12 Challenges to achieving Teleportation | Shorts Supercut

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Energize. Captain Kirk vanishes in a shimmer of light and reappears on a planet. Teleportation has been part of science fiction and mythology, if we're being honest, for as long as we've been telling stories. It's the ultimate shortcut. Go anywhere instantly.

[00:00:20]These are 12 challenges to building a transporter. And this is number one.

[00:00:26]What is teleportation really? Star Trek's original explanation was that the transporter converts a person into a matter stream and then beams them through space. Now, that sounds pretty good until you remember what matter actually is. You see, matter is made of atoms. Now, atoms have mass and charge.

[00:00:49]So, they interact with electric and magnetic fields. And more importantly, they interact with other atoms. Now, that interaction, electrons repelling electrons, it's the reason you can't walk through a wall. And it's also why you can't simply beam a human being through the ship's hull down through the atmosphere to the surface of the planet.

[00:01:14]Every atom on the way would collide with countless others, and most of them would be scattered or maybe absorbed. None would arrive in anything like the correct order. Now, as a physical process, a matter stream simply doesn't survive contact with real atoms in real space. So, the original idea doesn't work. Now, later, Star Trek shifted towards a different concept. The transporter still handles matter, but the transmission is essentially information. You scan the person, record them at some unimaginably fine resolution, and then transmit that data as electromagnetic signals. That at least avoids trying to shove atoms through other atoms. And it's much closer to the actual physics question.

[00:02:06]Teleportation is really about information, not matter. If you wanted to teleport something, the only viable route is to measure its full physical state. positions, momentum, quantum states, a whole lot. Convert that into data, send the data, and then reconstruct the object at the destination.

[00:02:27]Now, this immediately raises some problems about measurement, information capacity, quantum limits, and whether you can ever know enough about a system to reconstruct it. But before we get into all those headaches, let's start with something friendlier. Can we teleport information at all? And it turns out, yes, but in a very specific way. That's for the next episode. Stay nerdy. Teleportation is real, just not the Star Trek version. We can't teleport objects, but we can teleport the information that defines a quantum system. On the atomic scale, that's as close as physics gets to the real thing.

[00:03:09]These are 12 challenges to building a transporter. And this is number two, quantum information. When physicists talk about information, we don't mean things like names, birthdays, or like what someone is wearing in a photograph.

[00:03:23]We mean a complete description of a physical system. Everything you'd need to predict how it behaves. Now, in classical physics, this is pretty simple. An object, um, like this book has a definite position. It's here. It has a velocity zero and it has a temperature maybe whatever the room temperature is. You can measure these values. You can write them down and nothing fundamental changes about what's happening with the book. But if we want to measure the atoms that like make up the book then we need quantum mechanics and that is a different story. Now at the atomic scale particles do not have definite properties. They are described by probability amplitudes. Mathematical functions that tell you how likely different outcomes are. So if we take the example of position, instead of the particle is here, you get a spread of possible locations and that spread is part of the quantum state. Momentum works the same way. Not a single value but a distribution of possibilities.

[00:04:35]These ingredients, the position, amplitudes, momentum, amplitude, spin, and phase, and the correlations between them all, they don't live separately.

[00:04:44]They're all combined into one mathematical object called the quantum state. The quantum state is the complete description of the system. Now, from this, you can calculate the probabilities of any measurement you might choose to make. But the blueprint here is fragile because when you measure a quantum system, you force one outcome to become real and you destroy the original quantum state. You can't look at quantum information without altering it and you can't copy it either. So when physicists teleport quantum information, what they mean is they're transferring the entire quantum state from one particle to another without ever observing what that state actually contained.

[00:05:42]So how do you move information that you can't look at, you can't copy it, you can't keep it? Well, that's for the next episode. Stay nerdy. We can't measure quantum states without destroying them.

[00:05:55]So, how do we teleport them? These are 12 challenges to building a transporter.

[00:06:00]And this is number three, quantum teleportation. Quantum teleportation was first demonstrated in 1997 using photons. Now, it relies on three specific ingredients. You have entanglement, you have a special kind of joint measurement called a bell state measurement, and you have ordinary classical communication. That part is important, you guys. So, here's the basic idea. Alice and Bob want to teleport particle X to a different location. They start by creating a pair of entangled particles, A and B. Alice keeps A. Bob takes B to a distant location. Entanglement links their states in a way that classical physics can't reproduce. Now, Alice performs a joint measurement on particle X and her particle A. This is called a bell state measurement. It takes the two particles as a combined system and outputs one of four possible results. When she does this measurement, two things happen at once. The original quantum state of X is destroyed, and Bob's particle B is projected into a new state that is mathematically related to X's original one, but isn't exactly that state yet.

[00:07:17]Alice's measurement gives her two classical bits of information telling her which of the four possible measurement outcomes happened. So she sends those two bits to Bob by ordinary normal communication, a phone call, an email, whatever. When Bob receives these two bits, he then performs a simple operation on his particle B. Now the operation he performs depends on the message he received from Alice. Once he applies the operation, particle B ends up in exactly the same quantum state that particle X originally had.

[00:07:57]Teleportation complete. The quantum state has moved from X to B and the original state is destroyed in the process. So B is not a copy. The state has moved in space. Quantum teleportation is not just an interesting experiment. It is a working method used in quantum computers and quantum communication systems.

[00:08:21]Sometimes you need to move a quantum state from one place to another without measuring it. And teleportation is the tool that lets you do that. It transfers the state intact even when the cubits involved are far apart.

[00:08:38]So, we can teleport the quantum state of a single particle. Does that scale up to teleporting an entire human? Well, that's for the next episode. Stay nerdy.

[00:08:51]Can we teleport a human? We know the quantum teleportation works for single particles. So, what stops us from scaling it up? These are 12 challenges to building a transporter. And this is number four, the human factor. A human body contains about 7 * 10^ the 27 atoms. That's 7,000 trillion trillion atoms. But the important point, it's not the number. It's how those atoms behave because they do not sit still. They are part of an enormous interacting, constantly changing quantum system.

[00:09:29]Chemical bonds form and break. You have ions that [snorts] flow across membranes. We have proteins folding and unfolding. Neurons switch their electrochemical states. And any thermal motion shakes every atom on time scales down to phmptoseconds. That is a millionth of a billionth of a second. To teleport a human, you would need a complete description of the entire system at one instant in time. Not just the positions of all the atoms. You would need every quantum degree of freedom, every amplitude, every phase relationship and every correlation between particles across the entire body.

[00:10:14]The difficulty is that quantum information in a living system does not stay the same for long enough to capture. Now, in a single particle, the state is simple. It's stable. In a human body, every atom is constantly interacting with millions of others.

[00:10:34]There's collisions, there's vibrations, chemical reactions, and all of it nudges the quantum state in tiny ways. Now, these changes happen incredibly quickly.

[00:10:48]The details you would need to record just don't hold still long enough to record them. By the time any scanner tried to capture them, the system would already have shifted into a slightly different configuration and then another and then another and then another. This happens billions of times per second. So even before we worry about how to measure all that information, the quantum state you want to teleport is changing faster than you could possibly record it.

[00:11:20]But suppose for the sake of argument that we could freeze everything in place and stop all the motion.

[00:11:28]Would we even be able to measure that much information with the precision required? Well, that's for the next episode. Stay nerdy. To scan a human for teleportation, you would need to know where every atom is and how fast it's moving. And straight away quantum mechanics steps in and says absolutely not. These are 12 challenges to building a transporter. And this is number five.

[00:11:58]The Heisenberg problem. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us that the position and momentum are not things you can know at the same time with unlimited precision. The rule is written as delta x multiplied by delta p is greater than or equal to h bar / 2. But this is not a technology issue. It's not that our scanners are too weak or that our detectors are too slow. Quantum mechanics simply does not allow a particle to have a perfectly sharp position and a perfectly sharp momentum at the same moment. If you measure position very precisely, the momentum becomes fuzzy. If you measure momentum very precisely, the position becomes fuzzy. So to recreate a person, unfortunately, you would need both pieces of information for every atom in the body. But that full set of exact values just doesn't exist. The uncertainty principle says the universe never gives you that kind of data in the first place. Now, Star Trek, to be sure, spotted this problem and they invented Heisenberg compensators.

[00:13:11]These are fictional devices that simply make the uncertainty go away.

[00:13:18]It's an acknowledgment that the writers know the physics says no, but that the plot still needs it to say yes. Now, in reality, there is nothing to compensate.

[00:13:29]You can't engineer your way around the uncertainty principle. So, if you wanted like a real compensator, you'd have to rewrite quantum mechanics from scratch.

[00:13:39]But we're on a journey here, guys. So, let's imagine just for the sake of argument, the compensators exist and we can measure everything perfectly. The next question is, how would we actually do that measurement? Well, that's for the next episode. Stay nerdy. If you want to teleport someone, you need to scan them. Now, this isn't like a simple medical scan like an MRI or something like that. You need to scan them on an atomic level, as in map every single atom in their body. But how? These are the 12 challenges to building a transporter. And this is number six, the measurement destruction problem. To figure out where something is, you have to interact with it. Usually, we use light. You fire photons at it, and you see how they scatter. That's how all imaging works because light interacts with different materials in different ways. To see something really small, you need to use light with a wavelength that's just as small as the thing you want to see. That's a basic rule of wave physics. Atoms are about an angstrom apart and that's like 10us 10 m. So to see structures that size, you'd need something like x-rays or gamma rays.

[00:15:00]These have the shortest wavelengths and short wavelengths mean high energy.

[00:15:06]X-rays and gamma rays are energetic enough to strip electrons off atoms, break chemical bonds, and dump heat into whatever they hit. Now, if we scale that up to scanning an entire human being, well, to record atomic positions, you'd be blasting every atom in your body with high energy radiation. And the total energy dumped into your tissue would tear the molecules apart and heat everything well past survivable levels.

[00:15:36]You'd be destroyed long before the scan finished. This isn't about our scanners not being good enough. It's because the physics of measurement ties resolution to energy. The sharper the image you want, the more energy you have to throw at the object. And at atomic scales that energy is destructive. So everyone on Star Trek is dead. Not because of the no cloning theorem, but because if you scan someone at atomic resolution, the measurement itself would pull them apart. Now I know you guys. I know that some of you are saying, well, you don't know what might happen in the future.

[00:16:15]They might figure out like how to do this in a gentle way. Okay, fine.

[00:16:20]There's a magical way some future physicist found to scan the whole body before it's pulled apart. Fantastic. The next question is, how much data is that?

[00:16:29]And that's for the next episode. Stay nerdy. How much information does it take to describe a human being? If you wanted to store everything you needed to rebuild a person from scratch, how big would that file be? These are 12 challenges to building a transporter.

[00:16:46]And this is number seven. How much information is a human? In information theory, the number of bits you need to store a zero or one answer is log two of the number of possible answers. So if an atom could be in a trillion possible places, you would need about 40 bits to say which one it's in. Now the information we realistically need is on a quantum level, but that's complicating it a bit too much here. So let's just do a rough calculation of a few of the main things you would need to record. It'll be enough to get the point across. Don't you worry. Starting with position. So the body is about a meter across. An atomic precision is about an angstrom.

[00:17:32]Basically the distance between two atoms is roughly 10 the minus 10 of a meter.

[00:17:38]Um so that means that you have 10 the 10 possible positions along each axis of the body. So each one needs about 33 bits. That's a total of 100 bits.

[00:17:48]Momentum has the same idea and the same precision roughly. So you have about another 100 bits. You also want to know what element is being made up and there's about 100 elements to choose from. So that adds about another seven bits. Chemical structure is another thing. You want to know what it's bonded to, what type of bond it is, what the angles are involved are. That's roughly 50 to 100 bits. Also, we have electronic configuration. So which orbitals are occupied adding another 50 to 100 bits.

[00:18:19]So altogether we can estimate about 400 bits per atom for a classical structure.

[00:18:24]Nothing quantum here you guys. We multiply that 400 bits by the 7 by 10 27 atoms in the body. You get about 3x 10 30 bits. That's a three followed by 30 zeros. 3,00 billion billion billion bits. Let me give you some context.

[00:18:45]The entire planet Earth is expected to generate roughly 1.5 * 10 the 24 bits of data in 2025 alone. Your body contains about 2 million times that amount of information. So to store one human being, we'd need every bite of data Earth produces for the next 2 million years. or we need to scale up global storage by a factor of 2 million for one person. And if your mind isn't completely blown by the sheer scale of the information our bodies hold, wait until you find out how long it would take to collect that much information.

[00:19:27]But that's for the next episode. Stay nerdy. How long do you think it would take to measure all the information in a human body in order to teleport it?

[00:19:37]These are 12 challenges to building a transporter. This is number eight, the speed problem. Now, the atoms in your body don't like just politely hold still. Their quantum states change on unbelievably fast time scales. Many of the chemical processes happen in phentocs. That's 10us15 seconds. Electron motion can shift into atosconds. That's 10us 18. And then some of the fastest electronic transitions that we know of might reach into the zepptoc range. That's 10 to the minus 21 seconds. That means there are 10 uh to the 21 zepptocs in 1 second if you want to record a state before it changes.

[00:20:21]Your scanner needs time resolution at least that fast. Now in the lab we can currently make atosecond laser pulses.

[00:20:28]Um, zepptocond measurements are still theoretical, but it's not hard to imagine having them in the future. So, let's be generous and assume that you can measure one atom's full state every Zepptocond.

[00:20:42]Well, a human has about 7 * 10 27 atoms.

[00:20:47]At one atom per zepptocond, scanning everything one by one would take roughly 7 million seconds. That's about 81 days.

[00:20:57]Now you might say, I I hear you. I hear you. Well, we don't do it sequentially.

[00:21:02]Why would you do it one atom by one atom? We scan all the atoms at the same time. Of course. Okay. But that creates a new problem. Capturing everything simultaneously means handling 3 * 10^ the 30 bits of information in one moment. More than 2 million times the Earth's yearly data production all arriving at the same time. Storing it is already impossible. Just catching it would be too. So scanning either takes months while the system keeps changing or it needs an impossible data burst from a system that won't sit still long enough to measure. And if you are still holding on desperately to this idea, still shouting at the screen, but Abby, maybe the future will find a way. Okay, fine. We measured, we scanned, we stored the data. We still need to send it somewhere. And that requires transmission. But that's for the next episode. Stay nerdy. How long would it take you to teleport a human body? I mean, how fast can you transmit all the information you need to rebuild a human somewhere else? These are 12 challenges to building a transporter. And this is number nine, the transmission problem.

[00:22:23]Okay. The basic amount of information needed to describe the position and momentum of each atom in a human body as well as its electronic configuration and chemical structure takes up about 3x 10 to the 30 bits. If you don't believe me, watch one of the previous episodes.

[00:22:40]Right now, the fastest data transmission ever demonstrated in a fiber optic system is around 100 terabits per second. That's 10^ the 14 bits per second. This isn't commercial broadband, okay? This is labgrade absolute cuttingedge photonics. At that speed, sending 3 * 10 30 bits would take 3 * 10 16 seconds. That's about 950 million years. nearly a billion years of continuous transmission at the fastest rates humans have ever achieved. Now, you might say, well, we'll go faster in the future, and sure, speeds will improve, but there are still hard limits on how much information you can push through a communication channel. There's things like noise, um, bandwidth, power.

[00:23:38]They all place physical ceilings on bit rates. So long before you get anywhere near transmitting the contents of a human being. And that brings up another issue. Energy. It's always about energy.

[00:23:53]Sending information costs energy. The faster you send it, the more power you need. And high-speed optical systems dump a huge amount of heat. You don't get infinite bandwidth without paying for it. But how much is that energy going to cost? Well, that's for the next episode. Stay nerdy. How much energy do you need to process information? I'm talking big data. Like the amount of information needed to describe a human being in atomic detail. These are 12 challenges to building a transporter.

[00:24:30]This is number 10. The energy cost. In physics, information isn't just this abstract idea. It has a physical cost.

[00:24:39]There's this thing called land hours principle which was published in 1961 and it shows that erasing or processing a single bit of information always requires a certain minimum amount of energy. Now the formula is E= KT * ln2 where K is Boltzman's constant and T is temperature and ln is the natural log of 2. At room temperature, that works out to be about 3 * 10 -21 jewels per bit.

[00:25:08]That's very small. But now imagine we're dealing with something much bigger. The information needed to describe a human at the level of atoms. Now a rough estimate that we did in a previous video puts that at around 3 * 10^ the 30 bits.

[00:25:25]Multiply the two numbers together and you get roughly 10 billion jewels.

[00:25:31]What does 10 billion jewels look like?

[00:25:33]Well, one liter of petrol contains about 30 million jewels. So, the bare minimum energy needed to process a human's worth of information is the energy in roughly 300 L of petrol. And this is the absolute theoretical minimum. The most perfect system allowed by the laws of physics. Real computers though, real scatters, real communications networks, all waste energy as heat. They need cooling, they need redundancy, and they lose information that must be re um reprocessed.

[00:26:09]A real system would require a hell of a lot more energy than just that bare minimum. The key point here though is that you can't engineer around that limit. It comes straight from the second law of thermodynamics.

[00:26:24]Information has an energy cost. Full stop. So if you ever wanted to teleport someone, this isn't like science fiction handwaving. This is the energy bill that the universe would charge you just to handle the information. We haven't even gotten into the reconstruction of it all yet. That's for the next episode. Stay nerdy. If you ever wanted to teleport someone, there's one question that decides whether the whole idea lives or dies.

[00:26:53]How do you actually put the person back together at the other side? These are 12 challenges to building a transporter.

[00:27:00]And this is number 11, the entanglement problem. In real physics, teleportation only works through quantum entanglement.

[00:27:07]Two particles become linked so that measuring one gives you correlated information about the other, even across long distances. How do we create that?

[00:27:17]Well, in the lab, we physically interact particles. You let atoms overlap so that their wave functions mix. Or you use finely tuned laser pulses to couple ions. Or you split a photon into two correlated photons. Entanglement always comes from a controlled interaction that puts two particles into a shared quantum state. Now that's not to say that it can't happen naturally. It can. But just in terms of our intentions for teleportation, to rebuild a human atom by atom, you would need an entangled partner for each atom you plan to reconstruct. Every single one would require a physical interaction to create it. And every pair would have to be isolated, synchronized, transferred to the location, and kept ready until the moment the information arrives. There's nothing in modern physics that scales anywhere near this. The most advanced experiments can entangle thousands of atoms under extreme lab conditions. To jump from thousands to 10 to the 27 is like going from a paper airplane to a galaxy size spaceship. The gap isn't technical, it's physical. And even if you could create that much entanglement, you'd have to stop it from decaying because entanglement is really fragile.

[00:28:37]heat, um, vibrations, any stray light, any interaction at all will break it. In a cryogenic quantum computer, you can hold entanglement for milliseconds. In a normal environment, electronic states decoheree in phtocs. That's a millionth of a billionth of a second. So, the receiver in a sci-fi teleporter would need 10 to the 27 perfectly entangled particles, all stable, all isolated, all waiting at precisely the right moment.

[00:29:11]It's weird to say we're nowhere near ever being able to maintain even a fraction of that cuz just just the the whole thing is just look in the series so far, we've learned just how difficult it would be to scan, store, and transmit the data that makes up a person. But if you are still insistent that you think this could happen, then I have one more challenge for you. If the original you is destroyed and a perfect copy appears somewhere else, is that still you?

[00:29:42]But that's for the next episode. Stay nerdy. Everyone on Star Trek is dead.

[00:29:47]You've probably heard this before, but if you haven't, a teleporter can only work by destroying you and making a copy. These are 12 challenges to building a transporter. And this is number 12, the identity problem. Quantum mechanics has this rule called the no cloning theorem. You can't make an identical copy of an unknown quantum state. The maths forbids it. And that means that any process that extracts all the quantum information from a system has to destroy the original in the act of measuring it. Now, real quantum teleportation works this way. The measurement that transfers the quantum state wipes out the original at the same moment that the new one is created.

[00:30:35]There are never two versions of the state and that solves the physics. But it creates a very human question. The ancient Greeks had a thought experiment called the ship of Thesus. If you replace a ship plank by plank until none of the original wood remains, is it still the same ship? Well, your body does something similar. Atoms get swapped out constantly. Cells die and are replaced, but we don't feel like new people every few weeks. Our consciousness flows through those changes. There's continuity. A teleporter doesn't preserve that continuity. It breaks it. You are taken apart completely down to the smallest detail for a moment there is nothing and then a new version Adam for Adam identical to you is assembled somewhere else is that person you now the person who arrives on the other side would insist that they've survived the process. They remember stepping onto the pad. They feel like themselves. They have all of your thoughts, habits, and memories. That is a major problem, but we're just we're sticking with the sci-fi. We're not going to get into that. They would swear they experienced the journey. But would you experience stepping off at the destination or would your consciousness simply stop? We don't know. Physics can't answer that. We don't have a scientific theory of the subjective experience of what it means to be the same person over time. Physics can tell us whether teleporting a human is possible. It isn't. Not with any physics that we know. But even if it were, physics couldn't tell us whether you'd survive it. That's a question about identity, and we don't have equations for that. Thanks for following along with this series. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope that I haven't like killed your dreams too much. I'll be back soon with a new topic, but if you want more in the meantime, you can always check out my Patreon. Stay nerdy.