Hey there, and welcome to Play Noggin.
I’m Julian, your brain’s Player Two.
I, like a lot of you, have always been fascinated
by the idea of exploring another world.
The problem right now is the length of time
it takes to travel to a distant planet or
solar system.
And, I guess, the fact that the technology
hasn’t been developed yet.
But that’s never stopped me from dreaming.
Ideally, I’d like to visit another world
of my own free will, and not be yanked from
the earth in an instant, along with a chunk
of a national park.
That’s the inciting incident of Obduction,
the latest game from Myst creators Cyan Worlds.
See, it’s a play on words.
“Obduction” is a geologic process in which
the edge of a tectonic plate consisting of
oceanic crust is thrust over the edge of an
adjacent plate consisting of continental crust.
“Abduction” is what happened to you, and
the aliens responsible used a form of technology
that has been a mainstay of science fiction
for years, technology that’s actually existed
in real theoretical science for longer than
you might think: teleportation.
Teleportation involves scanning something
at a subatomic level and sending the data
gathered from the scan to some distant location,
where a perfect copy is reconstructed.
When I say “copy,” I mean copy.
Since 1993, when quantum teleportation was
first deemed a theoretical possibility, we’ve
understood that the act of “scanning”
an object fully destroys that object, to the
point that the copy created is the only thing
that remains.
So, great, not only are aliens ripping me
away from my home, but they’re also obliterating
my original body?
Could they at least give my new bod super
speed or something?
It’s not too much to ask.
Now, maybe the thought of having your body
as you know it obliterated in the name of
a convenient commute squicks you out a bit.
Me too.
But the question of “How many of my subatomic
particles need to be originals for me to be
who I am” isn’t the point here.
In 1998, researchers successfully sent a single
photon approximately one meter along a coaxial
cable.
And just as everyone had theorized, the moment
the photon appeared at its destination, the
original ceased to exist.
It didn’t travel.
It was copied, destroyed, and cloned.
In order for quantum teleportation to be possible,
scientists had to find their way around something
called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Now, I looked it up, and surprisingly it has
nothing to do with blue crystal meth.
I worry I might watch too much TV.
Anyway, it’s the idea that you can never
know both the location and the momentum of
a particle.
The more we nail down data on one of these
things, say, a photon’s location, the less
we end up knowing about the other, its momentum.
And vice-versa.
They succeeded by using a phenomenon called
entanglement.
That’s the principle which allows two particles
to stay connected to each other, even over
great distances, so that what happens to one
directly affects the other.
So, one photon in a lab could be spun, and
its entangled photon hundreds of miles away
would also start to spin.
Even Albert Einstein referred to this phenomenon
as “spooky action at a distance,” which
is genius-scientist speak for “Whoa, stop
the ride, I want to get off.”
To teleport a single photon, they actually
needed three: one, the original to be teleported;
two, a photon used to transport the information
from the first; and three, a photon entangled
with Photon 2, upon which the information
was written.
See, if the researchers had tried to get up
close and personal with Photon 1 to read its
information, they would have altered it, thus
making it impossible to teleport in its actual
state.
That’s because subatomic particles exist
simultaneously in all states until they are
observed.
To interact with the particle directly would
require them to observe it.
Observing a particle locks it into one state,
which wouldn’t be representative of the
actual particle.
With Photon 2 acting as a sort of buffer,
they can copy the info onto Photon 3 over
a distance, thus successfully teleporting
Photon 1.
Is your head spinning?
My head’s spinning.
Now, unless we want our heads to spin straight
off, we’ve got a lot of work to do before
teleporting humans is feasible.
Did you know there are a ton of atoms in the
human body?
Okay, yeah, you knew that of course, but do
you know how many?
There are around seven billion billion billion
of them, because when we start talking about
numbers that big, even scientists sound like
kindergarteners.
In Obduction, we can buy that aliens have
this incredibly powerful and complicated technology,
because they’re aliens, and aliens can be
as scientifically advanced as the story demands.
In the real world, keeping track of seven
billion billion billion atoms, copying them,
moving them over vast distances…
It’s just not feasible.
Some even argue that quantum teleportation
and the sort you see in Obduction or, even
more popularly, in Star Trek, shouldn’t
even be considered the same thing.
In the latter, you’re deconstructing and
transporting matter over distances and reassembling
it perfectly; in the former, you’re merely
copying the “state” of one quantum particle
to another.
Maybe we’ll get there someday.
In the meantime, I’ll continue fantasizing
about teleporting to a strange new world.
Or at least dematerializing out of my car
when I’m stuck in traffic.
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