The Unfortunate Reality of Teleportation
Why we may never want to use this technology
The truth is that teleportation already exists. It was theorized in a 1935 paper written by Einstein and two of his colleagues, Podolsky and Rosen. It was later proven in experiments during the 1990’s. For decades we have known that it is possible, at the quantum level, to teleport particles from one location to another. There are no laws of physics which prevent human beings and objects from dematerializing in a surreal cloud of particles in one location and rematerializing somewhere very distant, somewhere like the slick moon-white ice fields of the Arctic or among the pollen-dusted flowers of the European countryside. Nature does not prevent us from traveling to a different point in space in a short amount of time. In fact, one of the deepest problems regarding teleportation comes not in the form of science but in the form of philosophy.
Would you die time and again to travel to a faraway part of the world? Would you be alright knowing that the original bodies of your loved ones would be destroyed only to be replaced by an indistinguishable copy at the other end? The idea of teleportation asks us first to answer the question of what makes us who we are. There are some of us which believe that our personalities and memories, that our entire identities, are tied up in the…
