The jellyfish pictured above, Turritopsis nutricula, has a rather extraordinary ability: like a phoenix, it can repeatedly revert from adulthood to its immature, polyp form and restart the process of aging, functionally rendering the organism biologically immortal. If the jellyfish can avoid disease, starvation, and predation, it has a potentially infinite lifespan.

In the same vein, the ubiquitous, microscopic tardigrades are some of the most resilient creatures on the planet. At only about half a millimeter long, they can survive extreme radiation, temperature, pressure, toxins, and dehydration. In fact, in a 2007 experiment tardigrades demonstrated the ability to survive in outer space, bombarded by solar radiation in a vacuum, for the full duration of the 10-day experiment. They are prime candidates for the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, an experiment that will send selected organisms into deep space on a three-year round trip journey. More to the point, in addition to being incredibly resilient tardigrades are not senescent - that is, they do not age and are, therefore, biologically immortal.

These are just two examples of many organisms with potentially infinite lifespans. In comparison, we know that human beings are genetically programmed to age and die. But immortality is not out of our reach. Research in genetics, bioengineering, nanotechnology, cybernetics, and many other fields continues to yield promising prospects - cybernetic implants and mind-to-computer uploading to name a few.

There is little doubt that technology-enabled immortality is in our future. However, this isn’t a post about the myriad pursuits of life extension. Rather it is about such a technology’s effect on humanity. The human condition is defined by cognizance of mortality; our sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology are predicated on our impermanence. We worry about making the most of our time, use medicine to extend our lifespans, and speculate on the possibility of conscious existence beyond death. 

There are several major social issues associated with the advent of technology-enabled immortality:

1. Productivity increase: Collaboration among a growing number of immortal experts might quickly revolutionize science, technology, and industry.
2. Resource shortages: With a stunted mortality rate, the population spike would rapidly deplete resources and endanger access to basic necessities like food and water.
3. Social structure: A single person might have several families over the years, the concept of retirement would have to be reassessed, selection for employment would become far more competitive, etc.
4. Immortality divide: There will be those who can afford immortality and those who cannot. That line is likely to form on financial lines, exacerbating the divide between the rich and the poor; “democratic human societies might ossify into rigid, caste-based” society.
5. Blurred humanity: Physiological augmentation might engender an individual’s identity as a human being. How human is an individual who is more cybernetic than organic? How human is someone with altered DNA?

On a personal level, cognizance of immortality also poses sapient immortals with an existential quandary: with all the time in the world on their hands, they fall into Sisyphus’ dilemma. What happens when personal immortality becomes social immortality? A collapse of society or alignment on a social objective? We may just live to find out.

These days landmark scientific discoveries and advancements occur so often that many go unnoticed by the general public. For instance, you might not know that the first thought-controlled robotic prosthetic limb system was approved for human testing late last month, Intel unveiled the first end-to-end photonics data connection capable of transferring data at 50Gbps, and that a robot astronaut is on Twitter. And for those who do keep up with scientific news, the frequency at which these major developments occur may leave you jaded to their importance. These days many discoveries at CERN never even make it onto major newspapers. If virologists tomorrow discovered a cure for the common cold I doubt I would be the least bit amazed; instead my first response would be “it’s about time.”

The last time I can recall being struck by a discovery was a few years ago when I read in physicist Michio Kaku’s book Physics of the Impossible that teleportation was successfully demonstrated - in 1997. Since then it has been demonstrated again and again with photons and atoms, and yet I hadn’t heard anything about it until over a decade later.

Kaku reflected on the speed of scientific advancement in his book: ”in my own short lifetime I have seen the seemingly impossible become established scientific fact over and over again.” I know science fiction has played an important role in my development. I was raised on movies like Gattaca, the Star Wars trilogy, and The Matrix and stories like those in Isaac Asimov’s Robot Series. High fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings were captivating, but I found elements of magic made these story too fantastical to relate to. The appeal of science fiction was that the innovations in science and technology illustrated in the genre seem attainable in our future. With depictions of intergalactic space travel, gene splicing, and artificial intelligence, futurist writers created worlds that were just beyond the horizon. Scientific discovery has always interested me because it bridges the gap between science fiction and reality. Think of smartphones, genetic engineering, commercial space travel, and the like which were introduced in science fiction but have been quietly integrated into our day-to-day lives. And what of force fields, invisibility, antimatter, and time travel? Would it be any surprise if I told you that each one of these has already been demonstrated or observed?

The reason I bring this up is that I have been following the developments in teleportation and its mechanism, known as quantum entanglement, since I first read Kaku’s book. I’ve found Marcus Chown’s The Quantum Zoo, Frank Wilczek’s The Lightness of Being, Steven Hawking’s television series Into the Universe, and Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole to be highly informative for a layperson such as myself. I think the topic is worth blogging about because of the revolutionary impact it will have when it is made available for public use in the not-too-distant future.

Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics which seeks to explain the behavior of subatomic particles where the line between matter and energy becomes blurred. While Newton’s laws and Maxwell’s equations successfully describe the macroscopic world we see around us - people, planets, stars - our understanding and explanations of how the universe works breaks down almost entirely on the quantum level.

Kaku, who is far more qualified to speak on the subject, explains that

According to Newtonian theory, teleportation is clearly impossible…Objects do not move until they are pushed; objects do not suddenly disappear and reappear somewhere else. But in the quantum theory, that’s precisely what particles can do.

When scientists developed the technology to peer into the quantum world, what they observed was unlike anything that they could have imagined. Quantum particles could disappear and reappear light-years away instantly, unbound by our sense of space and time. They could exist in multiple places at once, as waves of energy or matter or both. The behavior of matter and energy on the quantum level is so erratic that quantum physicists began tying particles’ behavior, such as jumping in and out of existence, with probabilities rather than “laws,” which prompted many like Chown in The Quantum Zoo to claim that “God plays dice with the universe.”

Some of the phenomena observed on the quantum level are tunneling, in which particles pass right through barriers unhindered, superposition, in which a particle exists in multiple states at once and probabilistically picks one to exist in when observed, and quantum entanglement. Kaku explains quantum entanglement as follows:

If two electrons are initially vibrating in unison (a state called coherence) they can remain in wavelike synchronization even if they are separated by a large distance. Although the two electrons may be separated by light-years, there is still an invisible Schrodinger wave connecting both of them, like an umbilical cord. If something happens to one electron, then some of that information is immediately transmitted to the other.

Exploiting entangled particles’ ability to instantaneously transfer information is the basis of teleportation. And when I write “instantaneously” I do mean faster than the speed of light. I offer this conceptual explanation of quantum teleportation: let’s say I entangled atoms A and B, which are miles apart, then made some alteration to atom A; that change would immediately be reflected on atom B. If I wanted to teleport a hydrogen atom, I could do so by having atom A scan the hydrogen atom. Atom A functions a gateway or a warp point for that information to travel to atom B. Scientists have used this property of entanglement to successfully teleport a macroscopic amount of cesium gas which contained “trillions upon trillions of atoms.” And this happened years ago.

Though quantum phenomena only occur naturally on a scale we cannot observe, scientific discoveries and advancements are allowing us to bring them to a macroscopic scale. As we develop our ability to exploit quantum entanglement on this scale, it is reasonable to expect the teleportation of living things in the future. The impact of this innovation will be revolutionary. Eventually we may not need cars or planes, or even space shuttles. Theoretically the Mars landing can occur at the same time as the Pluto landing, and it won’t stop there. Distance will no longer be an obstacle to anything, and the implications are mind-boggling.