Military examines ‘beaming up’ data, people
Frustrated that terrorist kingpin Osama bin Laden is still on the loose nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, a few military types and their scientific advisers are pondering a “what if” solution straight out of TV’s “Star Trek.”
Wouldn’t it be neat, they ask, if we could nab bin Laden via teleportation? In “Star Trek,” the characters traveled between spaceship and planet by having their bodies dematerialized, then “beamed” to another locale _ hence, the characters’ familiar request to the ship’s engineer: “Beam me up, Scotty.”
That’s teleportation.
Although many physicists think such ideas are claptrap, it would be ideal if the United States could teleport U.S. soldiers into “a cave, tap bin Laden on the shoulder, and say: ‘Hey, let’s go,’ ” said Ranney Adams, spokesperson for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base in the Southern California desert. “But we’re not there (yet).”
Not for want of trying, though. Last year, the Air Force spent $25,000 on a report, titled “Teleportation Physics Study,” to examine possible ways to teleport humans and objects through space.
The military has a long history of funding research into topics that seem straight out of science fiction, even occultism. These range from “psychic” spying to “antimatter”-propelled aircraft and rockets to strange new types of superbombs.
Military-watchers have long argued over whether such studies are wastes of taxpayers’ money or necessary to identify future super-weapons, weapons that a foe might develop if we don’t.
In recent years, many physicists have become excited about a phenomenon called “quantum teleportation,” which works only with infinitesimally tiny particles. It might lead to new ways of transmitting cryptographically secure messages, some speculate, but not human beings for a long time to come, if ever.
“Experts in the field can foresee using teleportation in the area of data encryption but not (at least not in the near future) for the purpose of ‘beaming’ macroscopic (e.g., human-size) objects across” space, said Phil Schewe, a physicist, chief science writer at the American Institute of Physics and author of a forthcoming book, “Bottled Lightning,” on the history of the American electrical grid.
Schewe thinks the government is sometimes justified in funding “offbeat research,” but he is wary of the Air Force teleportation study, prepared by physicist Eric W. Davis.
If the Air Force really thinks such study could lead to actual teleportation devices, “then I would say that something is wrong with the way the Air Force allocates its research money, at least on this topic,” Schewe said.
Pierre Chao, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said such seemingly bizarre research might be the necessary price that the United States must pay in order to guard its future security.
“The devil’s bargain that you’re going to take if you’re going to exist in that cutting-edge (scientific) world and use taxpayer dollars is that you’re going to be investigating some pretty goofy things,” Chaos said. “I’m not advocating that ‘psychic teleportation’ is anything real, but I am willing to accept a certain amount of ‘slop’ in the system to ensure that I am investigating other areas of real value and interest.”
Davis, who has a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Arizona, has worked on NASA robotic missions. His 79-page Air Force study seriously explored a series of possibilities, ranging from “Star Trek”-style travel to transportation via so-called wormholes in the fabric of space to psychic travel through solid walls.
Now at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, Davis reached both pessimistic and optimistic conclusions in his study. On one hand, he concluded that “Star Trek”-style teleportation faces enormous obstacles, partly because it would require the development of extraordinarily high-speed computers and would consume mind-boggling amounts of energy. Also, it would encounter all kinds of physics headaches generated by the principles of quantum physics.
For example, the computing-encoding of the entire contents of a human body would require 10 to the 28th (the number one followed by 28 zeroes) kilobytes of computer storage capacity. It would take 100 quintillion of the world’s best commercially available hard drives “to store the encoded information of just one human being.”
Also, “it will take more than 2,400 times the present age of the universe (about 13 billion years) to access this amount of data” from the computers, Davis writes. And “to heat up and dematerialize one human being would require . .. the energy equivalent of 330 one-megaton thermonuclear bombs.”
Source: Scripps Howard News Service, Written By: Keay Davidson (San Francisco Chronicle)
