Part of the Grand Unified FTL series.
WARNING: this article may contain numbers.
Previously
We glanced at “portals”: magic doors between one volume of space and the next.
Now we look at what I’m calling teletransport, i.e. the Star Trek transporter extended to transport across light years.
How Teletransport Works
Teletransporters disassemble a person or thing into atoms, subatomic particles, or “energy”, fling them across space, and reassemble them as they were at the beginning of the process in another star system.
How they can do this has spawned numerous science fictional and philosophical papers. The latter category has codified the Teletransportation Paradox. Is the person who emerges on the other side the same as the person disintegrated for the sake of rapid transit? What if the process wasn’t destructive? Would both copies be the same person? Can you record enough information to reassemble a person on the other side, especially given the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? Isn’t tearing someone into subatomic bits normally considered murder?
And all because a TV producer wanted to cut costs by avoiding shuttle takeoff and landing effects.
(Projectors do the same thing without tearing people into subatomic particles, but to each their own.)
Questions About Teletransport
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Must teletransporters have a sender and receiver at both ends?
The classic Star Trek transporter doesn’t. According to one bit of technobabble the transporter wraps targets in a remote force field, turns them into a “matter stream” and an “information stream”, then stores them in the transporter to reintegrate on the transporter pad or in some other remote location.
Transmats in classic Doctor Who, on the other hand, more sensibly assumed a transmat pad at both ends. This limits the usefulness of teletransportation since someone has to have traveled to the location to construct a pad. In novels and tabletop role-playing games, though, we don’t need to worry about the budget for landing a shuttle on a planet, only the speed (and energy cost?) for doing so.
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How much does the teletransporter send?
Ideally it sends a whole person and their gear. One can of course buy gear.
In Altered Carbon and Neptune’s Brood technology uploaded and downloaded only a travelers mind, and the receiving station instantiated them in a clone body, a stock “blank” body, or a specialized “shell”, depending on the traveler’s purpose and reserves of cash. This possibility seems ideally suited to Eclipse Phase and similar post-human or transhumanist settings.
In The Strange from Monte Cook Games psychic travelers entered synthetic worlds like players inhabiting avatars … except if you die in The Strange, you die in real life.
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What happens to the original when a person is teletransported?
Star Trek notionally breaks the original person into a “matter stream” that is then reassembled on the other end. Except in those cases when people are conscious of being transported, in which case it almost acts like a projector.
James Patrick Kelly’s award winning 1995 novelette “Think Like a Dinosaur” imagined a more morally ambiguous technology: the original is put to sleep and dissolved into component atoms … unless there’s a transmission error, in which case the original must be woken up … and then killed if the transmission did, in fact, go through.
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How fast does the “signal” propagate?
In the worst case, as in Altered Carbon, at the speed of light. Humans beaming themselves to another star, therefore, will take years to arrive and years to return, during which time the universe has moved on without them. For some people, like Altered Carbon’s ultra-rich or the A.I.-descended posthumans of Neptune’s Brood, that’s fine: they’re effectively immortal and interplanetary society has slowed to a crawl. For the majority of classic humans who still live less than 100 years, it’s a problem.
For the sake of our space opera we can posit some faster-than-light communication technology that makes beaming across the stars no less disruptive than hyperspace travel, jump drive, portals, or warp engines. See those sections for possible speeds and travel times.
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What’s the maximum range of teletransportation?
That depends entirely upon the signal technology.
See an upcoming article for a discussion about FTL communications.
Teletransport Bandwidth
Many examples of teletransport brush aside questions of how long it takes to transmit enough information to reconstruct a human being. In Star Trek the process takes only a few seconds, possibly more depending on that week’s crisis. Neptune’s Brood limited transmission to the speed of light and the traveler’s synthetic brain patterns, but never said exactly how long it took to transmit said patterns using a giant laser.
As with Jump Drive, it’s an interesting thought experiment, if not exactly convenient for ongoing campaigns, if transmission took days, months, or years even beyond the slowness of light speed. Transport to another star, and you won’t be back “home” for years, maybe decades.
In another interesting variation, if the matter at each end comes from that end rather than a nebulous matter stream, perhaps transmitting certain equipment takes longer. The transmat station has plentiful supplies of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and the trace elements of a humanoid body and their clothing. Transmitting iron and steel may delay the process a bit, so it’s sent separately. Exotic energy weapons require exotic materials which take much longer to source. And so on. It’s easier to buy locally than transmit all your gear, especially if some of it is psionically (or magically!) enhanced.
Teletransport Variations
Psychic Teletransport
H. P. Lovcraft’s “The Shadow Out Of Time” presents a prehistoric species, the Great Race, that projects their minds forward and backward through time to swap minds with, say, a human from 1920s Earth who starts acting strangely and ends up in a mental institution.
Rules for psychic powers are beyond the scope of this document. One could treat it like brain uploads and downloads, only with alien crystals instead of barely plausible hacker technobabble.
Wormhole Transmission
The transmission beam passes through a portal that’s too small or volatile for matter, but it can transmit signals to the other side. This variant assumes sending and receiving stations at both ends of the wormhole, but range, speed, and bandwidth become irrelevant.
“Think Like a Dinosaur” features this kind of teletransportation. The Strange, mentioned above, uses some sort of psychic or metaphysical transference so it’s effectively the same thing save that “avatars” either appear in a default location or their last location before they returned to Earth.
Next
We consider another Star Trek plot device, the warp drive.