Could Teleportation Devices Become a Reality in the Future?

Teleportation has been a fun science fiction topic for years. I remember watching the movie “The Fly” many years ago. A guy got in a teleporter, but a fly also snuck in with him. The man and the fly got “mixed” during teleportation, and the man gradually turned into an essentially really dangerous monster fly, just like in the image above.

And let’s not forget Star Trek! Gene Roddenberry, the inventor of Star Trek, wanted the crew of the Enterprise to zip around the galaxy and get down to planets as fast as they could. For budget reasons, it seemed difficult to make it look like the whole Enterprise landed on a planet each time, so he came up with “beaming” which is another way of saying teleportation.

While these fictional portrayals are entertaining, the reality of teleportation is far more complex. Most scientists think that teleporting macroscopic objects or living things is probably impossible. You’d have to exactly recreate every atom in a human body in the exact state that it was before, and that’s just to create another you. What do we do with the old you? Kill you off so the new you can exist somewhere else? And if we keep both of you around, then all we’ve done is found a new way to clone someone!

Recreating you in another location doesn’t mean disassembling you in your present location, so you’d have two yous, like in the image below of two Captain Kirks from the Star Trek episode entitled The Enemy Within.

The amount of information required to describe every atom in a human body is staggering, and the process of disassembling and reassembling matter at the atomic level presents enormous technological challenges.

And yet, all is not lost. It turns out that scientists have made progress in quantum teleportation of “information,” which might lead to advancements in quantum computing and secure communication. So, while macroscopic teleportation isn't feasible, related research is ongoing and potentially valuable. Don’t expect to “beam up” anytime soon, but further research theoretically might lead to other exciting technological developments in the future.