Star Trek Transporters for the Jarhead in Jeopardy
Via TrekToday and Scripps Howard News Service the US Department of Defense spent $25,000 researching how to create Star Trek style transporters. Surprise! It's unfeasible. As an example of the hurdles: "encoding of the contents of a human body would require 10 to the 28th kilobytes of computer storage capacity, or 100 quintillion commercially available hard drives. Moreover, to dematerialize one human being the way Star Trek does it "would require...the energy equivalent of 330 one-megaton thermonuclear bombs." Yep. Do you know that NASA spend millions of dollars perfecting a pen that would write in space. The Russians gave their cosmonauts pencils.
The idea of digitizing and transporting someone somewhere is one the dumbest ideas of all time. It's infeasible, unstable and would be tremendously painful to endure. Not painful? Ever scape your hand on a sander? The transporter would kind of laser scrape you until you were an vat of goo ready to be digitally related to another position.
What would work: dimensional repositioning. You're standing in one spot in the third dimension, someone throws a switch and you're somewhere else. You've remained stationary, but spacetime has folded beneath your feet. Turn off the contraption and you land in your new spot. The problem is that you would have to move through a higher dimension to get from A to C (sans B). As of now, only the dwarves from Time Bandits have the map for how to get from here to there without touching the points in between. Space-time folding would be "easier" than the Star Trek style of beaming. Unfortunately easier means that instead of getting from here to Jupiter in a row-boat; you now only have to get from here to the Moon in a row-boat.
The idea of digitizing and transporting someone somewhere is one the dumbest ideas of all time. It's infeasible, unstable and would be tremendously painful to endure. Not painful? Ever scape your hand on a sander? The transporter would kind of laser scrape you until you were an vat of goo ready to be digitally related to another position.
What would work: dimensional repositioning. You're standing in one spot in the third dimension, someone throws a switch and you're somewhere else. You've remained stationary, but spacetime has folded beneath your feet. Turn off the contraption and you land in your new spot. The problem is that you would have to move through a higher dimension to get from A to C (sans B). As of now, only the dwarves from Time Bandits have the map for how to get from here to there without touching the points in between. Space-time folding would be "easier" than the Star Trek style of beaming. Unfortunately easier means that instead of getting from here to Jupiter in a row-boat; you now only have to get from here to the Moon in a row-boat.
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