Do the bandwidth limitations of light prevent 'beaming people up'?

[Stonius]

Okay, I have too much time on my hands, but bear with me.

I started this train of thought in another thread, but since it's only me that seems to have caught this particular train of thought, I decided to create another thread purely for the convenience of others who may not wish their thread to be interrupted by my dribble.

Here is that post, for context;



Okay, I got curious as to what this means in terms of limitations of bandwidth in the universe (Trekkies beware, the results don't look good!).

How much bandwidth would it take to beam someone up in a reasonably short amount of time? I started with visible wavelengths (red) for no reason other than it's is easily produced and red cheap lasers already exist.

I'm a bit math challenged, but as near as I could figure out;

There are, according to Professor Google, around 7*10^27 atoms in a human body.

The highest possible baud rate of red light corresponds with its frequency. You can encode the information however you like - polarisation, presence/absence of a photon, whatever, but you can't get around the quantum nature of light, so assuming the frequency of red light is the same as its baud rate. IOW, a red light at 430 Teraherz can transmit 430,000,000,000,000 bits of information per second, which is just under half a teraflop of information per second.

Let's give the scientists of the future a break and say that they manage to encode what type of atom, it's orientation, and position into this one bit of information somehow (remember it's a one or a zero). So by my calculations for 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00 atoms in the human body transmitting using red light at 430 THz, you could expect to arrive on board the Starship Enterprise in
7*10^27 / 4.3*10^14
=1.6*10^13 seconds

OR (dumroll please)...

a mere half a million years!

Yikes!

And blue light doesn't help much, shaving it down to only 288 thousand years.

So then I started thinking how high does the frequency have to be?

Gamma rays start at 1*10^20. Surely that should give a reasonable transmission time?

Nope - you'd still be waiting 2.2 years.

But of course, there is no end to the electromagnetic spectrum. I decided to plug in the value of the most energetic gamma rays yet detected in the form of Gamma ray bursts which apparently reach 2.42*10^25.

The sad news is that even given the best case scenario and using the highest frequency light in the universe from a conveniently placed collapsing star (or whatever causes these bursts, we still don't really know yet, do we?), transmitting a person by light would still take 4 minutes and 49 seconds.

Sorry Trek fans. It's still a good show. Try not to think about it when you watch it. :-/

-Markus

[xelasnave]

My first computer was a Tandy 16k.
At that time the personal computer we call our smart phone was beyond comprehension.

The first radio two stories high.

So don't be put off by facts that say its impossible.

Alex

[Shiraz]

:)

That ignores data compression Markus. DNA can carry the full coding of a human organism in about 10^8 bits, so that could be the minimum required if there was some way to assemble the organism without needing a lifetime of growth and experiences. Thus, the lower bound would be transmission of the basic code of a human in about 5 microseconds. Add in the wiring diagram of the brain and neural weights encoding experiences etc and it would clearly take longer. So that's narrowed the problem down a lot - we can say with reasonable confidence that it may actually be possible to transmit the full information content of a human in a time period somewhere between 5 microseconds and half a million years.

[Stonius]

True, but I did allow them some pretty big concessions in that I allowed the encoding of an entire atom in a single bit. The number of particles, how many neutrons, shared electrons, chirality, position energy state... there are so many properties that would have to be correctly recalled from that one photon! Or maybe they could just send the co-ordinates and dimensions of a 'liver cell' and build your body the same as before, but from generic cells. Would you still be *you? I don't know. But then we get into cloning, don't we?

Thinking about the accuracy required to place an atom accurately within a volume the size of a human body requires a very high degree of precision. Even putting one atom in place next to another one could be fraught if they don't bond in the same way, or at all! The precision required will require many bits, even for relative placement because the atoms are so dang small!

You're right in that technology advances incredibly fast. Video compression has come a long way from a very bit hungry format, but media are still the biggest of files. Maybe in the future rich people will pay more for the lossless encoding, and poor people will have to deal with the less healthy lossy codec?

-Markus

[Stonius]

But then, I guess you could massively increase the bandwidth with parallel communication. Hadn't thought of that. say, 32 photons, each of slightly different frequencies arrive simultaneously, each encoding a different bit of information, suddenly you have 32 bits being transmitted where there was just one before.

Markus

[ZeroID]

SATA, Serial Asynchronous Transmission of Androids ...