Man Will Teleport When Pigs Fly (or Teleport)

I expect to see some pretty amazing technological developments over the coming decades, but I am quite certain that the teleportation of organic beings will not be one of them.

There are two particularly intriguing sci-fi notions that come up regularly in physics lectures as well as fantasy films, and they are time travel and teleportation.  I am often asked which feat will be accomplished first by man.  I believe that travelling instantaneously along the dimension of time is actually more feasible than doing so across a dimension of space. 

Einstein’s special relativity shows that the universe allows matter to travel forward in time (although travelling backwards in time may not be permissible).  All one must do to travel forward in time is move at a very high velocity, near the speed of light (300,000 km/s).  Einstein showed that accelerating mass to such extreme velocities requires a tremendous amount of energy; so, it is difficult and costly, but not outside the realm of possibility.

Imagine for a moment that a high speed train were to circle the equator at near light speed on a fixed path.  The clocks on the train would run slower, and the passengers would age slower than if they were sitting stationary on the Earth.  Unfortunately, the centripetal acceleration of the circular motion would not allow the train to stay on this fixed course (it would fly out into orbit).  Also, the frictional losses would be enormous.  The only practical place to perform forward time travel is likely in outer space, where there are no effects of friction.

Travelling backwards in time requires faster than light travel (tachyon speeds), but light speed seems to be a firm boundary that no matter can exceed.  In any case, if it were possible to travel backwards in time, we would expect to have met time travellers from the future at some point, and to my knowledge, we have not encountered any as of yet.  Back to the Future is a phenomenal film, but it is sheer fantasy.

Teleportation would be a real game-changer for mankind.  Transporting matter around the Earth (be it living or non-living) takes so much energy and time.  While teleportation would likely require vast amounts of energy, the time of travel would reduce to nearly zero assuming near light speed transmission – once you clear customs.

My Aunt, who was a very bright woman, once insisted that I stop studying space elevators, and instead, focus all of my efforts on teleportation.  That way, she would no longer have to drive to work, or anywhere else for that matter.  I told her a space elevator could actually exist in my lifetime, while teleportation cannot.  She was unimpressed - a space elevator could not facilitate her morning commute. 

While there is a scientific basis for how time travel can occur, there is none for teleportation.  The most realistic concept was depicted well in the 1986 re-make of The Fly. 

In the film, a scientist builds two pods (one for departure, and another for arrival).  However, the matter does not actually get transported from one pod to the other.  The matter inside the first pod is chemically analyzed and then vaporized.  Then, the information is sent to the second pod, which attempts to re-synthesize the same matter that was in the original pod.  Teleportation infers near-instantaneous transport, while what occurs in the film is a two-step process: decomposition and creation.

The scientist had created a chemical photocopier, not a transporter.  While the invention would be ground-breaking, no person would use it to get to work in the morning.  Rather than being transported, they would be killed and then newly regenerated at work – not a good way to start the day.  Oh, and be warned:  if a housefly happens to join you in pod 1, you will die a horrible death over the coming weeks (I have a sudden urge to re-watch The Fly with my brother).

On one hand, it really is too bad that teleportation will not be realized in the foreseeable future.  So much of life consists of moving stuff from one location to another.  Looking ahead to the next flight I plan on taking, it would be nice to bypass the experience, arrive at my destination, and know with certainty that my luggage would too.

On the other hand, transport can be a lot of fun.  Imagine adolescence without road trips, or camping without canoeing.  Often, getting there is the best part.  Ralph Waldo Emerson had it right: “Life is a journey, not a destination”.  

The Space Elevator

There are two main reasons why, for the past sixty years, man has launched rockets from the surface of the Earth. 

The first reason is to place satellites into an orbit around our planet.  The moon is a Celestial body that orbits the Earth in an elliptical fashion at an average of about 380,000 km away from the Earth.  Other than this large body and other small space debris that orbit the Earth, all other bodies that do so were placed in their respective orbits by man to serve some purpose.  One can think of an orbit as a path that a falling object takes continuously around a larger body.  Much in the way that a baseball’s path curves to fall towards the Earth once it is thrown, an orbit is in a perpetual state of falling.  The difference is that the orbiting body is moving much faster than the baseball (think kilometres per second), and the baseball faces the resistance of air, whereas the drag forces in space are negligible. 

It boggles the mind, but we (and when I say we, I mean America and Russia) have transported thousands of satellites into space.  Most satellites are used for communication, be it internet, phone, or television, while some are used for Earth observation leading to weather prediction, the tracking of oil spills, and the marvel that is Google Earth.  Most satellites are located hundreds of kilometres above the surface of the Earth (note that an airplane’s altitude rarely exceeds 12 km) in an area known as LEO (Low Earth Orbit).  

Another popular zone is at the GEO (Geosynchronous) altitude of about 35,800 km altitude; this is a special altitude for which the orbital period of a satellite is the same as that of the Earth.  If one were to stand on the equator and stare up at an equatorial GEO satellite, one would observe no motion at all.  It would be as though the satellite were attached to the Earth by an invisible cord.  The typical operational life of a satellite is fifteen years.  As such, the majority of satellites currently in orbit are decommissioned and commonly referred to as space junk.

The other reason for which man sends payloads to space via rockets is for interplanetary travel.  Such ventures are done in the name of research, observation, exploration, and discovery.  Sometimes these payloads contain astronauts, as in some trips to the moon, but often these are unmanned missions, or probes, investigating, for example, Mars or Saturn’s moons.  The missions are very exciting, sometimes providing answers to important scientific questions, other times demonstrating what we can achieve when we put our minds to it; the 1969 moon landing was perhaps the defining moment, technologically speaking, of the twentieth century. 

An even more formidable task would be sending man on a return trip to Mars.  The greater distance to Mars as well as the greater Martian escape velocity means that the payload leaving the Earth would be much more massive than that for Apollo 11.  Also, the trip length (years instead of days) would make the challenge for the astronauts far greater.  However, it is the issue of the large mass which makes the Mars mission unrealistic today.  Transporting mass away from the Earth using rockets is prohibitively expensive.  The cost for satellite placement in GEO is in the area of $10,000 US per kilogram of payload; it is substantially greater for interplanetary travel. 

In today’s space industry, every gram is questioned.  In order for a payload to achieve the escape velocity required for interplanetary travel, over 90% of the mass leaving the Earth must consist of fuel; this is a chemical constraint associated with rocket travel.  For this reason and others, the rocket will probably not be the principal mode of travel used to escape the Earth’s gravity fifty years from now.  

The most promising upgrade from the conventional rocket appears to be the space elevator, which could reduce the cost to GEO to as low as one hundred or even ten dollars per kg (reducing satellite placement costs by at least a factor of one hundred).  An operational space elevator, which would carry no fuel, would open up space to mankind; it would bridge the gap between us and the vastness we see when we stare up at night, both figuratively and literally.