A recent paper, published at the University of Leicester, explores just what transporters (or any teleportation of matter tech, really) might be capable of, were we to invent them today. The results are not what you might call promising.
The amount of energy and time it would take, the study finds, to send you from one place to another pretty much negates the whole idea of teleportation. It would literally be faster to walk — no matter how far you’re teleported. That’s because storing the full data of a single human cell takes up something like 10 billion bits of information.
If that doesn’t sound insurmountable, then good. That was the easy part. Each cell in the human body contains the data needed to create the rest of them as well. Storing and reconstituting the full contents of your brain on the other hand is incredibly complex. In terms of storage space alone, the brain’s data takes up 2.6 times ten to the 42nd power bits of data. Yeesh.
Transferring all that data, even given zero packet loss (there goes second grade) at a speed of 30GHz, would take approximately 350,000 times longer than the universe has been in existence. 350,000 times 14 billion years. And if you think that simply increasing the bandwidth will immediately solve the problem, guess again. The study also found that increasing the bandwidth enough to speed up the process by a few thousand years would quickly exhaust the Earth’s power supply.