Transportation using disintegration Is it physically possible to have one device, that will scan one object atom by atom and record it to some computer file and then send it to some other machine that could use this blueprint to rebuild that object? What are limitations of this?
 A: There are roughly $10^{28}$ particles in the human body. If we assume that each particle can be described by a single double-precision number, then it would take
$$
10^{28}{\rm atoms}\cdot\frac{{\rm numbers}}{{\rm atoms}}\cdot\frac{8{\rm bytes}}{{\rm numbers}}\simeq10^{29}\,{\rm bytes}\sim10^{17}{\rm terabytes}
$$
Which is way more memory than what is thought to be made in the world currently. So there's one limitation.
I know some space based observatories can handle the rejection/acceptance of particles at about a million per second. If we assume we can do a few orders of magnitude better in determining particles with some non-existent earth-based scanning device (another limitation), then
$$
t_{scan}=\frac{10^{28}\,{\rm particles}}{10^{12}{\rm particles/sec}}=10^{16}\,{\rm sec}\lesssim t_{age\,of\,universe}=4\times10^{17}{\rm sec}
$$
So there's your third limitation.
There'd likely be a time limitation with rebuilding the stored information similar to the one above, but I'm not sure any type of numerics on it.

Seems that we're really far away from being able to do this, if it could ever be done (which I'm still doubtful of).
