I came across this when reading my e-mail from one of my Star Trek lists. I
thought you might be interested. It kind of makes me think "If Only".
Nicki

> Beam Me Up Rumsfeld?
>
> The United States military is studying the feasibility of teleportation,
> "beaming up" people such as Osama Bin Laden or sending defense teams to
> difficult-to-reach locales.
>
> The Scripps Howard News Service has picked up a story which quotes Ranney
> Adams, a spokesperson for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Edwards Air
> Force Base, as saying it would be ideal if the military could send
soldiers
> to remote spots via teleportation. "But we're not there [yet]," he added.
>
> The Air Force spent $25,000 last year on a study of teleportation physics
to
> consider means of transporting people and cargo through space, though
> physicists said that the obstacles in terms of energy expenditure and data
> transfer are enormous.
>
> "I would say that something is wrong with the way the Air Force allocates
> its research money, at least on this topic," said Phil Schewe, the chief
> science writer at the American Institute of Physics. He noted that experts
> can foresee using teleportation for encrypted data, but transporting large
> objects, let alone living beings, is a long way off.
>
> But Center for Strategic and International Studies fellow Pierre Chao said
> that scientific advances required risks in funding. "The devil's bargain
> that you're going to take if you're going to exist in that cutting-edge
> [scientific] world and use taxpayer dollars is that you're going to be
> investigating some pretty goofy things," he said.
>
> The encoding of the contents of a human body would require 10 to the 28th
> kilobytes of computer storage capacity, or 100 quintillion commercially
> available hard drives. Moreover, to dematerialize one human being the way
> Star Trek does it "would require...the energy equivalent of 330
one-megaton
> thermonuclear bombs."
>
> The original article is at Scripps Howard News Service.
>
> http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=BEAMUP-09-25-05
>
> Regards
> John Hopkins



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