Ten Things the Future will hold! (2)

2. Teleportation

"Personally, I would never use a transporter because the original Sheldon would have to be disintegrated in order to create a new Sheldon."

-Sheldon Cooper

For human teleportation to occur, such a machine would have to exist which analyzed all the 10^28 atoms (more than a trillion trillion) in the human body record their exact position, send this information to the other location and then reconstruct these atoms in exactly the right place - even a few mistakes could result in deformities or abnormalities.
 In a sense though this isn't really teleportation but killing someone and re-creating a 'clone' of them - which does have some problems ...
For one, I don't think it would be pleasant to die by having every atom in my body disintegrated every time I wanted to go on holiday; not a very effective way of travelling. And another point is - even if this person is technically 'you' what happens to your very essence? Your mind? Your memories? Your every characteristic?

Beam me up, Scotty!

This seems scary to me as I don't think dying then having a different person take over my body seems like a nice way of getting from Point A to B. Hopefully less harmful ways of teleportation will be realised in the future.

At the minute the biggest breakthrough we have made in the field of teleportation is teleporting a laser beam stored in a cloud of atoms, which involves teleportation between the laser light and the matter of the cloud and atoms. 

It's not much but it has come far from a single photon. As long as we keep going one step further: another sub-atomic particle e.g neutron, an atom, a molecule for example a molecule water, more complex molecules or structures of molecules, small micro bacterial life or single cell organisms - eventually we could be able to teleport small animals or even humans!

These advancements are nowhere near our technology or knowledge today however maybe one day we could take a little holiday to Mars - without the arduous journey.

Thanks for reading, Chris.