by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground e-Magazine

In yesterday’s blog (Are You Ready for a Sci Fi Future?), I mentioned that teleportation was more than a possibility or a snippet from a Sci Fi film. In actuality, teleportation has been performed in the lab with consistent results on increasingly larger pieces of matter. Nothing as large as a living, breathing being, but still.

Here’s the catch with teleportation. It doesn’t move an object from place to place. Instead, it destroys said object and recreates its exact replica in a different location. Well – almost its exact replica. Because of Heisenberg’s principle, which states that you can’t determine a particle’s position and its momentum at the same time (to determine momentum you have to destroy position and to determine position you have to destroy momentum), it is impossible to create an exact replica. But you can come pretty darn close. When an object is being teleported, it isn’t quite exactly the same as the object that was destroyed. But it’s close enough for government work.

This brings all sorts of questions to mind. As scientists work with teleporting larger and larger particles, eventually there is going to come a time where what they decide they’d like to try and teleport is something living. What will the consequences be of such an attempt?

When you destroy a living being and make an exact copy, how exact will that copy be? According to Brian Greene, author of the Elegant Universe, it is likely that the differences will be so minute – a cell here and there – that from a grand scale, you would never know it wasn’t an exact copy.

But what if consciousness is a quantum function? What if some little element that moves around here or there in the destruction, copying and recreation is that teeny tiny particle that makes us US? Then what? Not only that, but if you take me – a decided original – destroy me, copy me, and put me back together as exact of a copy as possible under Heisenberg’s principle, will I still be me? If I have had all of my memories copied, destroyed and recreated, and if I have had my consciousness copied, destroyed and recreated, what will I be in that new place where I’ve been moved. Is an exact copy me, or is it now something else entirely?

These are the things I wonder and think about. What are the implications of teleportation? Is something that has been teleported using the current method of telportation actually its original or something else entirely? Is an exact replica of you YOU if you have been destroyed and put back together?

No answers. Only questions. What do you think?