

10^28 kilobytes will be required to teleport an entire human being [pdf] - albybisy
http://fas.org/sgp/eprint/teleport.pdf

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surye
For the curious, this is about 8,470,329.47 yottabytes.

For the even more curious, a scale to think about from wikipedia[1]: In 2010,
it was estimated that storing a yottabyte on terabyte-size hard drives would
require one million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of
Delaware and Rhode Island.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte#Examples](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte#Examples)

~~~
andrewpe
To put this in another term, on a Google Fiber connection (1000 gbit/s) it
would take 2477 trillion years to transfer one human.

~~~
andrewpe
That number of years is around 176,928 ages of the universes

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Zhenya
Sounds like we just need better compression algorithm.

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Tomte
Has anyone figured out yet which parts of a human can be compressed in a lossy
way without anyone (especially yourself) noticing?

~~~
danielbarla
Well, you could always go with "most of the body". I mean, the peripheral
parts could be almost regrown from source, with the additional benefit of
leaving behind many years of injuries you've picked up. My knee certainly
agrees with this sentiment right now :)

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atrilumen
Oh well; you probably don't want to be teleported (cloned and killed) anyway.

~~~
kruczek
Only if you speak about teleportation as cloning and killing. But if you speak
about kind of a wormhole teleportation (which the paper mentions among other
things), then it doesn't really pose any philosophical dilemma.

~~~
informatimago
It has been established that Star Trek teleportation was cloning and killing.

But this may not be a problem: either people have a soul or they don't.

\- if they don't have a soul, then I don't see how cloning and killing could
be a problem.

\- if they do have a soul, then in the killing part the soul is detached from
the destroyed body. And in the cloning part, some soul should attach to the
created body.

The question is then whether the original soul reattach to the clone or
another soul? It seems likely that the original soul reattach to the clone,
because they are better atuned, than another soul.

Now, where you could have a problem, is if another soul get attached to the
clone. Some episodes of ST TOS and of ST VOY explored the problem (soul
splitting, interferences with souls from parallel universes, etc). But this
doesn't seem to be the normal use case.

Of course, we won't know what happens in our universes until we try it. Go
science!

~~~
kruczek
If people don't have a soul, it still is a problem, because you are still
killing a person. Why should I care that my exact clone will be living my
life, if I'll be vaporized? And consider another scenario, as described in
"Into the Silent Land" \- what if there's a malfunction and the clone is
created, but I am not immediately destroyed - should I then voluntarily agree
to be killed just to make sure there's only one of myself?

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mobiuscog
Have we decided on DRM yet ?

