How long would it take to teleport a person?

Researchers James Nelms, Declan Roberts, Suzanne Thomas and David Starkey started out by calculating how much data it would take to represent a human being. They went with 10 billion bits, the amount of data encoded by DNA base pairs in the human genome.

Then they calculated how much information would have to be fed into the human brain to restore the traveler's pre-teleportation mental state. That inflated the total to a truly astronomical number: 2.6 tredicillion bits, or 2.6 x 10^42 in scientific notation.

The time required to transmit that data depends on how much bandwidth you have. If you're using the 30 GHz microwave band that's standard for satellite communications, it'd take 4.85 quadrillion years (4.85 x 10^15 years). That's about 350,000 times longer than the universe's current estimated age of 13.8 billion years.

That's a long time.