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How Teleportation Will Work

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Sick of those frenzied morning school drop-offs? Longing for a morning commute free of highway road rage and public transit bum stink?

Well, lucky for you, science is working on an answer, and it might just be as simple as scanning your body down to the subatomic level, annihilating all your favorite parts at point A and then sending all the scanned data to point B, where a computer builds you back up from nothing in a fraction of a second.

Sure, it kind of amounts to chunking your kid in a subatomic wood chipper every morning, but just think of all the time you'll save!

It's called teleportation , and you probably know it best from the likes of " Star Trek " and "The Fly." If realized for humans, this amazing technology would make it possible to travel vast distances without physically crossing the space between. Global transportation will become instantaneous, and interplanetary travel will literally become one small step for man.

Doubtful? Consider for a moment that teleportation hasn't been strictly sci-fi since 1993. That year, the concept moved from the realm of impossible fancy to theoretical reality. Physicist Charles Bennett and a team of IBM researchers confirmed that quantum teleportation was possible, but only if the original object being teleported was destroyed. Why? The act of scanning disrupts the original such that the copy becomes the only surviving original.

This revelation, first announced by Bennett at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society in March 1993, was followed by a report on his findings in the March 29, 1993, issue of Physical Review Letters. Since that time, experiments using photons have proven that quantum teleportation is, in fact, possible.

The work continues today, as researchers combine elements of telecommunications, transportation and quantum physics in astounding ways.

Teleportation: Recent Experiments

Human teleportation.

Teleportation experiments cause quite the mess in science fiction, producing inside-out baboons , gene-spliced monsters and dematerialized madmen like nobody's business.

In reality, however, the experiments are thus far abomination-free and overall quite promising.

In 1998, physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), along with two European groups, made IBM's teleportation theory a reality by successfully teleporting a photon -- a particle of energy that carries light.

The Caltech team read the atomic structure of a photon, sent this information across 3.28 feet (about 1 meter) of coaxial cable and created a replica of the photon on the other side. As predicted, the original photon no longer existed once the replica appeared.

In order to carry out the experiment, the Caltech group had to skirt a little something called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle . As any boxed, quantum -state feline will tell you, this principle states that you cannot simultaneously know the location and the momentum of a particle. It's also the main barrier for teleportation of objects larger than a photon.

But if you can't know the position of a particle, then how can you engage in a bit of quantum teleportation? In order to teleport a photon without violating the Heisenberg Principle, the Caltech physicists used a phenomenon known as entanglement . In entanglement, you need at least three photons to achieve quantum teleportation:

Photon A: The photon to be teleported
Photon B: The transporting photon
Photon C: The photon that is entangled with photon B

If researchers tried to look too closely at photon A without entanglement, they'd bump it, and thereby change it. By entangling photons B and C, researchers can extract some information about photon A, and the remaining information would pass on to B by way of entanglement, and then on to photon C. When researchers apply the information from photon A to photon C, they create an exact replica of photon A. However, photon A no longer exists as it did before the information was sent to photon C.

In other words, when Captain Kirk beams down to an alien planet, an analysis of his atomic structure passes through the transporter room to his desired location, where it builds a Kirk replica. Meanwhile, the original dematerializes.

Since 1998, scientists haven't quite worked their way up to teleporting baboons , as teleporting living matter is infinitely tricky. Still, their progress is quite impressive. In 2002, researchers at the Australian National University successfully teleported a laser beam, and in 2006, a team at Denmark's Niels Bohr Institute teleported information stored in a laser beam into a cloud of atoms about 1.6 feet (half a meter) away.

"It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects," explained team leader Dr. Eugene Polzik. "One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium" [source: CBC ].

In 2012, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China made a new teleportation record. They teleported a photon 60.3 miles (97 kilometers), 50.3 miles (81 kilometers) farther than the previous record [source: Slezak ]. Just two years later, European physicists were able to teleport quantum information through an ordinary optical fiber used for telecommunications [source: Emerging Technology from the arXiv].

Given these advancements, you can see how quantum teleportation will affect the world of quantum computing far before it helps your morning commute time. These experiments are important in developing networks that can distribute quantum information at transmission rates far faster than today's most powerful computers.

It all comes down to moving information from point A to point B. But will humans ever make that quantum jaunt as well?

Sadly, the transporters of "Star Trek" and the telepods of "The Fly" are not only a far-future possibility, but also perhaps a physical impossibility.

After all, a transporter that enables a person to travel instantaneously to another location might also require that person's information to travel at the speed of light -- and that's a big no-no according to Einstein's theory of special relativity .

Also, for a person to teleport, the teleporter's computer would have to pinpoint and analyze all of the 10 28 atoms that make up the human body. That's more than a trillion trillion atoms. This wonder machine would then have to send the information to another location, where another amazing machine would reconstruct the person's body with exact precision.

How much room for error would there be? Forget your fears of splicing DNA with a housefly , because if your molecules reconstituted even a millimeter out of place, you'd "arrive" at your destination with severe neurological or physiological damage.

And the definition of "arrive" would certainly be a point of contention. The transported individual wouldn't actually "arrive" anywhere. The whole process would work far more like a fax machine -- a duplicate of the person would emerge at the receiving end, but what would happen to the original? What do YOU do with your originals after each fax?

It stands to reason, then, that every successful bio-digital teleportation would be an act of murder and creation. Each use would see the digitalization of your body's every detail, the creation of a genetic clone complete with all the travelers' memories, emotions, hopes and dreams.

The original copy would have to die; that is, unless we're cool with the notion of duplicating ourselves every time we need to travel cross-country and committing infanticide each time little Jimmy heads to school.

As with all technologies, scientists will surely continue to improve upon the underlying concepts of teleportation. One day, such a harsh vision of life, death and teleportation may well seem barbaric and uninformed. Our ancestors may feel their bodies fade and dematerialize on one world, even as their eyes open on a planet untold light-years away.

Explore the links on the next page to learn even more about quantum physics and teleportation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will teleportation be possible, has teleportation ever been done, how long will it be until humans can teleport, what are the three types of teleportation, lots more information, author's note: how teleportation will work.

Teleportation is one of those "Frankenstein" technologies that terrify us even as they inspire us. Surely, the power to travel instantaneously from New York to Bangkok or from Earth to Alpha Centauri is certainly a power worth grasping after. It could ultimately guarantee the survival of the human race and its peripheral technologies could change fundamentally what it is to be human.

After all, if a machine can digitize everything that's you and rebuild it on the other side of the planet, then why bother with a perfect copy? How about an enhanced copy that's younger, smarter, stronger and happier? Why should you ever worry with getting old when you can simply pass through the teleporter and emerge renewed?

Bio-digital teleportation tempts and haunts us. It's why so many of our sci-fi visions of it involve inherent tragedy and dehumanizing horror. Because if we ever achieve it, we'll have mastered life, death, matter, space and time. Surely, some barrier should stand between humanity and such godhood, right? –- Robert Lamb

Is teleportation possible? Yes, in the quantum world

"Beam me up" is one of the most famous catchphrases from the "Star Trek" series. It’s the command issued when a character wishes to teleport from a remote location back to the Starship Enterprise .

While human teleportation currently exists only in science fiction, teleportation is possible now in the subatomic world of quantum mechanics -- albeit not in the way typically depicted on TV. In the quantum world, teleportation involves the transportation of information, rather than the transportation of matter.

Quantum teleportation involves two distant, entangled particles in which the state of a third particle instantly "teleports" its state to the two entangled particles.

Last year, scientists confirmed that information could be passed between photons on computer chips even when the photons were not physically linked. Now, according to National Science Foundation -funded research by University of Rochester and Purdue University scientists, teleportation may also be possible between electrons.

In a paper published in Nature Communications and one to appear in Physical Review X , the researchers, including Rochester physicists John Nichol and Andrew Jordan, explore new ways of creating quantum-mechanical interactions between distant electrons.

The research is an important step in improving quantum computing, the scientists say, and has the potential to revolutionize technology, medicine and science by providing faster and more efficient processors and sensors.

Quantum teleportation is a demonstration of what Albert Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance" -- also known as quantum entanglement. In entanglement, one of the basic of concepts of quantum physics, the properties of one particle affect the properties of another, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.

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Will Human Teleportation Ever Be Possible?

As experiments in relocating particles advance, will we be able to say, "beam me up, scotty" one day soon.

Lately it seems like the research world has launched into a full-throttle game of “what superpower would you choose?” For those who desire invisibility, engineers are developing exotic materials that can bend an object’s light completely out of view. For would-be telepaths, neurobiologists are working on ways to read one person’s brain wave patterns and transmit them into another person’s head.

My personal favorite, though, is perhaps the most outrageous fantasy power of all: teleportation, the ability to arrive without traveling. Imagine being able to dematerialize from your living room and show up the next moment in Venice or the Amazon rainforest or the rings of Saturn (wearing an appropriate space suit, of course). The idea is so seductive that it has been a mainstay of science fiction since the early days of Star Trek and Doctor Who , but it also seems an affront to common sense.

Fortunately, common sense doesn’t guide the rules of quantum physics, as evidenced by a brief 1993 paper with a mouthful of a title: “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State Via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels.” In it, a team led by Charles Bennett of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center demonstrated how to link two particles together a certain way, and keep them linked even at great distances.

That connection, known as quantum entanglement, has a remarkable power. It enables someone holding one of the particles to send, instantaneously, a chunk of information — the “unknown quantum state” in the paper’s title — to someone else holding the other particle. Because of that weird quantum connection, the information goes from one person to the other without physically passing between them. It arrives without traveling.

Relocating information from one particle to another may not sound a lot like, “Scotty, energize,” but at a fundamental level, they are two versions of the same process. Every atom in Captain Kirk’s body is a set of data (type of atom, location, energy state and so on); the captain as a whole is just an enormous collection of those data sets. Teleport all the relevant information to the surface of a planet, and you can re-create Kirk exactly as he was aboard the ship.

Well … maybe. Teleportation technology has progressed rapidly since 1993, and it is now being tested in the lab. But as the crew of the Enterprise repeatedly discovered, human teleportation is hard to do right and easy to do wrong. There may be better, simpler ways to attain that type of superpower.

Log on to a Quantum Computer

Even a limited form of teleportation could be a revelation. Physicists are hard at work developing a quantum computer, a related technology that processes information using individual atoms or particles instead of transistors. Such a computer could vastly outperform traditional processors on certain types of calculations: cracking codes and solving complex equations, for instance.

More exciting, a quantum computer could lead to the first fully realistic simulations of quantum phenomena. All of biology, chemistry and nanotechnology fundamentally operate at the quantum level. Being able to understand those processes on their own terms would be a giant leap.

Teleportation is a key enabling technology for quantum computing because it allows you to extract the information the computer produces without disturbing the rest of the system. No teleportation, no results. Last year, a team led by physicist Alex Kuzmich, then at the Georgia Institute of Technology, demonstrated a practical form of information teleportation by entangling a computer’s atoms and photons (particles of light) on demand. Once you can do that, you can take advantage of that quantum connection to beam data out of your quantum computer and get it exactly where you need it.

And once you can build a quantum computer, the possibilities keep going. Kuzmich and others envision entire “quantum networks” that would link together multiple computers and provide high-speed communications between them. If you think that idea sounds vaguely familiar, you are right; it’s a quantum version of the Internet.

A primary reason to go down this path is security. Working with entangled particles requires incredible delicacy, but that also makes it incredibly private. If anyone tries to eavesdrop on an entangled message, the very act of unwanted listening disrupts the whole teleportation process. Any message sent over a quantum Internet is therefore perfectly secure — or as perfect as anything known to humanity. Heartbleed bug? No problem.

What About Me?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you are anything like me, you want to know about the unlimited form of teleportation, the kind that beams people from place to place. Let me temper your enthusiasm with two considerations, one philosophical and one technological.

First, extracting all the information from Captain Kirk’s body (or yours) requires knowing the physical state of every atom, which would require total disintegration. Each time Kirk steps into the transporter, then, he is committing suicide and then getting reborn at the other end. Second, the amount of information required to re-create him is staggering — about 4.5 x 1042 bits, by one estimate, determined recently as part of a highly entertaining graduate physics project at the University of Leicester.

Nobody knows how to collect and transmit that much information. And remember how the slightest disturbance ruins quantum entanglement? The process of reassembling your atoms would inherently scramble the information. At this point, it’s suicide at one end without rebirth at the other. Kirk might as well put on a red shirt first.

The teleportation situation becomes much less bleak if you bend the definition a bit, however. As many a video game player has noticed, the human brain has a remarkable ability to project itself outside the body and into other objects or virtual spaces. NASA is exploiting that ability with Human Exploration Telerobotics, a project that lets astronauts “inhabit” robots in locations that are fatal or inaccessible. A mechanical astronaut will soon be strolling outside the International Space Station. In the near future, you might be able to experience space exploration vicariously through a Mars rover or mechanical arms poking at a distant asteroid.

If that’s too much of a cheat for you, how about a DNA fax machine? Biotech guru J. Craig Venter proposes that if we find microbial life on Mars, we could sequence its genome locally, transmit the information and rebuild the organism here on Earth. In principle, Venter notes, the process could go the other way: It would be possible to send human DNA, along with an appropriate incubator, to distant planets and synthesize people at the other end. Then your clone could start setting up shop on a world orbiting Alpha Centauri B.

Cloning still doesn’t fulfill the full superpower fantasy of teleportation, I realize. No, what you ideally want is a complete mind-upload to your distant doppelganger, so that you/he/she can really be there. That would reduce the teleportation problem from “probably impossible” to “wildly difficult.” That still leaves the problem of the brain’s enormous information content. But if you accept that information is the only thing that defines your mind, the task seems feasible. No longer do you need to assemble atoms meticulously in the right locations; just the facts will do.

Note a fascinating common thread through all these possibilities. Whether you regard yourself as a pile of atoms, a DNA sequence, a series of sensory inputs or an elaborate computer file, in all of these interpretations you are nothing but a stack of data. According to the principle of unitarity, quantum information is never lost. Put them together, and those two statements lead to a staggering corollary: At the most fundamental level, the laws of physics say you are immortal.

How about that for a superpower?

This article appeared in print as "The Ups and Downs of Teleportation."

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Science News Explores

Human teleportation this century we’re stuck doing it virtually.

Beaming real bodies around still eludes science, but beaming them virtually is no problem

An illustration of a person facing a giant black edged hole through which stars and a galaxy can be seen. The person's dark hair is windblown, they are raising their glowing right hand up to the portal.

The transporters used in Star Trek and other sci-fi movies teleported whole bodies throughout the universe. In the real world, that isn’t possible yet. But we can teleport images of ourselves for virtual interactions — both on Earth and out of this world.

Grandfailure/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Field trip by teleportation

Laura Shackelford works at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. As a paleoanthropologist, she studies ancient humans. As part of her work, she teaches students how to do excavations. They usually take place at some field school . But in 2017, she started to design something different: virtual excavations.

Her students get “beamed” — virtually — into a cave at a national park. Supposedly, a private company discovered natural gas supplies under this site. It now wants to begin mining the gas there by fracking .

a virtual image of an archeological field site in a cave

Shackelford’s students become the archaeologists in charge. Their first task: Study the site’s history by excavating it. They must find out if the site has some historic or cultural importance that means it should be left intact.

The students do exactly what they would at a real field school. They learn excavation techniques. They dig up artifacts. They even run lab analyses.

Shackelford’s goal is to boost the accessibility of field sites. Field schools tend to be expensive. They also can be quite challenging for people with physical disabilities. Her virtual program gets around those problems. Her students get the experiences they need without having to leave her classroom.

From that perspective, she says, “It’s been really successful.” She’s run it twice so far — in 2019 and 2020.

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The role of collaboration

Archaeology is very collaborative. To emphasize that, Shackelford’s students work in pairs. They take turns donning their team’s virtual reality (VR) headset to excavate. At other times they act as the team’s support person.

Support partners have a number of tasks. One is to keep teammates wearing the VR headsets from running into objects and their other excavating classmates. “It’s partly a matter of safety,” Shackelford explains. “I have a room full of students, half of whom are blinded because they’re in a virtual headset.”

two students in front of a computer one is wearing a VR headset and using a hand controller, the other is looking at the monitor. The monitor is showing a cave surface texture

At a true field site, each pair would be working in a different area of the excavation, Shackelford says. To add that feel for her students, each pair works at a different section of the virtual site. Later, they have to share what they’ve learned to interpret the data being gathered.

“They can’t figure out what the site was used for,” she points out, until “they collaborate.”

In this program, the students will discover that the cave housed a tuberculosis (TB) clinic around the 1940s. Patients lived there while being treated for the disease.

In the first half of the 20 th century, TB was a significant problem in the United States. At the time, one doctor noticed that caves tended to have clean, dry air. That doctor argued that caves, then, might be good places in which TB patients could recover. In response, some physicians set up clinics in various caves.

“Doctors [later] found that that was a terrible idea,” Shackelford says. It proved to be “the exact opposite kind of environment you’d want for TB patients.” Her students are now virtually unearthing some of this real TB history. And they’re able to take part without the time demands, costs and other challenges of travel and accessing dig sites.

Shackelford hopes to run the program again in 2024. She also plans to open it to others beyond her own classes. Meanwhile, she’s working with her colleagues to improve the course.

For instance, her team wants to make the program accessible to wheelchair users. They’re also adding more specialized labs. One lab teaches how to process plant samples. She’s now creating one to study animal remains. Another will focus on dating ancient samples based on the radioactive isotopes in them.

Holoporting into space

What good is teleportation — even the virtual type — if you can’t beam people into space? Well, you already can, sort of. In October 2021, NASA beamed one of its medics, Josef Schmid, to the International Space Station (ISS). There, the doctor gave one astronaut a virtual exam. The space agency used a technique known as holoportation (a mashup of hologram and teleportation). And this term fits: it combines holography with extended reality (XR). To do it, NASA used off-the-shelf hardware.

a photo of Kayla Barron, an astronaut wearing a VR headset, a red long-sleeved shirt, and grey cargo pants, floating in the ISS module. She is speaking into a microphone

The headset had an entire holographic computer inside. A motion-sensing camera used advanced sensors to capture high-quality 3-D “models” of the team to be “transported.” Those data were then compressed and transmitted live to the ISS. An app called HoloWizard (designed by the software company AEXA) powered the system.

Schmid is a NASA flight surgeon. Being a medical doctor, he takes care of astronauts and their families. But for his visit to the ISS, he never left Earth. NASA projected him up there as a 3-D hologram. It also did this for other members of the team, such as AEXA‘s chief, Fernando De La Peña Llaca. The astronauts could see the virtual visitors and interact with them in real time.

a photo of an older white man sitting in a chair in a mostly empty office. His left hand is outreached to "shake hands" with the astronaut he is speaking with.

“We knew we were connected when the crew member [wearing the headset] said, ‘Whoa!’” recalls Schmid. “We were floating in front of him … as if we were there.”

But Schmid and the others remained firmly at NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas. A portion of the space station appeared to be floating in front of each of them. It was “like I was looking into a portal into [the ISS],” Schmid recalls.

A view of an astronaut holoporting from the ISS to NASA's Mission Control during a simulation

The imagery wasn’t perfect. There were pixelation issues. And sometimes the linkup turned wobbly. But for Schmid, it felt like a glimpse into the future.

While “on” the ISS, he demonstrated a cranial nerve exam. It’s something he might perform with a patient in his office. He also showed the crew how to do a knee exam. Then he proceeded to virtually shake the hand of astronaut Thomas Pesquet. (This was the first ever Earth–space handshake, but it’s unlikely to be the last.)

Next time, Schmid hopes NASA will use two motion-capture cameras. That way, people in both places — on Earth and in space — can be “present” in each other’s spaces as holograms. He also would like to experience a VR setting in which “you look around — behind you, above you and below you — and you’re in the space station.” He looks forward to such house calls. Or in this case, maybe they’d be “space calls”?

One day, holoportation might be used for private medical and psychiatric visits with astronauts. It might also allow NASA to host dignitaries at the space station. Schmid can even imagine astronauts dining with their families — virtually. “Really,” he says, “the sky is no longer the limit.”

a photo of Josef Schmid holported onto the ISS, he has his hand raised in a Vulcan greeting

Beyond teleportation

XR is not a new technology. Neither is holography. Engineers are just finding newer ways to use them. XR for virtual teleportation has, in fact, been around for a while. During the pandemic shutdowns of 2020 and 2021, the tourism industry tapped into XR to offer virtual tours. Some companies now use it for factory visits, tours of sports stadiums and more. Others are working on ways to let people work together in an immersive, virtual environment (such as site visits and meetings).

As NASA has shown, holoportation has great potential for 3-D telemedicine . The space agency can even imagine true extraterrestrial use, such as for future missions to deep space.

But there are also plenty of potential uses here on Earth. People could holoport to safely visit extreme environments, such as Antarctica during its months of frigid darkness. Doctors might also use it to “visit” patients on offshore oil rigs or at military bases on the frontlines of conflict.

But to physically teleport someone from one place to another? “As far as we know,” Weaver says, “right now there doesn’t really exist any technology that can scale up to transport an entire human being.”

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Why Can’t People Teleport?

Let’s face it: Nobody likes to travel.

Whether they’re traveling to get to an exotic location for vacation or traveling to work on a daily commute, nobody actually likes the part where they have to travel. The people who say they like to travel probably mean they like to arrive . That’s because being somewhere can be really fun: seeing new things, meeting new people, getting to work sooner so you can go home early and read physics books. The actual traveling part is usually a drag: getting ready, rushing, waiting, rushing some more. Whoever said “it’s the journey, not the destination” clearly never had to sit in traffic every day and never got stuck in a middle seat on a transatlantic flight.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a better way to get to places? What if you could just appear where you want to go, without going through all the places in between?

diptych of people standing in line and then teleporting to chair

Teleportation has been a fixture in science fiction for well over 100 years. And who hasn’t fantasized about closing their eyes or hopping into a machine and suddenly finding themselves where they want to be? Think of the time you’d save! Your vacation could start now, and not after a 14-hour flight. We could get to other planets more easily, too. Imagine sending colonists to the nearest habitable planet (Proxima Centauri b, four light-years away) without having to spend decades in transit.

But is teleportation possible? And if it is, why is it taking scientists so long to make it a reality? Will it take hundreds of years to develop, or can I expect it as an app on my phone sometime soon? Set your phasers on stun, because we are going to beam you up on the physics of teleportation.

If your dream of teleportation is to be here in one moment and then be in a totally different place the next moment, then we are sad to tell you right off the bat that this is impossible.

Unfortunately, physics has some pretty hard rules about anything happening instantaneously. Anything that happens (an effect) has to have a cause, which in turn requires the transmission of information. Think about it: In order for two things to be causally related to each other (like you disappearing here and you appearing somewhere else), they have to somehow talk to each other. And in this universe, everything, including information, has a speed limit.

Information has to travel through space just like everything else, and the fastest anything can travel in this universe is the speed of light. Really, the speed of light should have been called the “speed of information” or “the universe’s speed limit.” It’s baked into relativity and the very idea of cause and effect, which are at the heart of physics.

Even gravity can’t move faster than light. Earth doesn’t feel gravity from where the Sun is right now ; it feels gravity from where the Sun was eight minutes ago. That’s how long it takes information to travel the 93 million miles between here and there. If the Sun disappeared (teleporting off for its own vacation), Earth would continue in its normal orbit for eight minutes before realizing that the Sun was gone.

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So the idea that you can disappear in one place and reappear in another place instantly is pretty much out of the question. Something has to happen in between, and that something can’t move faster than light. Fortunately, most of us aren’t such sticklers when it comes to the definition of “teleportation.” Most of us will take “almost instantly” or “in the blink of an eye” or even “as fast as the laws of physics will allow” for our teleportation needs. If that’s the case, then there are two options for making a teleportation machine work:

Your teleportation machine could transmit you to your destination at the speed of light.
Your teleportation machine could somehow shorten the distance between where you are and where you want to go.

Option No. 2 is what you might call the “portal” type of teleportation. In movies, it would be the kind of teleportation that opens up a doorway, usually through a wormhole or some kind of extradimensional subspace, that you step through to find yourself somewhere else. Wormholes are theoretical tunnels that connect points in space that are far away, and physicists have definitely proposed the existence of multiple dimensions beyond the three we are familiar with.

Sadly, both of these concepts are still very much theoretical. We haven’t actually seen a wormhole, nor do we have any idea how to open one or control where it leads. And extra dimensions aren’t really something you can move into. They only represent extra ways in which your particles might be able to wiggle.

Much more interesting to talk about is Option No. 1, which, as it turns out, might actually be something we can do in the near future.

If we can’t appear in other places instantly, or take shortcuts through space, can we at least get there as fast as possible? The top speed of the universe, 300 million meters per second, is plenty fast to cut your commute down to a fraction of a second and make trips to the stars take years instead of decades or millennia. Speed‑of‑light teleportation would still be awesome.

To do that, you might imagine a machine that somehow takes your body and then pushes it at the speed of light to your destination. Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with this idea, and it’s that you’re too heavy. The truth is that you’re too massive to ever travel at the speed of light. First, it would take an enormous amount of time and energy just to accelerate all the particles in your body (whether assembled or broken up somehow) to speeds that are close to the speed of light. And second, you would never get to the speed of light. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve been dieting or working on your CrossFit; nothing that has any mass can ever travel at the speed of light.

Particles like electrons and quarks, the building blocks of your atoms, have mass. That means that it takes energy to get them moving, a lot of energy to get them moving fast, and infinite energy to reach the speed of light. They can travel at very high speeds, but they can never achieve light speed.

That means that you, and the molecules and particles that make up who you are right now, would never actually be able to teleport. Not instantaneously, and not at the speed of light. Transporting your body somewhere that quickly is never going to happen. It’s just not possible to move all the particles in your body fast enough.

But does that mean teleportation is impossible? Not quite! There is one way it can still happen, and that’s if we relax what “you” means. What if we didn’t transport you, your molecules, or your particles? What if we just transmitted the idea of you?

One possible way to achieve speed‑of‑light teleportation is to scan you and send you as a beam of photons. Photons don’t have any mass, which means they can go as fast as the universe will allow. In fact, photons can only travel at the speed of light (there’s no such thing as a slow-moving photon—in a vacuum).

Here’s a basic recipe for speed‑of‑light teleportation:

Step 1: Scan your body and record where all your molecules and particles are.
Step 2: Transmit this information to your destination via a beam of photons.
Step 3: Receive this information and rebuild your body using new particles.

Is this possible? Humans have made incredible progress in both scanning and 3D printing technologies. These days, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can scan your body down to a resolution of 0.1 millimeters, which is about the size of a brain cell. And scientists have used 3D printers to print increasingly more complicated clusters of living cells (known as “organoids”) for testing cancer drugs. We’ve even made machines (using scanning tunneling microscopes) that can grab and move individual atoms. So it’s not hard to imagine that one day we might be able to scan and then print whole bodies.

The real limitation, though, might not be technological but philosophical . After all, if someone made a copy of you, would it actually be you?

Remember, there’s nothing particularly special about the particles that make up your body right now. All particles of a given type are the same. Every electron is perfectly identical to every other electron, and the same is true for quarks. Particles don’t come out of the universe factory with personalities or any sort of distinguishing features. The only difference between any two electrons or any two quarks is where each of them is and what other particles they’re hanging out with.*

But how much would a copy of you still be you? Well, it depends on two things. The first is the resolution of the technology that scans and prints you. Can it read and print your cells? Your molecules? Your atoms, or even your individual particles?

The even bigger question is how much your “you-ness” depends on the tiny details. What level of detail does it take for the copy to still be considered you ? It turns out that this is an open question, and the answer might depend on how quantum your sense of self is.

How much information would have to be recorded in order to create a faithful copy of you? Is knowing the location and type of every cell and connection in your body enough? Or do you also need to know the position and orientation of every molecule in your body? Or if you drill down deeper, do you also need to record the quantum state of every particle?

Every particle in your body has a quantum state. That quantum state tells you where the particle is likely to be, what it’s likely to be doing, and how connected it is to other particles. Because you can only say what each particle is likely to be doing, there’s always some uncertainty. But is that quantum uncertainty an important part of what makes you you? Or does it happen at such a small level that it doesn’t really influence important things, like your memories or how you react to things?

At first glance, it seems unlikely that the quantum information in each of your particles would make a difference in making you who you are. For example, your memories and your reflexes are stored in your neurons and their connections, which are pretty big compared to particles. At that scale, quantum fluctuations and uncertainty tend to average out. If you were to subtly scramble the quantum values of a few of the particles in your body, would you be able to tell the difference?

Debating the answer to this question might be more appropriate for a philosophy book, not a physics book, but here we can at least consider the possibilities.

If it turns out that the quantum state of your particles doesn’t play a role in making you who you are, and that simply recreating how your cells or molecules are arranged is enough to make a copy that thinks and acts like you, then this is good news for your next vacation because teleportation gets a lot easier. This means that you just have to record the location of all your small bits and pieces and then put them together in the exact same way elsewhere. This is like taking a LEGO house apart, writing out the instructions, and then sending those instructions to another person to build. Modern technology seems to be well on its way to someday achieving this.

Of course, it wouldn’t be an exact copy of you, which might make you wonder if you’re losing something in the translation.

Would it be like sending a JPEG version of an image instead of the full picture? Would you come out the other end a bit fuzzy around the edges, or not feeling quite like yourself? The loss of fidelity you’re willing to put up with depends on how badly you want to get to the next star system in as short a time as possible.

But what if your you-ness does depend on quantum information? What if the magic, or the indelibleness of you, lies in the quantum uncertainty of every particle in your body? This sounds like a bit of New Age hocus-pocus, but if you really want to be certain that the copy coming out the other end of this teleportation machine is exactly the same as you, then you have to go quantum all the way.

The bad news is that this makes the problem of teleportation much harder. Really, anything quantum is hard, but the idea of copying quantum information is doubly hard.

This is because, from a physics point of view, it’s technically impossible to know everything about a particle all at once. The uncertainly principle tells us that when you measure the position of a particle very accurately, you can’t know the velocity, and when you measure the velocity, you can’t know the position. And it’s not just that you can’t know it. It’s much deeper: Information about position and velocity doesn’t simultaneously exist ! There’s an inherent uncertainty in every particle.

The only thing you can know about a particle is the probability that it’s here or there. How, then, do you make a quantum copy with the same probabilities as the original?

Let’s consider the problem of making a quantum copy of a single particle. If you insist that your light-speed teleportation machine make a copy of you that is absolutely identical to your current self, then this is pretty much your only option.

To copy a particle down to the quantum level means that you want to copy its quantum state. The quantum state of a particle includes the uncertainty about its position and velocity, or about its quantum spin, or any other quantum property. It’s not really a number but more a set of probabilities.

The problem is that to extract quantum information from a single particle, you have to probe that particle somehow, which means perturbing it. Even just looking at something involves bouncing photons off of it. If you shoot photons at an electron, you might learn about its quantum state, but you will also scramble it. This isn’t because we aren’t clever enough or because we haven’t developed a fine enough probe. The quantum “no‑cloning” theorem tells us that it’s impossible to read quantum information without destroying the original.

So how do you copy something that you can’t see or touch? It’s not easy, but one way to do it is using “quantum entanglement.” Quantum entanglement is a strange quantum effect where the probabilities of two particles get linked together. For example, if two particles interact with each other so that you don’t know what their spins are, but you do know that they are the opposite of each other, then the two particles are said to be entangled. If you find that one is spinning up, you know the other one must be spinning down, and vice versa.

Quantum teleportation works by taking two particles, entangling them, and then using them like two ends of a telephone fax line. For example, you can take two electrons, entangle them, and then send one of them to Proxima Centauri. Those two electrons would sit there, still entangled, until you are ready to start the copy process.

From there, it gets a little complicated, but essentially you use the entangled electron you have here to probe the particle you want to copy, and that interaction gives you the information you need to make the electron at Proxima Centauri be an exact quantum copy of the particle you wanted to duplicate.

Amazingly, humans have done this for single particles and even for small groups of particles.* The record so far is making a quantum copy between two points that are 1,400 kilometers apart. That won’t get you to Proxima Centauri yet, but it’s a start.

Scaling this quantum copy machine to more than just a few particles won’t be easy. There are 10 26 particles in your body, so it gets very complicated, very fast. But the point is that it’s possible .

Is that quantum reassembled person actually you? Well, it would be the most faithful reproduction of you that can possibly be made.

If that’s not you, then who are you?

One potentially sticky part about this idea of teleportation is that it can end up making multiple copies of you. In the case of the low-fidelity teleportation machine that doesn’t copy quantum information, you might imagine using it to make clones of you. You could scan your body and then beam that information to Proxima Centauri, and then to Ross 128 b (another nearby habitable planet), and then to any number of other planets. In fact, you could start printing copies right here. They might not be exact quantum copies of the original, but they would be similar enough to create all kinds of moral and ethical issues.

Fortunately, there is one saving grace about the quantum copying version of the teleportation machine. The same principles of quantum theory that allow you to copy quantum information also require that the original information be destroyed when it’s copied. Whichever way the technology ends up working, the scanning process would inevitably destroy the original by scrambling all of its quantum information. This means that the copy you send over is the only copy that remains.

To recap, the idea of transporting ourselves somewhere in a proverbial blink of an eye is definitely possible. If you can tolerate a speed‑of‑light transmission delay, and if you accept that a scanned and reassembled version of you is really you, then teleportation just might be in your future.

Of course, we forgot one important caveat: In order to teleport somewhere as described in this chapter, there needs to be a machine on the other side to receive your signal and reconstruct you.

That means that if you want to one day beam yourself to another planet, someone has to first get there the old-fashioned way: by traveling.

Any volunteers?

Excerpted from Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson. Copyright © 2021 by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Heisenberg, the quantum philosopher, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, the discovery of climate change, featured author, latest book, teleportation is here, but it’s not what we expected.

In 2005, the obituary of physicist Asher Peres in the magazine Physics Today told us that when a journalist asked him if quantum teleportation could transport a person’s soul as well as their body, the scientist replied: “No, not the body, just the soul.” More than just a simple joke, Peres’ response offers a perfect explanation, encoded in a metaphor, of the reality of a process that we have seen countless times in science fiction. In fact, teleportation does exist, although in the real world it is quite different from the famous “Beam me up, Scotty!” associated with the Star Trek series.

Teleportation in real science began to take shape in 1993 thanks to a theoretical study published by Peres and five other researchers in Physical Review Letters , which laid the foundation for quantum teleportation . Apparently, it was co-author Charles Bennett’s idea to associate the proposed phenomenon with the popular idea of teleportation, but there is an essential difference between fiction and reality: in the latter it’s not matter that travels, but rather information , which transfers properties from the original matter to that of the destination matter.

Quantum teleportation is based on a hypothesis described in 1935 by physicist Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, known as the EPR paradox. As a consequence of the laws of quantum physics, it was possible to obtain two particles and separate them in space so that they would continue to share their properties, as two halves of a whole. Thus, an action on one of them (on A, or Alice, according to the nomenclature used) would instantaneously have an effect on the other (on B, or Bob). This “spooky action at a distance”, in Einstein’s words, would seem capable of violating the limit of the speed of light.

The theory of this phenomenon, called quantum entanglement , was later developed in 1964 by John Stewart Bell, and has been corroborated by numerous experiments. The work of Peres, Bennett and their collaborators proposed that a third particle could interact with Alice’s and lose a quantum state —the value of one of its physical properties— to be transferred to that of Bob, so that it would acquire that state. Without a transfer of matter, the Bob particle would be converted into a copy of the Alice interactive particle, and there would never have been physical contact between them.

Teleported qubits

Since 1998, various experiments have achieved this quantum teleportation, initially using individual photons, then atoms and more complex systems. At first the phenomenon was demonstrated at a short distance, which increased in subsequent studies to hundreds of metres and kilometres. The current record is the teleportation of photons 1,400 kilometres from Earth to the Micius satellite in Earth orbit, an achievement successfully carried out in 2017 by the team led by Jian-Wei Pan at China’s University of Science and Technology in Hefei (USTC).

In these experiments, what is transmitted is information coded in bits. In the classical sense, a bit is a basic unit of binary information that takes the value of 0 or 1. In its application to quantum states, a bit may contain information about, for example, the spin of a particle (a kind of rotation). But in the quantum version of the bit, the qubit, its value can be both 0 and 1 or another value , such as 2, since quantum mechanics allows states to overlap . This is why quantum computing is seen as a more powerful technology than traditional computing, since its capacity to store and process information is much greater.

However, it is essential to stress that quantum teleportation does not serve to transmit data instantaneously, or at faster than light speed. The reason is that Bob needs to get additional information about Alice’s measurements that is not transmitted through the entangled particle system, and therefore must be sent through another channel; for each teleported qubit two classic bits must be transmitted, and this can only be done through traditional ways that, at most, only reach the speed of light.

A future quantum network

But despite this limitation, the possibilities of quantum teleportation look more and more promising as new milestones are reached. This year, two teams of researchers have reported for the first time the transmission of qutrits, or three-dimensional units of information (which can take three values, 0, 1 and 2). “Both studies have demonstrated the teleportation of qutrit . The main difference is the method we used,” explains Bi-Heng Liu, physicist at UCTC and co-author of one of the as-yet-unpublished studies , to OpenMind .

However, at the moment there is still some controversy at play between the two teams. As explained to OpenMind by physicist Chao-Yang Lu, also from UCTC and co-author of the other study, published in Physical Review Letters , with regard to the work of his colleagues, “the very quantum nature of teleportation hasn’t been demonstrated.” Co-author of the same study Manuel Erhard, from the University of Vienna, also believes that in Liu’s experiment, “the measurements and results are not sufficient to claim genuine three-dimensional and universal quantum teleportation.” For his part, Liu defends his results: “We have done the numerical simulation and confirmed the teleportation of qutrits.”

The controversy also extends to the possibilities of scaling the system to a greater number of dimensions. According to Liu, “both schemes are scalable.” For his part, Erhard argues that his own system can easily be extended to any dimension: “It is a question of technological development to further increase the dimensionality,” he says. On the other hand, he’s not sure if the same can be said about his colleagues’ system.

But what is the point of expanding these experiments into a larger number of dimensions? “A possible application of high-dimensional quantum teleportation lies in quantum networks,” Erhard explains to OpenMind . “Thus, we envision a future quantum network that is based on higher-dimensional alphabets. These come with the advantage of higher information capacities and also larger resistance to noise, for example.”

Therefore, moving from qubit to qutrit, and from there to ququart, and so on, is now laying the foundation for future quantum computing networks . Lu predicts that his system will achieve so-called quantum supremacy, the ability to solve problems unattainable by classical computing: “We are implementing multi-photon multi-dimensional quantum computing experiments called boson sampling, and hopefully in the near future we hope to control 30-50 photons to reach quantum supremacy.”

Javier Yanes

Related publications.

Towards the Quantum Computer: Qubits and Qudits
Understanding Quantum Cryptography
The Race for the Quantum Computer
Schrödinger, a Quantum behind the Secret of Life

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Beam me up Scotty: German scientists invent working teleporter, of sorts

New system destructively scans objects transmits them through encrypted communications across any distance and rebuilds it the other side

Teleportation has been the holy grail of transport for decades, ever since Mr Scott first beamed up Captain Kirk and his crew in the 1966 opening episode of Star Trek . Now the technology may have been cracked in real life … sort of.

Scientists from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam have invented a real-life teleporter system that can scan in an object and “beam it” to another location.

Not quite the dematerialisation and reconstruction of science fiction, the system relies on destructive scanning and 3D printing .

An object at one end of the system is milled down layer-by-layer, creating a scan per layer which is then transmitted through an encrypted communication to a 3D printer. The printer then replicates the original object layer by layer, effectively teleporting an object from one place to another.

“We present a simple self-contained appliance that allows relocating inanimate physical objects across distance,” said the six person team in a paper submitted for the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction conference at Stanford University. “Users place an object into the sender unit, enter the address of a receiver unit, and press the relocate button.”

The system dubbed “Scotty” in homage to the Enterprise’s much beleaguered chief engineer, differs from previous systems that merely copy physical object as its layer-by-layer deconstruction and encrypted transmission ensures that only one copy of the object exists at any one time, according to the scientists.

Real-world applications are pretty short for this kind of destruction and reconstruction. But the encryption, transmission and 3D printing objects could be key for companies wishing to sell goods via home 3D printers, ensuring only one copy could be made per purchase – effectively digital rights management for 3D printed objects.

Those looking to cut their commute by simply beaming into the office will have to wait at least another decade or two.

3D printing

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Teleportation, ESP & Time Travel: 10 Tales of Superpowers

Teleportation and Other Fantastic Claims

Just your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

The idea of people with superpowers is one that has long captivated audiences. Modern-day movies, graphic novels, TV shows and video games are full of fictional stories involving people who have acquired extraordinary and seemingly impossible abilities. The real world has plenty of fantastic claims as well spurring on debate and study.

One person who made fantastic claims was Pedro Ruiz Calderón, a Catholic priest who was brought to trial in Mexico City in 1540. Calderón claimed that he could teleport between continents, make himself invisible, predict the future , make women fall in love with him, find buried treasure, summon and exorcise demons among other abilities. Research by John Chuchiak IV, a professor at Missouri State University, sheds light on his trial.

LiveScience takes a look at superpowers throughout history. Some of them appear impossible while scientists are working on others to make them a reality.

Psychokinesis

Eusapia Palladino who, in an 1892 photograph taken in Milan, and shown here, supposedly levitated a table while researcher Alexandr Aksakov checked for fraud.

Psychokinesis (PK) is the ability to move or otherwise manipulate objects using the human mind . There are two types of psychokinesis , the "macro" and "micro" level. Many have claimed macro abilities — to be able to manipulate of large objects — throughout history. A 19th-century example was Eusapia Palladino who, in an 1892 photograph taken in Milan, and shown here, supposedly levitated a table while researcher Alexandr Aksakov checked for fraud.

The micro level involves the manipulation of random events using the human mind. Between 1979 and 2007 the PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) lab in New Jersey studied this phenomenon running detailed statistical analysis. Its researchers found that the human mind has a very slight ability to manipulate random events, a finding that is controversial and debated among scientists.

Time Travel

How can you swim upstream in the river of time? Physicists Charles Liu and Michio Kaku have some answers.

Time Travel is an ability which is often featured in science fiction. Through time dilation it is theoretically possible to travel forward in time although the effect wouldn't be significant unless you traveled a vast distance on a very fast spacecraft.

Moving backwards in time is more difficult and scientists are still uncertain as to whether it is even theoretically possible.

There have been claims of people having encounters, of sorts, with the past. On August 4, 1951 two English women on holiday near Dieppe claimed to hear the sounds of the famous World War II battle throughout the night while in their hotel room. They took careful notes and an article describing their case was published in the May-June 1952 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

Reincarnation

Buddha and a light symbolic of enlightenment

Reincarnation is the belief that when someone dies they are reborn. It's featured in several religions including Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.

There have been cases where young children recall information which some believe to be from past lives they lived. The late Dr. Ian Stevenson, a medical doctor who was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, documented and published an estimated 3,000 cases of this over a period of 40 years. He tried to match up these claimed experiences with people who actually died.

Extra Sensory Perception (ESP)

Extra Sensory Perception, or ESP, is the ability to obtain information through means other than the five senses. Examples of it include telepathy or “mind reading,” as it’s more popularly known. Precognition is another form and involves knowing of a future event ahead of time. Another form is remote viewing, seeing a distant place through paranormal means.

The U.S. military and CIA did research exploring the military and intelligence applications of ESP, particularly remote viewing. Project "Stargate" was a $20-million study started during the Cold War. It was spurred on by reports that the Soviet Union was investigating ESP. Although some claim that there were successful instances of remote viewing the project was shut down in 1995. [ The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments

An 18th century depiction of a dowser from the 1733 book Histoire critique des pratiques superstitieuses

The practice of "dowsing" or "divining" often features a person using twigs or a rod to find a water source. It can, however, be used for other things as well. Pedro Ruiz Calderón, the 16th-century priest, claimed to have been able to find buried treasure using supernatural means, and made a good amount of money selling his abilities. Needless to say modern-day scientists are skeptical that dowsing can actually be done.

(Shown here, an 18th-century depiction from the 1733 book "Histoire Critique des Practiques Superstitieuses.")

Predicting the Future

In many ways predicting the future is not a supernatural power. Economists, climatologists, demographers, all use scientific (or semi-scientific) methods to try to predict the future.

The use of supernatural powers to predict the future, however, has a much longer history. The use of horoscopic astrology, though not based in science, dates back more than 2,000 years and is tailored to the individual.

An ancient astrologer would determine the positions of the planets, sun and moon at the time their client was born. They would then use the information to determine their future. Researchers reconstructed and published in 2012 the oldest known astrologer's board , found in a cave in Croatia.

Astral Projection

A woman appearing as if she is dreaming or in a surreal world.

Invisibility

From HG Wells 1897 novel "The Invisible Man" to Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, the ability to make yourself invisible is one that has long fascinated science fiction writers.

Pedro Ruiz Calderón, the Catholic priest put on trial in 1540, claimed to be able to turn invisible. He said that the ability came in handy when he snuck in and out of the bedrooms of his mistresses.

Although the power seems fantastic scientists are working on technologies that may one day be able to render large objects partly or entirely invisible. Using artificial metamaterials they are developing techniques to bend light. Another effort, published in 2011 in the journal Nature Communications, uses calcite to block off red and green lasers and ordinary white light .

Love Spells

The ability to use supernatural abilities to make someone fall in love with you has ancient origins.

Archaeology Magazine reported on a case from Roman Egypt in which two wax figurines were found in an "erotic embrace." They contained an inscription which read in part "seize Euphemia and lead her to me Theon, loving me with mad desire, and bind her with unloosable shackles, strong ones of adamantine, for the love of me..."

Although modern-day scientists don't believe in love spells some substances, like strawberries, are said to act as an aphrodisiac, increasing sexual desire. [Top 10 Aphrodisiacs]

Teleportation

Teleportation was made famous by the series "Star Trek." People, aliens included, could beam from the fictional starship Enterprise to the surface of a planet in one piece (although transporter malfunctions were occasionally used as a plot device).

In real life Pedro Ruiz Calderón, the priest who went on trial in 1540, claimed to be able to teleport from Mexico to Europe and back again. His claim was laughable since, if he could do that, he could have easily escaped his trial!

Today scientists working in the field of quantum physics are working on teleporting light , with some success . Whether we will ever be able to teleport spaceship crewmembers or warlock priests is another matter. [ Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings ]

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

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Owen Jarus is a regular contributor to Live Science who writes about archaeology and humans' past. He has also written for The Independent (UK), The Canadian Press (CP) and The Associated Press (AP), among others. Owen has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto and a journalism degree from Ryerson University.

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air corridor
misdirection
non-delivery
send something out
shoot something off

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your bread and butter

a job or activity that provides you with the money you need to live

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All the ways Dragon’s Dogma 2 will fight against you

We expect certain things from modern video games, and Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t really care

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A Beastren warrior wearing metal armor in the game Dragon’s Dogma 2

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a fascinating open-world fantasy role-playing game that gives players great freedom to explore and deep customization options to build their character and party. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is also incredibly restrictive. It doesn’t care much about your expectations of it based on other games you might’ve played (e.g., Elden Ring , Baldur’s Gate 3 ), nor does it follow many conventions of modern game design.

That’s kind of the appeal, though — Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a throwback. It adheres to many of the rules defined by the original Dragon’s Dogma more than a decade ago.

But as you start your journey in the kingdom of Vermund, you might find yourself wondering, Am I doing something wrong? What the hell is going on in this game? Don’t worry. It’s not just you. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a brilliant game, but it’s not trying to cater to all players, particularly those looking for instant gratification or, like, convenience.

There’s no enemy lock-on

If you’re like me and have been playing some Elden Ring lately in anticipation of Shadow of the Erdtree ’s arrival, you may wind up consulting Dragon’s Dogma 2 ’s control options early on to figure out how to target-lock enemies in combat.

Here’s the thing: You can’t.

An Arisen warrior slashes at a band of goblins, with splatters of blood emitting from their bodies, in a screenshot from Dragon’s Dogma 2

Sure, you can grab onto enemies to pick them up, throw them, or climb on them like you’re battling a Shadow of the Colossus boss. But you can’t, say, click in one of the analog sticks to lock on to monsters to make combat easier to wrap your head around.

Fortunately, your pawns have pretty good aim. And the game may have something of a soft lock to make your attacks connect, but don’t expect Devil May Cry-style lock-on during combat encounters.

You have extremely limited fast travel

There’s really no easy means of fast travel in Dragon’s Dogma 2 . You can find and purchase consumable items called Ferrystones that will let you teleport to other locations. But teleporting is extremely limited — there are only a few Port Crystals in the game to teleport to.

Instead, you’ll have to rely on your own two feet to get around the game’s huge map. Alternatively, you can take oxcarts from town to town, but those are limited too, both in availability and speed. While riding in an oxcart, you can nap through much of the ride, but your journey may be interrupted by monster attacks or roving bandits, cutting your trip short.

A quartet of adventurers looks upon the distant medieval city of Vernworth in a screenshot from Dragon’s Dogma 2

There are also a handful of ropeways that will let you travel through the skies of this ancient land, but ropeway travel is even more perilous than going by oxcart. Expect to be harassed by harpies and griffins while riding in the game’s few available gondolas. (Heads up that you can also get around while holding on to some flying beasts. Just don’t expect them to take you anywhere you want to go.)

Dragon’s Dogma 2 game director Hideaki Itsuno told IGN in an interview earlier this year that the game’s lack of fast travel is by design. “We’ve put a lot of work into designing a game where you can stumble across someone and something will happen,” he explained, “so while it’s fine if it does have fast travel, we decided to design the map in a way that the journey [itself] could be enjoyed.”

There are no difficulty options

While many modern games strive to offer an array of difficulty options to appease a broad base of players, Dragon’s Dogma 2 offers only one. If you want to make the game slightly easier, hire some powerful pawns. Play as a Trickster to avoid direct combat. Just don’t expect a “story mode” level of difficulty.

See those towers? You can climb them... for some cardio

Dragon’s Dogma 2 ’s map is peppered with watchtowers that will provide a great view of the landscape. Some towers even have ballistae at the top. Those powerful weapons, your pawns will tell you, might just give you a tactical advantage.

But the towers in Dragon’s Dogma 2 don’t function like the towers in other open-world games, particularly those made by Ubisoft. They won’t open up huge portions of the in-game map. And those ballistae? They’re hard to aim, take a long time to fire, and don’t actually do much damage against the game’s giant flying monsters. The towers do serve as regular resetters of expectations, and they’re often filled with treasure chests. Just don’t expect them to serve much of a purpose beyond that.

All of this is to say that whatever expectations you bring to Dragon’s Dogma 2 , they’ll be challenged in ways big and small. Some of those upended expectations might be annoying from a quality-of-life perspective — there are no graphics options to speak of on consoles, for example — but others are implemented specifically to sell the realism of living in this medieval fantasy world. That means the best way to experience Capcom’s new RPG is to leave your assumptions from other game experiences at the door.

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Dragon's Dogma 2

Originally posted by ᔑᓭ∴ᔑリ⊣ : you cant use them inside places or in combat

Originally posted by FunkBaconDeluxe : Originally posted by ᔑᓭ∴ᔑリ⊣ : you cant use them inside places or in combat

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Originally posted by ᔑᓭ∴ᔑリ⊣: you cant use them inside places or in combat. If this was the case the message would say 'a ferrystone cannot be used at this location'. There's a chance an event of some sort is happening at your portcrystal, and it is inside the event trigger so you must approach from outside. #3.