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Re: Happy 50th birthday Apple

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On Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:40:10 +0100, liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid
(Liz Tuddenham) wrote:

>John <Man@the.keyboard> wrote:
>
>[...]
>>  10**25 particles in a human body can not be scanned by
>> anything less than a gamma-ray burst that would volatilise the human
>> and bore a hole in the ship a yard wide from the emitters past the
>> hull. The beam would go on to fry a moving circular spot on the
>> surface of the nearby planet. The storage-in-the-buffer would take a
>> bandwidth of truly astronomical magnitude and more computing power
>> than could be created were the observable universe full of chips made
>> from single particles. The reconstruction would take a similar beam of
>> death-rays and years, probably more years than the current age of the
>> cosmos. 
>
>...but apart from that, is there any reason why it couln't be done?

 We.eee...ee.llllll, if we assume that we want Human-A on the planet
and she's supposed to be the same person as Human-B who stood upon the
processing plate, with a complete continuation of her thoughts, then
we'd need to "store her in the buffer" rapidly enough that every
single particle and its every single and conjugated energy state and
quantum level would be moved from pad to planet simultaneously, with
no errors, no slippages, no distortions and no lacunae, as one entire
unit. Not an energy matrix formed from the original B but the original
B itself, complete with muscles, blood cells, internal gases,
lymphatic fluids, 30,000 hairs, lipstick and chewing gum. Every atom,
every molecule, every protein, every electron being in A as it was in
person B. 

 This needs to take place well within a Plank unit of time so there is
absolutely no discontinuity of existence. 

 And Human-A, when rebuilt, must have the very same particles, down to
the gluons, quarks and energy fields, that were once Human-B. Not
remade bits from an energy beam but the very same ones, having
continuously existed from pad to planet. 

 The fax machine in Tokyo does not eject the *same* paper as was put
into the fax machine in London. 

 With 19th Century facsimile copying machinery and their descendants,
we *know* that two copies exist. With 23rd Century "Star Fleet"
technologies, the original is destroyed to avoid legal wrangling. It
is murder. 

 But the real issue is the energy level. When I calculated the power
of the scanning beam necessary to pin-point the precise positions and
momenta of every particle of a human body, I was exceedingly
conservative. I assumed that the beam would take an origin point and
would refer all locations to that point, to save in descriptive
information. That maybe a kilobyte would be needed to locate a
particle, and maybe another to describe its momentum and that the body
contained about ten to the twenty-fifth power of particles. Avogadro's
number times a couple of magnitude to allow for 100 kilograms of mass.
I also assumed one second for the scan, which is a horrendously
ludicrous amount of time. So many things move around in that much
interval that the scan would resemble half-digested pea soup and the
rebuild would be jam, if it even resembled anything solid. 

 I also assumed that technology would someday be available to lens and
focus photons with individual energies comparable to the mass of a
cannon ball, which is what would be the power of a beam with a
frequency needed to scan the subject rapidly enough for the technology
to have some vague chance of reading it. Note that such a photon, if
bounced off of a particle, would not sense it, it would simply
annihilate it. There is no compromise energy level between not
disturbing the particles and reading them rapidly enough for the
process to be useful, no mini-max, no best-magnitude. Atoms,
molecules, cells, fluids, gases and sub-atomic bits are simply too
small for rapid scanning of 10*25 of them to be feasible in a human
timescale. The numbers don't work. 

 19th Century facsimile machines can read pages very slowly because
pages just sit there. The ink stays still as it rolls through the
drive. Humans are *far* messier. Make one error in transcription and
the human is dead, different or deformed. Or, realistically, soup and
vapours. 

 StarFleet transporters can not happen. Simple arithmetic forbids it
and legally they are murdering machinery. 

 Now, "StarGate" jump rings, those may be possible. Those wrap the
body in a bubble of sub-space and send the entire package, like an
email with headers, footers and routing information, to the target
ring set through sub-space. Carter was wrong. The gate does not
"demolecularise" anything. Every StarGate technology sends the
complete object as a sub-space package. That is why hyperdrives,
StarGates, jump-rings and Asir beaming technologies all work and all
work in a similar fashion. 

 For Ancient tech to work, all we need is a sub-space and a way to
make bubbles out of it. 

 The lovely and creative Mr. Rodenberry gave us transporters to save
on the crews leaping into and out of shuttles fifty times per episode.
It was a brilliant plot-device. Unfortunaeatly Physics and Arithmetic
hate it.  

                                                     J.     

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