‘Beam me up, Scotty’: Will we ever teleport or travel the universe (and live on Mars)?
Star Trek promised us a lot, didn’t it? Not only did Captain Kirk and his crew travel the universe lightning fast using handy warp drives that could distort spacetime, but whenever they felt like going on a jaunt to a nearby planet they needed only to step up to the ship’s teleporter and utter those immortal words, “Beam me up, Scotty” and they would find themselves dissolving and reassembling in the next scene. And they never even ended up somewhere weird like inside a rock or a giant alien’s digestive tract.
But is this vision of a star-hopping, teleporting human race total fantasy? Science-fiction writers might gloss over some of the finer technical difficulties of faster-than-light travel but scientists are yet to rule it out as impossible – “it’s just mind-bogglingly hard”, says experimental physicist Ben Buchler at the Australian National University.
And yet already Buchler and other scientists have teleported lasers across rooms and even into space, and frozen light mid-air – like a Darth lord straight out of Star Wars – with the help of strange quantum phenomena.
