I do not see any way in which the laws of physics as we have observed them can seriously allow either faster than light travel or the transportation and re-assembly of matter a la Star Trek. Faster than light travel only seems possible under certain very specific or rare circumstances that apply only to the quantum world.

Quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, allow particles to fleetingly travel faster than light, but any observation of this is completely hidden from view and you cannot use this phenomenon to transmit information. Black holes and worm holes are fashionable these days to get to 'warp speed' but thank God black holes are rare. There are many technical arguments to suggest that they cannot be used as practical 'doorways' to other parts of spacetime.

As for transporting matter, talk of 'pattern buffers' and 'transporter beams' and 'Heisenberg Suppressors' aside, we can already transport matter at nearly the speed of light in our accelerators, and our TV picture tubes. But entire people are more than atoms, they involve an enormous amount of information to specify the quantum states, locations and velocities of every fundamental particle in the body. The amount of information required is staggering, and relaying this from one place to another in a few seconds seems implausible. It may, however, be possible to do this with inorganic crystalline material in which the atoms are basically identical and occur in a fixed geometry. But 'regrowing' an object at the point of reception from a set of digital instructions would still take a long time since information transmission rates are measured in gigabytes per second, and even a simple objects contains trillions of atoms. Short cuts could be found, but then information would be lost which could be fatal for organic objects, and certainly for specifying the locations and states of the trillions of neuronal connections in the brain which control memory and behavior among other things.

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