Holy Crapoly! Science Fiction May Become Fact In Our Lifetime!

[Kittish]

Doesn't the Star Trek teleporter basically just kill you and make a copy someplace else?

Pretty much, yes.

[Moirae]

Doesn't the Star Trek teleporter basically just kill you and make a copy someplace else?

I suppose. That's really a simplified way of putting it if you learn about the tech from trek.

More like, it takes apart the tiniest bits of your body (down to quark level and possibly smaller), moves them through space, and reassembles them in another place.

[wolfie]

I guess that means a trip long enough to require most of the crew to be kept in hibernation (2001: A Space Odesey) is out of the question.

When "Enterprise" first hit the small screen, I read that one thing they were having trouble with was interpolating the technology (i.e. picking a level of gadgetry that was somewhere between the present day and the original Star Trek). Why was this such a problem? Because between the late '60s and the present, we had already passed the level of technology in ST in some areas.

[Chromatix]

I don't think we'll be able to "transport" macroscopic items, let alone humans, in the foreseeable future. I also think that interstellar travel will be out unless we can do FTL or wormhole travel with feasible amounts of energy (and not bathe our destination in hard X-rays when we arrive). The sole exception would be generation or sleeper ships, which have their own problems.

More realistically, I think there is lots of potential for interplanetary travel and spaceborne colonies. There is plenty of raw material to buid with up there if we have a way to move it around, and lots of space to build in even if we restrict ourselves to long-term stable orbits (the ISS isn't in one of those - if we stopped boosting it periodically, it would decay into the atmosphere within a few years). People have already invented feasible colony structures that provide protection from solar radiation, the trouble is with engines.