Transport via Digital Encoding

When the survival of humanity on Earth is at risk, we could turn to the idea of interstellar migration. The evolutionary drive for self-preservation and reproduction continually encourages us to seek strategies for survival. Yet traveling to planets outside our solar system is, with current technology, practically impossible. The distances are vast, achievable speeds are too low, and the required energy is enormous.

What if, instead of physically transporting a human being, we chose to transmit information? Electromagnetic radiation, including light, can propagate through a vacuum at the speed of light, approximately 300,000 kilometers per second. If only information, rather than matter, needs to be transmitted, this offers a fundamentally different approach to interstellar migration.

The fundamental question is: What makes a human who they are?

If we assume that being human is completely determined by the configuration of atoms, molecules, neurons, and their relationships — in other words, by the exact physical structure of the body and brain — then this information could, in principle, be recorded.

We would, however, have to assume that such a complete description is actually possible and that all relevant information could be measured and stored with sufficient accuracy. Whether such a description would actually be sufficient to reconstruct a conscious person is not an established scientific fact, but rather a scientific and philosophical hypothesis.

A complete digital scan of a person could then serve as the basis for reconstruction elsewhere in the universe.

This leads to an alternative approach to space travel:

• The body does not travel; the information describing it does.
• The information is transmitted through electromagnetic signals, potentially using light or laser transmission.
• At the destination, the data is decoded and used as a blueprint for physical or virtual reconstruction.

Possible scenarios include:

1. The receiving planet hosts a civilization with comparable technology capable of decoding the information and reconstructing the individual virtually.
2. The receiving civilization has the ability to construct a physical body and brain from locally available matter according to the transmitted structure.
3. If only basic elements are available, such as hydrogen, heavier elements could potentially be synthesized, provided that the necessary physical conditions and technology are available.

In all three scenarios, however, a fundamental problem remains: the information describes a person, but transmitting that information does not demonstrate that the original consciousness itself has been transferred.

This approach offers several potential advantages:

• Information can propagate at the speed of light.
• The original matter does not have to travel across interstellar distances.
• The transmission itself could involve far less mass than transporting a physical human being.
• Multiple reconstructions of the same individual would theoretically be possible, raising profound ethical and philosophical questions.

There is, however, an important qualification. A complete description of a human being would probably contain an enormous amount of information. Therefore, the suggestion that only a relatively small amount of energy would be required is too strong unless we know how much information would actually have to be measured, stored, encoded, and transmitted.

We could theoretically test the underlying principle on Earth by digitally transmitting information about an object or, in a much more demanding hypothetical experiment, a living organism between two locations. At the receiving location, the object could then be reconstructed from locally available matter.

Such an experiment would not mean that the original object had literally been “transported.” It would demonstrate that information about an object could be used to reconstruct a physical equivalent elsewhere.

The distinction between transportation, reconstruction, and copying is therefore central to the entire idea.

For illustration, the nearest known star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is approximately 4.24 light-years away. Even with a spacecraft traveling at 100,000 km/h, the journey would take more than 45,000 years. Information transmitted at the speed of light, by contrast, would travel across this distance in a little over four years.

This approach confronts us with a fundamental question:

Would a copy of ourselves on another planet really be considered “us”?

And if so, what would that mean for our understanding of identity, continuity, and personal consciousness?

Perhaps the greatest problem with interstellar digital transport is therefore not technological, but philosophical. Even if we were technically capable of creating a perfect reconstruction of a human being, it would remain unclear whether we had actually transported that person or merely created a new version of them.

Suppose that a person on Earth is completely scanned and that all relevant information is transmitted to another planet. There, using locally available matter, a body and brain are constructed that correspond in every relevant detail to the original.

The reconstructed person would possess the same memories, personality, beliefs, and knowledge as the original person at the moment of scanning.

From the perspective of the reconstructed person, it might feel as though they had actually made the journey. But from the perspective of the original person, there is no guarantee that their consciousness has moved anywhere.

The problem becomes even clearer if the original body is not destroyed. In that case, two individuals would exist after the reconstruction who, up to the moment of copying, possessed exactly the same memories and personality. Both could legitimately say: “I am Trebla.” From the moment of reconstruction onward, however, their experiences would begin to diverge.

If one hundred identical reconstructions were created, the same problem would arise one hundred times.

Information alone therefore seems insufficient to define personal identity.

Perhaps personal identity is consequently based neither exclusively on the material structure of the body nor solely on the information contained in the brain. Perhaps the continuity of consciousness also plays a fundamental role.

This brings us back to the question raised in Chapter 6:

Where does identity reside?

Perhaps the ultimate problem of digital transportation is therefore not whether we can transmit sufficient information, but something much more fundamental:

Can we actually transport a human being, or can we only create a new human being who remembers being the original?

That may ultimately be the most intriguing problem raised by the idea of digital interstellar migration.