My quick thoughts on Transporters.
McCoy was right. Transporters are a bad idea.
They are cool and neat and all that, but something never sat right with me. I knew they were bad, but didn't have any technical knowledge as to why.
After going through getting my Ham Radio Extra license and learning some Antenna theory I know why.
First, I have to make some assumptions.
Transporters have to destroy or deconstruct the original object.
Transporters have to convert and temporarily store the object as a digital model.
Then, a transporter has to send the digital model to a device that can capture, record, and temporarily store the digital model.
Lastly, the device has to reassemble the digital model into an organic object, which is a copy of the original.
My next assumption is accepting that it is possible upon destroying the object, the device will be able to index the individual pieces (possibly molecules, if not the individual atoms). The average human body is made up of 7 Octillion (7 X 10^27) atoms. Currently, a Quantum computer can perform 1 trillion operations per second. It would take 7 quadrillion seconds or 3.7 million years to completely index a body with today's Qcomputer. In the far future, a Qcomputer could do more. The assumption would be a lot more, but I'll accept that in a few hundred years a Qcomputer could do 1 quadrillion operations per second. With that, it would take 7 trillion seconds. With 1000 Qcomputers, that gets us down to 221 years.
Increase operations to 100 quadrillion operations per second and increase the number of Quantum computers to 100,000 drops the time to 31 minutes. Increasing the count to 1,000,000 computers gets us to 3 minutes. Increase operations to 1 quintillion and we get 18 seconds.
I can accept that. I don't think that's completely unrealistic in the future.
Next, we need storage. Seven Octillion bytes. Add encapsulation (mostly position data) and checksums (for validation and error correction) we need 30 or more Octillion bytes (30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). With laser storage that could also be possible -- in the far future. We could do it now, but it would probably take a football field building of laser disc hard drives to do it.
The next thing is that we have to convert the bytes into a radio frequency. Theoretically, we can send 100 trillion bytes of data at 300 gHz using one Hz of bandwidth. There's a term called Signal-to-noise ratio.
One definition of signal-to-noise ratio is the ratio of the power of a signal (meaningful input) to the power of background noise (meaningless or unwanted input). Or how clearly you hear a sound against some background noise. The hiss on a radio channel is noise.
We'll assume we can get a signal-to-noise ratio of 1:1. Meaning, we can "hear" the digital data sent very clearly.
Sending that tremendous amount of data would be possible, however, it would have to be a direct line of sight. Any objects in between the sending transporter and the receiving transporter will create increased noise at best and block the signal at worst.
Low-frequency radio waves can penetrate a regularly dense rock, but not high-frequency radio waves, which is our transporter beam. Also, in Abram's Star Trek, Scotty's transwarp teleportation stunt would never work. One, the power needed to send a beam would have to be tremendous, and the second thing is that radio waves degrade over distance. Signal-to-noise would increase exponentially and there would have to be a receiving transporter on the other end listening at the correct frequency. As radio waves travel frequencies change slightly, which increases SNR (signal-to-noise). Also, radio waves can not exceed the speed of light.
Abram's or even earlier "standard" transporters would violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. In the case of our transporter, the transmitted energy would never be 100 percent by the time it reaches the receiving transporter. We could use amplifiers, but that would increase SNR. Also, a receiving transporter HAS to be used. Sending energy over some distance could never assemble itself into matter on its own. The universe naturally tends towards randomness and disorder. Thus, data sent by a transporter has no way of knowing how to reassemble an organic object in an orderly way. The receiving transporter would have to act as a 3D printer. First, the indexed digital data would have to be received completely, and then verified using the checksum. If the checksum number doesn't match the computed number of the received byte then the data would have to be resent. If the checksum is correct, then the data has to be cataloged. Once cataloged the printer can then sequentially print the organic object.
For entertainment's sake, I can accept station-to-station teleportation. But everything else does require me to completely suspend any rational notion of how physics works. So, in the end, I'm with McCoy on this and I'll stick to the shuttle.
- James