Does teleportation mean creating a copy of a human being?

We desperately want teleportation to become real and part of our daily lives. Why? Let’s be honest, teleportation sounds very cool. However, in movies, it doesn’t seem like a straightforward process.
Interesting Engineering

Let’s be honest, teleportation sounds very cool. However, in movies, it doesn’t seem like a straightforward process. Think about the movie “The Fly.”

For teleportation to work, every single one of your atoms needs to be separated, and they need to be put back together in a new location. The process essentially works like a fax machine that scans and transmits your data to the receiver where you will be reproduced.

A fax machine is an ideal example of a teleportation device. You have two identical documents in two separate places. Even though it looks like you have sent the original document, you’ve only sent a copy of it to another location. That translates as the same working principle of teleportation. 

Imagine your body being scanned and a copy of you being sent to a different place. That’s teleportation. That’s also why it’s such a complex process. 

How do we scan and send a copy of ourselves to an entirely separate location without any negative ramifications occurring? 

Even with dangerous potentialities, teleportation is still a major focus for scientists as

it could save us incredible amounts of time. By teleporting, we’d travel faster than the speed of light.

To put that into perspective, travelling at the speed of light allows you to circumnavigate the equator 7.5 times in just one second. Teleportation is faster than that! 

So how near or far into the future will teleportation become a part of our lives?

Enter: the quantum world of physics. In 2017, a team of researchers in China reported it had successfully beamed a photon particle to a specially constructed spacecraft orbiting roughly 300 miles (482 km) from Earth. On top of beaming a particle from Earth into space, the team also created the first quantum network between satellite and ground, breaking the long-distance record for quantum entanglement. 

Put simply, quantum entanglement is the theory that makes teleportation possible. This theory explains that some particles in our universe exhibit uniform behaviour. For instance, if one pair of particles moves to the right, the other pair must move to the left. They are different, but they are always dependent on each other, so the state of one will always reveal the state of the other. 

This is what happens when physicists use this theory in teleportation. Whatever material is being teleported is encoded, this coded information then takes the form of the material on the other end – just like a fax machine.

There are a ton of questions still left to be answered but that’s teleportation in a nutshell!