We are still working out how to teleport photons. Assuming somehow we discovered how to teleport atoms, then molecules – perhaps in the next decade, as upbeat pop physicist Michio Kaku has suggested – the amount of bits to record and transmit is unthinkable. Even an e coli bacterium contains 9×10 to the power 10 atoms; you are made of an estimated 32 trillion – or about 31.2tn more cells than there are stars in the known universe.

According to a highly entertaining University of Leicester study into the computing power required to teleport a human being, your cells, broken down into data, equates around 2.6 x 1042 bits, which is 2.6 followed by 42 zeroes.

You would require stupendous bandwidth and roughly 10tn gigawatt hours of power. Teleporting one human being would therefore require hogging the entire UK power supply for more than a million years and take some 4.8 million million years to transfer – or about 350,000 times longer than the universe has existed. It would literally be quicker to walk