ is absurdly simplistic. Just how would this be done other than completely destroying you? The thought that the original might be retained is impossible.
- What is not impossible is reduplication (on the assumption that the rest of the procedure is possible, and that only information is transmitted).
- This video doesn’t consider the logic of the situation, only the practicalities.
Footnote 4:
- This isn’t possible. You can’t take a snapshot without doing the ripping apart.
Footnote 5:
- While I agree that the teletransportee is a copy, this is contentious and the philosophical point of interest. It can’t just be assumed.
Footnote 6:
- The presenter seems to think memories would be a particular problem.
- Since the proposed methodology is brute force decomposition into quarks, the extra information content of memories is rather trivial.
Footnote 7:
- Why is this really required?
- And is it true that disengaged quarks travel at the speed of light?
Footnote 8:
- Well, yes. Dissociated quarks are as about as highly interacting as you can get – with one another, for a start.
- Also, as you need the full blueprint in order to make the reassembly, there’s little point sending the matter as well, unless there’s insufficient available locally.
Footnote 9:
- Well, it is; but it depends at what level we’re talking about, and what aspects are significant.
- According to the ‘connectome’ view underlying ‘uploading’, it’s assumed that all that matters is the neurons as points and then their connections to all the other points.
- But – in reality – that’s only the tip of the iceberg. I’m not just talking about hormones and all that, but the ‘information’ contained in a single cell.
Footnote 10:
- Well, yes. A major miracle occurs in the films, where there’s no ‘receptor pod’.
- Were there such a receptor, presumably it’d only work with ‘information’ (or it’d be destroyed by the matter beam).
- Maybe there could be a lot of compression in the data sent, and a lot of local knowledge about how to make the rebuild using local matter.
Footnote 11:
- This question about ‘animation’ is interesting. I don’t imagine he’s talking about a life force. But life is an event, and simply transferring and reconstituting the matter doesn’t necessarily restart this event – or does it, if it’s really done atom-by-atom?
Footnote 12:
- Why this is so isn’t explained, but is covered in some of the references I give later.
- Quite how QT is supposed to work isn’t explained. Experiments are performed at the level of atoms.
- How does each of your atoms get entangled with another atom at the destination? Is this even the idea?
Footnote 14:
- These are not my comments; mine appear as footnotes to these!
- I need to add links to my own Notes as well.
- I’ve ignored simple-minded or repetitious items.
Footnote 15:
- Note that this is a purely physical difference rather than the usual ‘not the same person’ for reasons of radically-changed psychology. ‘Person’ is used here in the sense of ‘Human Being’ (the singular of Olson’s ‘people’).
Footnote 16:
- This is an intelligent but non-philosophical comment. There is a parallel between the two cases even though the one refers to artifacts and the other to organisms.
- It denies that anything persists and espouses mereological essentialism.
- I’m in two minds at the moment whether such a position is unsound or merely not useful.
- Most philosophers seem to take the position that organisms persist in the ‘strict an philosophical sense’, but that artifacts may or may not.
- Yet, even in the artefactual case, we want to say that my car – say – for legal and practical reasons – is the same car from one day to the next.
Footnote 17:
- The use of wormholes – were this theoretically – and technologically – possible – would be much more likely to be identity-preserving than matter or information beams.
- But, presumably, the end-points of the wormhole would need to specified - and the wormhole built – in advance, so wouldn’t have the flexibility of the Star Trek-style teleporter.
Footnote 18:
- This is discussed in "Kaku (Michio) - Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel", Chapter 4.
- The point here is that even if the teleporter worked ‘in theory’ it might malfunction ‘in practice’ for a multitude of reasons. It would remain a risky endeavour (though this isn’t philosophically interesting).
- It raises questions about just what ‘you’ are, in this context and just how the teleporter distinguishes ‘you’ from alien matter.
- ‘Information’ needs to be transmitted along with matter so that reconstruction can take place. If this was simple 3D coordinates, then reconstruction wouldn’t need to distinguish ‘you’ from ‘non-you’.
- However, given all the juggling that goes on at the atomic level (not to mention the macroscopic level’), providing 3D coordinates to the level of accuracy required would be impossible.
- Maybe some sort of AI would be able to sort out the mess?
Footnote 19:
- This is my view – and that of many philosophers – exactly.
- Philosophers such as Parfit – while admitting that this is the case – don’t care, saying that we would have all that matters in survival. For him, ‘living as’ is (almost) as good as ‘living’.
- This commentator has also picked up on the difference between forward and backward psychological continuity.
Footnote 20:
- This ‘repeat photocopy’ idea is a serious objection to repeated teleportation as a form of travel. No doubt there could be some sort of ‘parity bit’ included to pick up transcription errors, as for read-write errors or general data transmission; but what would you do if errors were found? Error correction would require retransmission of packages. But how tiny would these need to be?
- Maybe the method of transmission – matter versus information – is important here. But – as noted elsewhere – information would need to be transmitted to provide a blueprint for reassembly (unless, as one commentator whose ramblings I ignored suggested, the matter somehow ‘knows’ how it fits together. This sounds absurd, but in a quantum free-for-all, who knows?).
- See Wikipedia: Dean Koontz. I don’t expect I’ll ever read any of his books, though there are aspects of his character – Catholicism and dogs – that might be interesting.
Footnote 21:
- The first part of this comment is as previous ones. I agree that the dying / replacement (while not accepted as this, given that it would not seem to have any adverse consequences) would become culturally embedded; it might even become necessary practice in order to hold down a job if it became the only possibility for commuting. It might even become necessary in order to visit your family (even though it wouldn’t be you that did the arriving). Only the most philosophically steadfast could resist the temptation to go along with the crowd, and would be considered stupidly timid by society as a whole.
- Sleep is an important issue in this (and many another) context. It was raised by Locke, if only in his day and night persons, with incommunicable consciousnesses.
- But, given that ‘backward’ psychological continuity is no guarantee of identity, further indicators are required to assure us of our persistence after a sound night’s sleep. Physical continuity – in the form of ‘waking up in the same bed’ – is usually sufficient. In the case where I wake up in hospital after some nocturnal misadventure, a sensible story of how I got there will do.
- One could always invent scenarios where you don’t have knowledge, even though your belief is justified (or even true), but these situations are of no practical concern except to the paranoid.
- I suppose this shows that ‘theory’ as well as ‘raw experience’ is critical to our confidence in our persistence over time.
Footnote 22:
- ‘Exactly similar’ is intended.
- I nearly deleted this comment as it is ‘exactly similar’ (well, ‘fairly similar’, anyway) but it shows that the – too me – sensible interpretation of what’s happening in teleportation is fairly widespread even amongst YouTubers.
- I just add here (as I’ve done elsewhere) that the logical positivists would have dismissed the whole argument about whether or not I survive as ‘meaningless’ as no empirical evidence can establish the truth either way. This just goes to show that theory as well as empirical facts are essential if we wish to interpret the facts correctly. Some theories need to go beyond the facts (hmmm … I’m not altogether comfortable with this; I’m not sure where it might lead.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)