It isn't teleportation how we all understand it, how the movies portray it. I guess the articles that have popped up calling it as such have done so for easier understanding for the masses. Quantum entanglement would be a great way to send information back and forth over any distance instantly. Would that data be "travelling" faster than light? Most probably not, but there is something else going on that allows for it to seem that way. Something we don't yet understand. We already know the universe does allow for things to move beyond the speed of light through cosmic expansion of the universe (see the post/link posted earlier). If nature can do it, then maybe one day in the very distant future, maybe we can piggyback off it as well.
Do you believe?
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The trouble with that line of reasoning is there ought to be loads of high tech cultures out there, in our galaxy alone. A few hundred billions suns is a few hundred billion rolls of the dice. Even if most evolve in a stealthy way, all it takes is one to start building dyson swarms (or mega structures in general), and we'd spot them pretty much straight away.
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I dunno - looking around at our local galactic neighbourhood and largely we see suns that are poor for supporting life i.e. too short lived or too highly active, etc. and many of those that are the right type(s) don't appear to have planets in the habitable zone, etc. extrapolate that over the galaxy and its not improbable that any kind of advanced life has a probability of happening close to 1 in a few hundred billion stars - though that would still give a fairly high count for instances of civilisations for the number of stars in the universe.
What if they're already evolved far beyond what we recognise? Even being a million years ahead of us isn't really that long a period.
Or perhaps we're the most advanced?
Bear in mind that the methods we use to detect exoplanets bias the results. It's a lot easier to detect a gas giant planet orbiting very close to a red dwarf than it is to detect an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit around a sun-like star. From the small sample we've detected so far, it's beginning to look like stars WITHOUT planets are the rare exception rather than the rule.
Short-lived stars won't support any complex life, but they're quite rare. Red dwarfs are a lot more common. They typically start out as unstable flare stars, but they settle down eventually. And once they've settled down, they will continue burning for trillions of years - a few orders of magnitude longer than our own sun will last. That's a huge amount of time, plenty of opportunity for life to evolve if it's going to. In fact, if a technological civilisation does evolve around one of those stars, they will have a huge advantage in getting into space, because planets tend to be clustered much closer together, and are much easier to get to than in big sprawling systems like our own.
The main barrier, I suspect, is evolution leading to intelligence. Looking at our own fossil record, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly inevitable about natural selection leading to high intelligence. Humans seem to be an anomaly. Evolutionary paths that lead to intelligence may be extremely rare.
The answer is in what you quoted. You can come up with as many "what ifs" as you like; all it takes is one culture to NOT do that, and we should be able to detect it.
Another potential indicator IMO that we are relatively early in this story.
If we do destroy ourselves then perhaps another civilisation would hopefully learn from our mistakes!
Caporegime
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Currently ormthat has ever been, who knows.
Weren't we talking about intelligent life, though?
Yes, but that's magic. Even in fantasy stories with magic, it's impossible or extremely limited. The only stories in which it's possible to any large extent involve an omnipotent god. Not even the usual range of divinity. Not even Odin, Zeus, etc, could do it.
On the subject of buffering, here's a number:
65,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That's a rough estimate of the number of particles in the body of a medium sized adult, and that's assuming that you don't need to scan at a scale lower than proton/neutron/electron. I think you do, but I'm not sure. Even if you don't, that's farcically far too much data for an instantaneous scan (it has to be instantaneous because particles move) and writing to storage. How much data would you have to store per particle? I don't know, but that amount would be ludicrously huge even if it was 1 byte per particle.
Teleportation of humans, even in the "fax" sense, just isn't feasible using quantum entanglement. It might be very useful for secure data transfer, but teleporting humans or even small non-living objects isn't even on the cards. And it's limited to light speed to transmit information (which is the guts of the "fax teleportation" thing) and it's limited to signal transmission distance (and you must have perfect signal transmission) and it's limited to between locations that have had entangled quanta physically taken to them. We're going to have to take a shuttlecraft from the Starship Enterprise to the planet's surface
Sadly not. Sending information that way is still limited to the speed of light.
But not within the universe. Not as far as anyone knows, anyway. The universe can expand faster than the speed of light, but that's the limit within the universe. Unless current understanding is fundamentally wrong, of course.
Understandings have been wrong before with new observations and evidence has come to light, so who knows, it will more than likely happen again.
Even Einstein wasn't right about everything, as modern technology has shown in recent years.
This is teh beauty of scientific discoveries. New data always leads to revising what we know and a better understanding of what we could know.
Even Einstein wasn't right about everything, as modern technology has shown in recent years.
This is teh beauty of scientific discoveries. New data always leads to revising what we know and a better understanding of what we could know.
Yes, but that's magic. Even in fantasy stories with magic, it's impossible or extremely limited. The only stories in which it's possible to any large extent involve an omnipotent god. Not even the usual range of divinity. Not even Odin, Zeus, etc, could do it.
On the subject of buffering, here's a number:
65,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That's a rough estimate of the number of particles in the body of a medium sized adult, and that's assuming that you don't need to scan at a scale lower than proton/neutron/electron. I think you do, but I'm not sure. Even if you don't, that's farcically far too much data for an instantaneous scan (it has to be instantaneous because particles move) and writing to storage. How much data would you have to store per particle? I don't know, but that amount would be ludicrously huge even if it was 1 byte per particle.
Teleportation of humans, even in the "fax" sense, just isn't feasible using quantum entanglement. It might be very useful for secure data transfer, but teleporting humans or even small non-living objects isn't even on the cards. And it's limited to light speed to transmit information (which is the guts of the "fax teleportation" thing) and it's limited to signal transmission distance (and you must have perfect signal transmission) and it's limited to between locations that have had entangled quanta physically taken to them. We're going to have to take a shuttlecraft from the Starship Enterprise to the planet's surface
My post was a bit further along than quantum entanglement and into the highly theoretical realm of if we did discover some means of instantaneously teleporting the entirety of an object
Ignoring the actual logistics of scanning and the immense data throughput/processing - the data itself is highly compressible even using RLE techniques and with a better understanding of the structure of the data it is probably possible to algorithmically encode vast amounts of it where the most usual outcomes are slight variations of a subset of common types, etc. at a fundamental level there isn't actually a lot of data per atom even including subatomic/fundamental particles in the equation (though as you said a lot of instances of it) - obviously you'd need some relative coordinate system and some storage of other states there will also be some states where it either doesn't matter to preserve the exact state or a low degree of precision is acceptable.
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Soldato
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The odds that extra terrestrial life exists are very high indeed, and in my opinion it exists. Whether we ever get to acknowledge or observe it in any way is another story.
As far as the lions in London Zoo are concerned, snakes don't exist.... Even though the reptile house is only a stone's throw away, they will never know the concept and their paths will never cross. We are in a much more restrictive cage within the universe.
As far as the lions in London Zoo are concerned, snakes don't exist.... Even though the reptile house is only a stone's throw away, they will never know the concept and their paths will never cross. We are in a much more restrictive cage within the universe.
It does seem incredulous if you look at say this high res capture of Andromeda http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable/ if there was no advanced form of life in amongst all that - never mind the wider universe.
Cool picture ^^
As radio waves take around 75,000 years to get from where we are now, right across our galaxy to the other side, and we have only being transmitting for about 80 years, then it's understandable we have not of had a response. Maybe life is prolific in our galaxy and they simply have not head us yet.
As radio waves take around 75,000 years to get from where we are now, right across our galaxy to the other side, and we have only being transmitting for about 80 years, then it's understandable we have not of had a response. Maybe life is prolific in our galaxy and they simply have not head us yet.