Self-Teleportation Some SF stories describe a person (or, less often, a device) teleporting itself without having a separate sending

or receiving station. Even assuming a civiliza tion has dealt with issues involved with teleportation in general, there are add itional problems with self-teleportation. Teleportation / matter transmission generally refers to a process in which an ob ject is disassembled into microscopic parts, and then sent from one place to ano ther by some means different than shooting objects like bullets or carrying them in a vehicle. We have to ask, what scientifically plausible means might there b e by which an object or person could be "teleported" as an intact whole. Certain ly, in terms of magic, the supernatural or some other daydreamed method people w ill envision a person "vanishes" from one spot and "appears" in another location . But from a scientific point of view this doesn't work. (That is, at least, for macroscopic objects. Quanta may do it, but not such that a person can decide be fore hand to make the quanta go to the location of his choice.) Realistic self-t eleportation would not send a macroscopic object as one big item. Teleportation using sending and receiving stations has the option of sending dat a describing an object to be assembled at the other end. If the other station ha s a store of raw materials, it could assemble from that, only needing to get dat a via radio, light beams or such. This is not an option for self-teleportation t hee is nothing at the other end to receive or use data. Either the original obje ct would be disassembled, the parts sent, then reassembled elsewhere; or matter already at the destination would be assembled to make a duplicate there. One of the inherent problems in self-teleportation is linked to the process of d isassembling at one place and reassembling somewhere else. If a person or device is taking itself apart and sending the separated pieces to another location, th ere will come a point when the original has become too disassembled to properly function and complete the teleportation procedure. The device or person could ca refully send those pieces of itself that were not needed for the teleportation p rocess first. However, at some point, it is necessary to disassemble the part th at performs the teleportation. Eventually, while taking this apart, it will beco me too incomplete to work. From a mystical perspective, the answer to this is that some insubstantial essen ce of a person carries out the teleportation of the physical body. There is no r eason to take that seriously in a scientific forum. There are a couple of ways t his issue could be circumvented. First, if the person / device doing the self-te leportation contained two complete teleportation "devices", it could use one of them to disassemble the second one and send it to the destination, and then the second could disassemble and send the first "device". The second alternative is that the person / device leaves itself intact while creating a duplicate of itse lf at the destination location, then the duplicate would disassemble the origina l. Both of these methods entail those issues inherent in teleporting without a r eceiving station (discussed elsewhere). In such cases, it is necessary to be abl e to manipulate the microscopic pieces with microscopic precision at a distance. Especially when the origin and destination to be traveled are not in line of si ght of each other, it is difficult to explain how one would accomplish that mani pulation of matter at a distance. In any case, stories describing self-teleporta tion rarely suggest that the above methods are used. Teleportation between two points that are in line of sight of each other could b e useful under certain circumstances - if a wild animal is charging at you, tele porting just 100 feet away might save your life. However, in general, we think o f teleportation as being used to go distances that would be difficult or time-co nsuming to travel by conventional (and less expensive) methods. To go a substant ial distance on a planet, even if there are no intervening above ground obstacle

s, the curvature of the planet will cause a substantial amount of the planet's s olid matter to be between the origin and destination. Sending matter directly be tween those locations becomes problematic. Radio waves can travel further than t he horizon by "bouncing off" a layer of the atmosphere. Bouncing matter off the atmosphere is neither as practical, nor will it send all the particles to a prec ise desired location nor give you a means to control piecing together the partic les to assemble exactly as desired. Self-teleportation seems to be limited by li ne of sight on a planet. Line of sight isn't restricted to such a short distance out in space. However, o ut in space one is usually inside some protective enclosure - a spaceship, space station, spacesuit, etc. Sending matter through these enclosures is an issue. A lso, when we talk of travel through space (teleportation or otherwise), we're of ten talking about long distances - greater than the ones from place to place on a planet. Longer distances have considerations. With self-teleportation, there's no receiving station at the destination - the assembly at the destination has t o be controlled from the originating location. If the two locations are a millio n miles apart, it would be necessary to do microscopic manipulation and assembly from that far away. At best, that would be quite tricky. The greater the distan ce, the more improbable it would be to successfully accomplish it. People vs. Devices A device can be designed to be made of various materials, use various kinds of c omponents, have various capacities for handling energy to power it, and use vari ous types of power supplies. When we talk about a person self-teleporting, we ha ve to ask to what degree the human body can meet the requirements of performing what is needed to teleport any object. The human body has a limited power capaci ty, and a limited tolerance for experiencing levels of energy without harm. To s end the body's particles from here to there will require expending energy to acc elerate the particles towards the destination, and then somehow use energy to ex ert a force to decelerate the particles. Even if one takes the approach of only assembling a duplicate of the person at the destination, it will be necessary to exert a force over a distance that will be able to manipulate microscopic piece s and put them together. We have no reason to think the human body has an abilit y to use any long-distance force of nature other than electromagnetism. Nor do w e have reason to believe the human body uses, or has any organs that would allow it to use, electromagnetism or gravity in a focused way, such as a beam. So, it doesn't appear that the human body has a means it could manipulate particles at a distance with microscopic precision. To assemble the microscopic parts requires more than an ability to manipulate pa rticles, but to be able to sense them in order to determine where they are in re lationship to each other so as to place them properly. If any humans had this so rt of sensory ability, they could "see" what others use microscopes to look at. Since we don't have humans who can sense microscopic objects without microscopes even at a short distance, it seems reasonable to assume humans can't perform th e necessary long distance sensing of microscopic objects to carry out teleportat ion. Even if we wish to assume that a human body was capable of doing these things, i t is also worth asking how quickly would the human body be able to perform it al l. Although other steps might be required, at minimum, an entire human body must be assembled at the destination. An adult human body is made up of about 1028 a toms. This is such a huge number that if a human body was capable of assembling a body at the rate of 1 billion atoms in a billionth of a second, it would take 10 billion seconds to complete the body. That's over 300 years. If there was a s upply of simple molecules at the destination, one might be able to shorten the a ssembly period by using them, but it would still probably take days, months or y ears.