TELEPORTING TO STARGATE (written on the Ides of March, 2007)
In "Discover" magazines Jan. 2007 issue (called "Top 100 Science Stories of 2006"), I was excited by #16 - "Quantum Teleportation Leaps Toward Reality" - and mentally merged it with a short article I wrote several years ago: "Gates > sGate > SGATE > STARGATE".
Quantum teleportation is the process of making a subatomic particles physical state vanish from one place and appear in another. Its possible because of a bizarre phenomenon known as entanglement, in which a pair of particles (such as two electrons) have complementary characteristics, such as spinning in opposite directions. Eugene Polzik and his colleagues at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, in collaboration with Ignacio Cirac of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Germany, entangled a light beam with a magnetized gas of cesium atoms. "For the first time," Polzik says, quantum teleportation "has been achieved between light the carrier of information and atoms." This was also the first time that it was done with a macroscopic atomic object acting as the target, instead of teleporting occurring between pairs of photons or pairs of atoms. But a superfast quantum computer, Polzik notes, requires the transfer of information between a data stream like light and a stored quantum state (such as the atoms in the computers hard drive).
Im excited coz quantum teleportation seems to be the beginning of research that is a method for bringing to fruition my dream of the "emailing" of matter. (Perhaps information can be transferred from the atoms of the original object to light then to atoms which will be reconstructed into a duplicate. However its done, this form of futuristic email has other consequences, too - please see my full article below for a sample.)
Gates > sGate > SGATE > STARGATE
This article starts with Bill Gates, the co-founder of the software corporation Microsoft. This is because part of the inspiration for writing this was a comment I read in a magazine about Bill Gates being the worlds richest man. It ends with the human races own technology causing it to transcend money and develop a society akin to paradise on Earth - i.e. we enter a doorway to a new world . . . a Stargate.
E=mc2 (Albert Einstein's formula unifying energy [E] with mass [m] and relating both to the velocity of light squared [c2] ) makes a person suspect the apparently solid world of matter is really an illusion, and you and I are actually made of insubstantial energy. Superstring theory, which rose to the forefront of physics during the 1980s, proposed that the fundamental constituents of nature are not particles but one-dimensional structures called strings. This heightens previous suspicions, and we wonder if these one-dimensional structures are in fact pulses of energy. Then along comes "TIME Australia" magazine's Feb. 26, 1996 article "What's Hiding in the Quarks?" (which says subatomic particles seem to be made of even tinier things). Finally, we might feel justified in assuming our suspicions were correct and that these "even tinier things" MUST be pulses of electromagnetic energy (meaning all substances are indeed insubstantial).
All forms of electromagnetic energy (radio, microwave, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-ray, gamma) travel as waves. How do we create an analog structure like a wave from a digital structure like a pulse? By adding the necessary number of pulses to the medium in which a wave travels to form the wave's amplitude (height) and wavelength (distance from crest to crest). (I am not going back to a time before the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 which showed light waves do not travel through space in something called the ether. My use of "medium" does not refer to any known or unknown substance, but to space as the means or agency by which a wave gets from point A to point B.) How could we create matter from waves? By superimposing waves of visible, gravitational, magnetic, electrical, etc. frequencies into holograms (near the end of the 1980s, the magazine "Scientific American" reported that holograms have been made not only with visible light and X-rays, but also with microwaves and sound waves).
If this article is correct, pulses are the basis of both waves and matter. Therefore, matter and energy would be digital in nature. Can this be extended, via superstrings, to space itself as well as to time (what Einstein called the 4th dimension - what Ill term "subspace", since Im a fan of science fiction)? In 1917, Einstein calculated that 3 universes could exist in the cosmos: can superstrings extend the digital cosmos into a 5th dimension (let's call it hyperspace)? Assuming we live in a digital cosmos, we are reminded of that other digital entity called the computer - and must wonder if all those pulses of energy result in a cosmic artificial-intelligence that is all-powerful and present not just everywhere in space and time, but also "outside the universe" i.e. in hyperspace. (This all-knowing, omnipotent and omnipresent being might be called God, Jehovah, Yahweh, Elohim, Allah, First Cause, Brahman, the Tao ...) The existence of such a "cosmic computer" would imply that both living and nonliving matter may be altered by programming, when people learn how to do this. Invasive procedures such as surgery would become obsolete.
The waves of energy which holographically compose matter could be digitised and transmitted over the Internet - and the receiver's computer could be equipped with sensors to decode the mix of frequencies, as well as an assembler that reproduces this mix and radiates it to create products indistinguishable in any way from the original product (the frequency mix could also be electronically recorded). The difference between life and nonlife appears to be merely one of complexity. So after inanimate objects and parcels have been successfully e-mailed, more advanced software will be developed and allow things like fruit and vegetables, or living animal/human tissues, to be transmitted (or transported) between places (i.e. in space) and between times (the famous scientist Stephen Hawking states that time can be thought of as another spatial dimension and that time travel is a theoretical possibility - I believe it will be navigated in the future just as ordinary space is today).
This advanced software could also be used to genetically engineer people whose genes have been disassembled into subatomic, electromagnetic pulses and manipulated by computers. An opportunity to possess an eternally youthful body and a brain free of criminal tendencies may therefore exist. When we develop this electronic hardware and software, and also acquire the science-fiction-like technology of time travel, everyone who has long since died could have their minds downloaded into reproductions of their bodies and be resurrected (establishing colonies throughout space and time would prevent overpopulation).
Living in a digital cosmos has another consequence, too. The technology to copy and e-mail physical objects must eventually lead to gold becoming overly abundant in this world. The standard of value for money is, at present, based on gold. The value of anything depends on how rare it is - so when gold becomes exceedingly common, its value must plummet and all forms of money must become practically worthless. Every alternative standard of value would suffer a similar fate. No doubt lawmakers and others will seek to preserve monetary value and prevent the end of the world as we know it (perhaps by outlawing the emailing of objects containing gold). But I'm convinced they'll be fighting a losing battle against the tide of history, because I regard the future abundance of gold etc. as related to the present Internet piracy of music and movie files, which many say is a fact of life and is here to stay! Then the only way to maintain, and improve, our standard of living will be through a level of sharing and cooperation that will transform society into paradise on earth - I believe this ideal future of centuries to come has to be begun now by ordinary people; despite the present realities of violence, greed, noncooperation and selfishness!
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