A scientist or technologist, or engineer, will often tell you that something is impossible. They may mean that it’s impossible right now. However they are locked in the the state of the art today. Nor can they see a path from today to a future where the something is possible.

I don’t mean to diss the practical people. You need them. And let’s face it, Sci-Fi is is also laced with Fantasy, improbabilities, and plenty of suggestions that violate all known laws of physics. Nevertheless, Sci-Fi at it’s best is an incubator for dreams. It gives the builders a goalpost to move towards.

One of these is the idea of narrative fiction having organic unity that doesn’t take well to decomposition into the most adaptable and usable parts from a scientific perspective.

That is the problem right there – science vs science fiction rejects that idea outright, yet the “gap” fantasies bar outsiders from accepting the fact, despite this taking place in their chosen area of expertise.

Teleportation is an example of this: the quantum entanglement underlying recent examples can only occur with zero-mass states of atoms, which is to say pure information, a bit of a problem for applying it to people a la Star Trek even with the most strenuous of diets.

Not as I understand it, teleportation would work as portrayed in Stargate (the matter stream rings, not the wormhole gates): sending an entangled matter stream to constitute elsewhere, faster and more efficient than ships at short range.

And hell of a lot riskier! Luckily no one knows how to make it feasible.