The edge of teleport period – how far are we?

How easy it is when you don’t have to wake up early in the morning and not be caught in a traffic jam just to reach your place of work? Or work abroad yet you can still eat dinner with your family every night!? These are some of the things we can benefit through teleport.

I have been a Harry Potter book fanatic and I find it cute when they have to use the fire place and sprinkle some dust of floo powder on them to travel from one fire place to another. How about the use of portkey? Ordinary objects became the key to a distant place; just how Harry met You-Know-Who unintentionally on the Goblet of Fire. Or simply disapparate and apparate? These are just some of the ideas tempting the human race to dream that sooner or later, there will come a time that anybody can do teleport. But how close are we to that?

From the primitive way of communications, we are now in to the stage where we can enjoy talking to our loved ones thousands of miles away and seeing how they look in real time. From the Bell’s first telephone, we now have celphones that aside from calling and sending sms, are also capable of surfing the net or watch your favorite tv show, not to mention its other multimedia features. With just a small gadget in your hand, you know you can reach any part of the world anytime. However, these do not entail that the possibility of teleport is visible.

As we have watched it in different movies, teleport enables a person to be present in a different place within just seconds. A person is transferred from one place to another in just a short span of time regardless of how far the distance between the point of origin and to the destination. But our latest technology of communications nowadays can only transfer a replica of the ‘information’ from one place to another. The fax, for example, transmits the contents of a sheet of paper to another yet different paper in other place. The transmitted data is like the original but not the same with the original. Quite confuse? The contents maybe objectively the same but the way it was written, where it was written was different. The original paper remains on its origin. This same way goes with our telephone calls. Our voice, when calling over the phone, was converted into a different form of data so that it can pass through wires and airwaves to reach our correspondence’s location. Still, our voice didn’t actually been transferred to its destination, only its replica. That’s why our voice quality changes or degrades when we are talking over the phone.

With present researches being done in relation to teleportation, the only thing possible right now is what they call quantum teleportation that relies on the process they call quantum entanglement. It is simply like having separate particles behaving as if they were only one and the same, yet located in different places. The changes to one particle will be mirrored in the other. As they have plainly described, it’s like scanning one person in a sort of technology like MRI scan and transmit that accumulated information somewhere else. Still, not the teleport we’re all dreaming. Although it captured approximately all of the person’s physical characteristics without violating any fundamental laws of physics, it simply doesn’t give chance for a person to travel from one place to another in an instant.

Sadly, teleport is still not yet reachable within human hands. Some scientists believe that teleport is not going to happen. Nonetheless, let’s not underestimate the power of human mind. One thing is for sure, I still have to ride the taxi if I want to go the mall or take the airplane if ever I’ll go back to Japan. To teleport will remain to my dreams until my life ends, I guess.