Data Requirements: Over the last few decades the speed and capacity of computers and related techno

logies have risen greatly. Computer scientists have been warning for years that physical limitations will prevent this trend from continuing for much longer. Ne vertheless, so far, ways have been found to keep computers progressing. There is no way to know for sure how much computers of the future may be able to do. Thi s is a case where each person trying to pursue hard SF must make their best gues s, and not everyone is going to agree. To make your best guess, you should have an idea of what a computer would have to be able to handle in order to carry out matter transmitting. To get a picture of how much data would be necessary to describe a human being f or reassembling, review the following figures: (1) Suppose for the purposes of reassembling we don't need to store information about subatomic particles, and only need to specify what the atoms are (the elem ent and what ion or isotope it is). For simplicity, pretend that all of the poss ible values can be stored in a single byte (256 possible values). (2) According to The Physics Of Star Trek, by physicist Lawrence Krauss and Bord erlands Of Science by Charles Sheffield, an adult human body would have about 10 28 atoms (a one followed by 28 zeroes), so 10,000 trillion trillion bytes would be required to represent them all. (3) The company I work for has total assets of $12.3 billion. (Not a small busin ess, not Fortune 500.) There are mainframe computers. Every business day the pri mary mainframe runs over 1000 distinct in-house written programs (each of which may be run many times during the day), in addition to the software purchased fro m other companies. And we have a sizeable programming staff to deal with all of this. The programs and data are backed up and saved in case anything happens to the computers. The total backup storage for the mainframe computers, numerous ce ntralized server computers and local servers at offices in nine cities all toget her takes up no more than 20 trillion bytes. You would need the backup capacity of 500 trillion such companies to hold this list of a single human body's atoms. (4) The amount of data would actually be much larger, as we must precisely descr ibe the arrangement of the atoms in three dimensions. However, I don't know how to compute how much extra data that is. Those of you familiar with graphics file s on your PCs may know they use up much more space than text files. Even graphic formats such as *.jpg which are designed to minimize space are only comparative ly less large than other graphic files. And that's just for two-dimensional imag es. This should hint at the fact the actual storage with spatial info will be mu ch more. But for the time being we must use the above figures. (5) Transmission rates tend to be expressed in bits per second rather than bytes , so what we need to transmit is 80,000 trillion trillion bits. (6) If you were able to transmit the data at a rate 100 trillion times as fast a s a fiber optic DSL line working at 30 Mbps, you'd be sending 3 billion trillion bits per second. Therefore, from when you started transmitting the first bit to when the last bit left the transmitter would take 26 million seconds (that's ov er 433,000 minutes, or over 7200 hours -- 300 days or so.) Remember that is how long it takes to operate the transmitter, not how long it takes to reach the rec eiving end. I used the top speed for home DSL to give readers a comparison to something they may be familiar with. Of course, that's not the fastest data speed available. T he fastest speed I found offered by Verizon for businesses was a dedicated OC-48

line, with a listed speed of 2.488 Gbps (2.488 billion bits per second). That's about 83 times as fast as the DSL line used above. If you were able to transmit at 100 trillion times as fast as an OC-48 line it would still take about 3.6 da ys. Even at 10,000 trillion times as fast as an OC-48 it would take about 52 min utes. Please also note that these numbers assume one is getting the absolute maximum c apacity from the transmitter. Internet users will know that they rarely get the maximum speed listed for their modem or router. So the actual amount of time req uired for the transmission would almost certainly be greater. (7) The above examples refer to current technology going through wires. Is there a maximum rate of sending data through space? To the best of our understanding, electromagnetic radiation is the fastest way we have to send large quantities o f data. The speed of light is approximately 3 x 108 meters per second. The form of elect romagnetic radiation with the shortest wavelength (thus the most wavelengths tha t will fit in one meter) is gamma rays. I'm told gamma ray wavelengths are "belo w about 10 picometers". For simplicity, let's say we have gamma rays with a wave length of only 1 picometer [1 x 10-12meters]. Combining that with the speed of l ight, that means we could have 3 x 1020 wavelengths per second. I'm not sure how much data one could encode in a single wavelength. For the mome nt let us assume we can convey enough information to identify one atom from a te leported object in each wavelength. Since an adult human has about 1028 atoms to be listed, this is far more than the number of wavelengths in one second. It wo uld take about 3 x 107 seconds. That's almost one year. Of course, it may be pos sible to reduce this amount by splitting up the information and sending it via a number of transmitters and receivers. This assumes, of course, you don't mind the physical hazards of especially nasty gamma rays or the energy requirements of producing them. We are not aware of any means that can send data faster than electromagnetism. I assume it is possible to produce gamma rays which have even more wavelengths pe r meter [and are more hazardous], to send more data in less time. Otherwise, to transmit at higher rates than the above noted 3 x 1020 bytes per second would re quire one of the following: a) convey much more than one byte per wavelength b) find a usable kind of energy wave that travels at light speed but has a short er wavelength than gamma rays c) find a practical means of transmitting data that is both faster than light AN D allows short enough wavelengths or data density to convey more information in less time See articles for issues related to tachyons and quantum entanglement. (8) "Quantum teleportation" would use quantum entanglement to set the attributes of a particle at the "receiving end" to be identical to a particle at the "send ing end". When the attributes of an entangled particle are altered, the other pa rticle changes instantaneously. However, because the measurement of a particle a lters the particle, "quantum teleportation" is actually more roundabout than thi s. The particle being duplicated is not actually one of the entangled pair, but a third particle, and the process requires communications between the sending an d receiving ends via means limited by the speed of light. The process of communi cations, and the testing and altering of particle attributes does make the proce ss take a significant amount of time especially if dealing with such vast number s of particles. Since this process merely alters particles already at the "recei

ving end", part of the process must be assembling the particles into the 1028ato ms in exactly the right arrangement. (9) If we could transmit and reassemble in a short amount of time, it might be p ossible to reassemble as the transmission arrived. That would save us from the a bsolute need to store this vast amount of data at the receiving end. However, it appears that from the beginning to the end of the transmission may be too long. Even if it only took 15 minutes, if the first body part to be reassembled had t o wait 15 minutes before the remainder of the body was completed, it might be da maged from lack of blood supply or such. It may be necessary to receive and stor e the entire transmission before reassembly can begin. (10) As I've left out amounts I could not specify, the estimate is probably quit e low. This all assumes you send the data only once with nothing extra to check the accuracy of the data. (It's standard practice to incorporate additional spec ial data in transmissions designed to help test for problems. This is done even for vastly shorter transmissions of much less importance than a human life.) It does not include the time and energy required for scanning in the human and proc ess the data prior to transmission. It does not include the time and energy to p rocess the data and reassemble the human at the receiving end. (11) Presumably, there are also ways to reduce the number of bits to transmit, u sing data compression and other tricks. The question is whether we can reduce it by so many orders of magnitude that it is practical. Even if we were able to re duce the size to 1/100, the storage requirements would be 5 trillion companies o f the above type and the transmitter would have to work for 3 days. (12) There would, presumably, also be a great deal of energy required to scan, i dentify and determine the relationships between the positions of all the 10,000 trillion trillion atoms. Lawrence Krauss put his estimates of the energy require d for disassembly in terms of numerous megaton hydrogen bombs. The energy requir ed to precisely manipulate and assemble all the particles / atoms at the receivi ng end would also be great. This would also be a factor in the practicality of t eleportation. (13) At the transmitting station, the body would have to be scanned to identify the type and 3-dimensional position of all of the 10,000 trillion trillion atoms . Even if this could be done in only a few seconds, a living body does not stay perfectly still down to microscopic levels for that long. The flow of blood and other macroscopic activities would continue, and microscopic activities in the c ells and between them would continue. This would make it hard to get an accurate "snapshot" of the body. (14) Assuming we could reduce the body activity mentioned above by first stoppin g the person's heart, brain activity, and every other aspect, it would require a dditional medical facilities at both ends, as well as adding extra risks to the person's life.