

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in Google X's teleporter

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These rather remarkable revelations come from a story published by Fast Company, which was given exclusive access to the Google X facility in Mountain View, California. The story mostly focuses on how Google X identifies problems that can be solved with technology, and then the multi-stage process of (hopefully) bringing a solution to market. While Google X could be working on dozens or hundreds of problems/solutions at any one time, Glass is the facility’s only real product that is getting close to consumer adoption. Other prominent projects include Google’s driverless car, smart contact lenses, and Loon — but, like teleportation, hoverboards, and space elevators, there’s no real timeline to bring any of these to market.

It’s always going to be tricky to bring things to market when you’re standing on the bleeding edge of technology, though. It’s not actually all that hard to come up with a problem that could be solved with technology — such as cheap space travel — but whether we actually have the materials, tooling, and scientific knowhow to create the solution is another matter entirely. That’s exactly what happened when the Google X Rapid Evaluation team looked at the possibility of building a space elevator. According to Dan Piponi, one of the team’s researchers, such a space elevator would require a building material “at least a hundred times stronger than the strongest steel that we have” — and the only material that comes close to that is carbon nanotubes.

elevator head

The top half of a space elevator, in low Earth orbit (artist concept, obviously)

As you may know, we’re actually getting quite good at building long strands of carbon nanotubes, but we still haven’t managed to make a high-quality nanotube rope that’s more than a meter long. To get to low Earth orbit (LEO), we’re going to need nanotube strands that are hundreds of miles long. There’s no reason to believe that we won’t eventually devise a method of producing long chains of nanotubes cheaply, but we’re probably talking about five or 10 years at least. Recently, an in-depth report into the feasibility of space elevators found that we should have the capability to build a LEO space elevator by 2025.

Google X ran up against similar problems when it was investigating the feasibility of teleportation and hoverboards. Piponi found that teleportation “violates several laws of physics” (but the research did lead onto some research into encrypted communications). They got a bit further with the hoverboard idea, managing to build some small-scale prototypes — but as we’ve covered in the past, scaling that up to a self-balancing board that has the power to levitate a human is currently well beyond the bleeding edge of materials science.

HUVr hoverboard, in classic Back to the Future pink

HUVr hoverboard, in classic Back to the Future pink

Still, even if these stalwarts of sci-fi remain out of our reach for a few more years, it’s pretty darn cool that Google is working on them. For now, let’s just not think about the repercussions of Google owning the world’s only space elevator or being the first to commercialize teleportation…


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  • Born_Knowledge

    Back to the Future! I wonder if our generation will witness teleportation. Honestly, I’m waiting on the time machine! LOL

    • Scott Jackson

      Doubt it. Things I never see getting invented: teleportation, time machine, speed of light travel. Unfortunately, these things are just not physically possible. They are science fiction and always will be. Just because we see them in movies doesn’t mean we should waste time trying to invent them.

      • ericccc

        Try to explain an Iphone to someone that lived in 1776.

        • sebastian giacana

          why an iphone? your life will be better if you werent thinking about apple 24×7 i know a guy that daysdreams about apple just like you

          • ericccc

            I don’t daydream about Apple. I have never owned an Apple product. None.

        • Scott Jackson

          I understand your analogy but an iphone doesn’t violate the laws of physics. I do see a form of time travel being invented by altering a persons’s perception of time. For example you could give someone the illusion of going back in time by putting them into some chamber that alters their perception of time and makes it speed up. So say you stayed in this chamber for a year and it speeds up time by 365 times, then when you get out only one day of real time has passed, making it appear as though you traveled back in time 364 days.

          Vice versa, you could give the illusion of going forward in time, by slowing down the perception of time in the chamber. Somebody goes in the chamber, and it slows down time by 365 times. You stay in the chamber for one day and when you get out 1 year has actually passed, giving the perception that you traveled forward in time 364 days.

          This type of time travel I could see as possible. This other nonsense that you could go back in time to events that already have happened and run into a younger version of yourself or go back to a time before you were born will never happen.

          • ericccc

            Physics is not nearly 100% understood. The human brain simply isn’t big enough to know everything. It is big enough to make us think we know everything though. Smh.

      • ASdalot

        Only time travel is retarded, the other two are are fairly realistic.

        • Scott Jackson

          I don’t think we are really at a point where we can say whether teleportation and speed of light travel are realistic…

          Yes, as far as teleportation goes, we might be able to send the data to re-create someone in a different place and we can vaporize the original person, but that’s not really teleportation. That’s cloning someone in a new place and killing off the original person. The clone re-created in the new place is not you, its an entirely new person. What happens if you don’t kill the original, you exist in two places at once? No, you are two separate people. So I don’t see how “true” teleportation is feasible.

          Speed of light travel…maybe. We just have to find a way to get over the slight hurdle of the fact that an object requires infinite energy to move that fast. Not sure how we’re gonna find a way around that one…

      • ray

        nasa is working on a warp drive, its in small scale testing but it is possible to warp space and make a long trip short. they said it would take 3 weeks to reach Andromeda with there current design. look up the alcubierre drive

      • ray

        go back to the stone age then imagine some fire but because you imagined it its impossible! so have fun man

  • Grant Roy

    As far as hoverboards go….what about a magnetic skatepark? So basically the skate park is a big electromagnet..the hoverboard is magnetically levitated, has a forward/backward propulsion unit, which is probably hand controlled, and some way to vary the strength of the electromagnetic repulsion..controlling to some degree the height, obviously not a general solution but would still be pretty rad if it could work. Balancing on it would be hard but so is surfing at first. Of course it would be extremely expensive to build an entire skate park into some kind of gigantic electromagnet…but who wouldn’t pay to ride that?

    • Aard88

      Embed strong Neodymium magnets with a specific orientation on the skatepark surface and have boards embedded with the opposite orientation on the bottom. The balance would be tricky and it would probably be hell to flip one over and get it unstuck, but that might work.

      • Sebastian Anthony

        Yeah, hoverboards are verging on the possible if you create a dedicated track for them — much like a maglev train.

        The thing is, people want to move around freely, not follow a very specific path :)

        • Sean

          That limitation ( it only works on certain flooring ) isn’t a huge deal breaker – skaters of the axle and wheel era use dedicated skate-parks and arenas and are generally barred from skating freely, (as an aside and semi-relevant: since the mid-80’s skating in public is basically a crime on a level with dwb.)

          Car drivers only operate their cars on paved roadways or on tracks dedicated to that use.

          Essentially the precedent is actually favoring a technology that follows a very specific path or stays within certain lines.

          • Aeon Sud

            But a technology/ or any new thing will be a successful one only if it has a relation or be an increment from its predecessor. So this will probably work if we are able to build pavement with magnetic pellets or particles :)

  • hahaha3425


  • thermoplasticity

    Teleportation is all about wormholes, not tearing down and rebuilding molecules. Jump gates are where it’s at.

    • SuperTech

      Agreed. Nothing says ‘bad hair day’ like being scanned/copied, then killed instantly by having every molecule in your body vaporized, only to have a fake copy of you built at some remote location. Whatever qualities made you up is gone forever when you’re vaporized. Might be ok for fruit, but I would not want to see a human go through that.

      • Vidya Wasi

        I wouldn’t want that teleporter to be running on Windows from Microsoft.
        Blue screen of death and it would be all over.

        Now imagine if you can’t be copied due to copyright nonsense and you can’t be re-materialized either because of the same issue.
        Some medical company owns some gene you have or worse you work for a company and can only use their own version of a teleporter.
        Even worse they own your dna and you must ask for permission first but you forgot and now you are in limbo..

        A realistic future view based on current events if teleporters could exist..

        Isn’t reality a bitter taste.

        • Ivor O’Connor

          Imagine our politicians in control of such a device. Imagine Anthony Weiner in control of such a device!

    • christianh

      I don’t think you want to create a wormhole in Utah… There’s a way to do it… But it’s nothing like Star Trek… Since “beaming” through a material would be BAD…

  • Scott Jackson

    Very misleading title. Doesn’t sound like they are actively working on any of these at all. They basically just did some feasibility studies, found out none of these were possible right now, and moved on to other projects. Nothing to be too excited about here…

    • Vidya Wasi

      It is called clickbaiting. It is a form of scam since this site runs on ads every click earns them money.

      Just install an ad blocker and set it to block all the ads on this site.
      I recommend this one:
      Alternative is to find a better “news” site.

      Sadly though you can’t force “news” sites to not waste your time with incorrect titles.

      It is a common problem when a market gets over-saturated. Some will eventually turn to evil methods due to desperation and laziness to keep themselves alive. Such as very malicious ads. clickbaiting, forced registration, etc.

      I prefer when sites do nothing. Keep on working hard and trust that the content they provide have quality enough to keep them alive.

      • Scott Jackson

        This site is definitely guilty of clickbaiting (especially Sebastian), but I still enjoy reading the content here and its still a good source for the latest tech news. I just take the titles with a grain of salt and am not surprised anymore if the content doesn’t match the titles.

        • pixelstuff

          Agreed. And that’s the very reason that Extremetech is the last place I check now for news (if I still have time) instead of the first place like it was years ago. I don’t know if that practice along with others doing the same has put a dent in their income level, but one can only hope.

      • Scott Jackson


  • Menno van der Coelen

    I think that physicists usually envision the teleporter wrong. They want to beam information about every atom to the other side of the planet to reconstruct you exactly as you were. Meaning you’d need a huge amount of data to send you to the other side (a x-ray beam of a metre wide I heard once).

    But that would be a waste. On molecular level we don’t vary that much. We all share thousands of proteins which are build of just 20 or so amino acids working at a warm 37C (or a little less). So instead of sending a huge amount of data about every atom you could also just send a few bits saying build a peptide protein.

    Btw did you know there are 512 ways to constuct a sacharose molecule
    (simple sugar) and only one tastes sweet? And that in nature only the
    sweet variety exists? that is how similar we are at a molecular level.
    That is why we wouldn’t need to send information about every atom to the
    other side of the planet in order for a transporter to work. (source in

    We wouldn’t even need all that we could just send data about which cell type goes where. An advanced algorithm could then introduce the state cells are in (e.g. dividing or at rest) based on the type of tissue being constructed.

    Only your DNA and brain would need to be scanned in detail to make sure you’d come out the same way as you went in.

    This wouldn’t be used as a form of transportation at first I think. I see more applications in medicine. Instant cure of cancer (just filter out the cancer cells and replace them with normal cells. Instant cure of genetic disease (just replace the defective DNA with normal DNA) and an instant cure of ageing (just add more telomeres to the end of the DNA strand, repair any damage to the DNA and use an algorithm to build your body from when you were twenty in stead of eighty.

    This doesn’t mean it will be easy to build a transporter. We can’t even print organs from cells let alone that we can build an entire cell from a bunch of molecules. We don’t even know how cells work on a molecular level when you get down to it. But still at least the transporter goes from impossible (damn you Heisenberg principle) to possible.

    • Vidya Wasi

      I wouldn’t want my balls ending up at 37C at the other end.

      A teleporter as “beam me up scotty” will never come is my gut feeling.
      Not even portal transportation as in Stargate SG-1.

      Faster than light space ships however might be possible. Tiny tiny chance and that would be long after I’m dead.

      The planet can’t even come together as a human race to build a space elevator.

      We bicker and fight about each and every irrelevant insignificant petty thing.

      Humans can do cool stuff when we work together. The politics of today combined with human egoism and selfishness prevents that or at least makes it take way too much time to be worth it. Not to mention companies that wants to get profit no matter if it kills the planet in the process. Shortsighted bastards!

      Human society as is . Prone to segregation, etc do not support cooperation as a race either.

      If I was an alien I would not want humans running around in the galaxy destroying everything like a virus. Petty infighting, etc.

      I especially do not want google or any other private american company to have ownership of such technology.
      If you can abuse a technology then it will be abused.
      Just look at what google and other companies have done already.
      We just can’t have nice things.

  • christianh

    I have a viable teleportation method… Hint, you can’t go through ANYTHING… PERIOD…

    The amount of energy required to “packetize” the molecules would run a state for a day or so…

  • stevedodge833

    Quote from article image: “The top half of a space elevator, in low Earth orbit”.

    How do they make that work? With the top in LEO (say 250 miles up), the bottom of the elevator line would have to be flying along in the upper atmosphere at space station velocities, around 17,000 mph or mach 25 in order to maintain a tension on the line AND keep up with the upper end in orbit. Try to grab THAT rope as it goes by.

    All the concepts I have explored require the top end to be placed well above geostationary orbit to maintain a tension on the “cable”, with the other end attached to the ground. We’re talking tens of thousands of miles of unbroken nano tube cable here, not hundreds.

    And I have to agree with reader Scott Jackson about time wasted. I believe science fiction will retard technological advancement for some time while some of us try to reproduce the unrealistic ideas of dreamers and story-writers instead of concentrating all efforts on proven theories and technologies. Like it or not, the only way we can get around in interplanetary space is to toss stuff out the rear very quickly to go forward, and that may always be the case, or at least will be for a long long time.

    If we are lucky, SOMEDAY we might discover a new technology nobody has conceived of yet that WILL give us a better way of going from “here” to “there”, but it will likely involve accidental discoveries, as so many wonderful inventions have come to be.

    So, drop those Heisenberg Compensator concepts and Trans-Warp theories and get serious, folks. We gotta get “out there” before the whole world eventually goes BOOM.

    • pixelstuff

      By “top half” they probably just mean the landing/docking area. Not the anchor.

      • stevedodge833

        Look at the image again. There’s nothing rising above it, and it’s clearly in LEO. Just another misconception, like believing cavemen lived with dinosaurs.

  • eonvee375

    i accept Google as potential World dominators…
    better them than someone else imo… ^^

    but on a serious note, it makes me happy that top companies like this are looking into that kind of “sci fi” tech ^^

    • jqpabc123

      LOL! They spent all of 5 minutes looking into them and found, surprise, surprise, what everyone already knew. In other words, their net contribution was zilch.

      Feel free to remove your lips from Google’s backside now.

      • eonvee375

        wow wow lets just sit down and ill get you a cup of shut the fuck up to calm your nerves… ^^

        • jqpabc123

          Does the cup have a “Google” logo on it?

          • eonvee375

            sorry cant hear you from all the disapproval your parents gave you…

  • Asdf Ghjk

    Space elevator in low earth orbit = no go. If you were to step off its highest point, you would fall straight down with almost no reduction of gravity.

    Space elevator would have have its highest point at least in geostationary orbit and then also have a very long cable connecting the counterweight thousands of kilometers further up.
    Therefore, this tech is waaay beyond our capabilities and investing into it right now would be non-productive. Much better to invest in reusable spacecraft, orbital launch railguns etc.

    • King Swahilli

      Thanks, I was going to comment about the LEO thing. Oh and btw it seems as though there has been a fairly large breakthrough, something about a new or modified “graphene ribbon” production process? Anyway I invite you to check it out.

  • Gene O.

    Where do I go to apply for a job with Google X, this would be my dream job, I am a Aerospace Experimental Machinist / Engineer.

  • David Howes

    A material strong enough to use to build a space elevator? Graphene and Carbon nanotubes. I’ll take my millions now.

  • Luigison <– Is that real? If so, how much would it cost to make and maintain a standard sized arena?

  • Donk970

    So those are all the things that didn’t pan out. This is a “skunk works” though so you can bet that there are more things being looked at that we will never hear about. I would bet good money that considerable money is being spent on energy. Certainly LFTR but also LENR and maybe even more exotic ideas.

  • JerryG

    It is interesting to read your research team stating teleportation violates physics laws, when Professor Ronald Hanson states real teleportation would not violate any physics laws. Of course, it all depends on how one performs that application. Dr. Eric Davis in his U.S. Air Force Teleportation Report, implies teleportation is real based upon the Chinese children using telekinesis and teleporting small objects. My theory, if teleportation can be done with mind over matter, it also can be done with technology. We have events happening today that appears to be teleportation, and thus it is proposed they can be duplicated with a slightly modified technology. I am creating a project called Bmeup Teleport that is proposing teleporting by using technology. A technology slightly modified but within our means today, and can be achieved without violating any proven scientific theories. Creating six Powerpoint Videos explaining the project at

  • Ogg Way

    If this is going to be like Google Apps, Google Drive, Android or other google products is not gonna work. Google´s dream nowadays is to become M$, create a ton of products that don´t work right and charge a ton for the crap.