Artik & ViraZeph
ViraZeph
Hey Artik, ever wonder if the teleportation tech in Star Trek could actually work with our current quantum entanglement knowledge? I'd love to dig into the math and the sci‑fi dream side of it.
Artik
You’ve got a classic sci‑fi wish in your hands, and I’m not about to hand it out without a few checks. Quantum entanglement lets us correlate states instantly, but it doesn’t let us move massive, localized objects through spacetime—there’s no known protocol to preserve the entire wavefunction of a human body. The math would have to collapse the no‑cloning theorem, which is a hard nut. So let’s get the equations down, watch for the loopholes, and then we can decide whether the dream is a dream or just a good story for a good story.
ViraZeph
You’re right, the no‑cloning theorem is the hard wall. Still, if we tweak the teleportation protocol to encode the entire wavefunction into a massive quantum register and then rebuild it with a “re‑entanglement cascade,” we might bypass the collapse. Think of it as teleporting a star‑ship by first swapping its entire state into a quantum memory array and then reconstructing it at the destination. The math gets heavy—Schrödinger in a multi‑particle Hilbert space, plus a huge error‑correcting code—but if we can keep the decoherence time longer than the transfer, the dream could tip into reality. Let’s sketch that out and see where the loopholes bite.
Artik
That’s a bold sketch, and I’m all for a good thought experiment, but the devil hides in the details. Swapping an entire ship‑sized wavefunction into a quantum memory, then reconstructing it elsewhere, is basically the same as having a perfect, error‑free quantum computer that can store every particle’s state and run the whole inverse evolution. We’re talking about Hilbert spaces of astronomic dimension and error‑correction that can beat decoherence for years on end. Before we dive into the math, let’s pin down what “massive quantum register” you’re imagining—single qubits, ion traps, superconducting chips? And what sort of error model we’ll assume. The more concrete, the better we can spot the real bottlenecks.
ViraZeph
Yeah, let’s make it concrete. I’d start with a hybrid ion‑trap array for the massive register—ion traps give us long coherence times and high‑fidelity gates, plus we can stack them into a modular lattice that scales. On top of that, I’d weave in photonic interconnects to shuttle entanglement between modules; photons are our low‑noise bus. For error correction, we’d lean on the surface‑code architecture because it tolerates pretty high error rates and can run on a 2‑D grid of qubits. The threshold is around 0.7 % for gate errors, but we’d aim for 0.1 % with laser cooling and sympathetic cooling ions. Decoherence times would have to be in the seconds to minutes range—so we’re talking about cryogenic operation and ultra‑stable magnetic shielding. The real bottleneck? The sheer number of qubits: a human body has ~10^27 particles, so even a coarse‑grained encoding would need at least 10^22 qubits to keep the fidelity acceptable. That’s orders of magnitude beyond today’s 10^5‑scale prototypes. So we can sketch the math, but the engineering is a galaxy away.
Artik
That’s the textbook path—hybrid ion traps, photonic links, surface code—yet the qubit tally you’re talking about still feels like science‑fiction math. 10^22 qubits to encode a single person? Even if we had a perfect quantum internet, that’s a scale that sits far outside our exponential‑growth trajectory. In short, the theory is neat, but the engineering curve is still climbing at a rate that makes the dream look like a future epoch, not a near‑term reality.
ViraZeph
Yeah, I know the numbers look like a sci‑fi fantasy. Still, it’s fun to push the limits and see where the math breaks. Maybe we could look at a hybrid approach—use a massive photonic lattice for bulk storage, then compress the state with entanglement‑assisted compression schemes. Or we could explore “quantum‑assisted” transport: instead of moving the whole body, teleport the information that lets a robotic proxy reconstruct the person. That might shave the qubit count down to a more realistic 10^18 or 10^19 range—still huge, but a step closer to a tech‑sandbox. What do you think, should we start sketching those compression protocols?
Artik
Sounds like a plan. We’ll start by writing down the density matrix for the body in a coarse‑grained basis, then apply a Schumacher‑style compression to squeeze the information into fewer qubits. Even with a 10^18–10^19 target, the code will still have to correct for massive errors, so we’ll layer the surface code on top. The trick will be to keep the logical gate fidelity above the threshold while juggling the photonic bus and the ion‑trap lattice. I’ll sketch the protocol and let you see where the math actually bites.