Teleportation

The molecule road or the parallel universe road

My friends and loved ones are all over the world. I have a number of day dreams about how to be closer to those people more often.

One of those dreams is to have a place in France where we will host a month of open doors for friends and family to stay with us. I think many of these friends would have a hoot meeting each other. So that’s in the plans for 2009…stay tuned….

The other dream is to be able to go to these friends and family at a moment’s notice when I feel like a chat, a hug, to say hi. What if they did the same thing at the same time to come to me… you know how that happens sometimes when you think of someone they think of you at the same time. In the current teleportation situation that would be a nice problem to solve. We’re not quite there yet.

On Thursday 20th of September Ray Kurzweil was virtually teleported from Boston to an event at CSC [Computer Sciences Corporation] in Sydney. He does this with very specific equipment which makes the experience well beyond the usual flat video screen.

At question time I had to ask the obvious question. I see now from the net that I am not the only one with that question for him. Surprise surprise. I asked whether I would be able to teleport in my lifetime.

Ray provided us with a two sided answer. One was about the virtual progress and how quickly that experience is changing and where it could go. Including having our brains on the net. I get the concept but have these weird visual ideas of a squishy thing… anyway. The other side of the answer was about teleporting matter and how complex that was.

Besides the rapidly progressing virtual technologies to ‘just like being there’, I am still wanting the real thing and be there. Be there quickly without the airports, the security checks that get more and more complex every time I travel, the immigration. There we go. Here is the reason why it would be terrible for the world. Lose control? Well that depends on how it all works.

That same day Ray spoke to us we had a lively and entertaining dinner at a manor house. As we were getting to the dinner hall from cocktails I had a chat with our CTO about the teleportation matter, no pun intended. I had two things bugging me and wanted to share those with someone. Thanks Derek.

One is that if the IT or ICTI technologies are like I believe they are an avalanche coming your way no matter which industry you’re in because they are so fundamentally altering the experience of business due to the accelerating exponential pace of improvements in what you can do with the technologies.

If we use it to solve the genome a lot faster than most people thought we could and it can be used to solve the brain mapping too. This acceleration should become a means to solve the teleportation dilemma too. Shouldn’t it?

The other thing I was wondering was. If we think the molecule approach isn’t going to be solved in a hurry. What about the parallel world approach?

I could not believe the next day 21st of September the New Scientist had an article on that very point and I found other accessible references like this one article in the telegraph about the Oxford research.

Serendipity is wonderful.