Quantum Shifting
There is a small but finite chance that here, today, you will suddenly transform right now! An in-depth investigation of quantum physics will confirm this, though hopefully, this brief explanation can substitute for that.
The down-side is exactly how improbable this event is: the probability isn't zero, but is so close that for all practical considerations it might as well be. If you've played the National Lottery, you might know that the odds of picking the same six numbers as the draw are approximately thirteen million to one against. Imagine if you had to choose several billion numbers from a near-infinite range: that's the chance we're looking at here!
But it is possible. How?
According to classical 'Newtonian' physics, science holds no 'maybes': everything is either possible, or it isn't: black or white; on or off. For most practical purposes this is good enough to be taken as true, but scientists began discovering phenomena at an atomic scale that appeared to break the rules.
In radioactivity, a beta particle is a high-energy electron emitted from an atomic nucleus. By classical physics, the attraction of the nucleus is far too high to ever permit the electron to escape, and yet it undeniably happens. However, by applying Quantum Mechanics, it was discovered that there was a small but definite chance that some particles could 'break the rules' and escape. This is called Quantum Tunneling: the particles give the appearance of cutting through the barriers that ought to stop them behaving this way.
Quantum Mechanics is a difficult subject to get a good grasp of. It is anything but intuitive: usually several pages of complex math are needed to illustrate the simplest of atomic events. Put simply though, the upshot is that nothing -nothing at all- is actually impossible. It can be so improbable that the universe would have to endure for hundreds of times its current age before it would be likely to have occurred even once, but is still possible.
Interesting, but not useful. What else can Quantum Mechanics do?
Allow me to introduce the philosophical example of Schroedinger's Cat. For reasons unknown, Mr Schroedinger has decreed that his cat is under sentence of death. He puts it in a sealed box with a canister of cyanide, and links the canister to a device which will release it at a random time in the future. It is absolutely impossible to tell when the cyanide will be released. The box is opaque (and for the sake of argument, fitted with life-support so the cat doesn't suffocate in the mean time).
The only way the cat's continued existence can be determined is by opening the box to have a look. As long as the box remains sealed, there is a possibility that the cat is alive, and a possibility that the cat is dead. It is, in effect, both dead and alive. Mathematically, it can be shown that the wave-function describing the cat's state of existence is a combination of both possibilities. In other words, it's no illusion: unless we actually check, the cat really is both dead and alive. If we open the box, the wave function will collapse to one possibility or the other.
You may be forgiven for thinking this is a load of waffle: the cat surely has a very good idea of whether it is alive or dead: it can't be both at once. Well, no, but the important thing that Einstein and a lot of other very intelligent people discovered was that everyone exists in their own unique universe: we all see a similar world, but in detail our perceptions differ. It has been shown that when nearing the speed of light, objects undergo length contraction. If the USS Enterprise passed you at Warp-point-nine and you measured its length (very quickly of course), you would find it shorter than you would if it were stationary. This is no illusion: it really has shortened. But to the crew, you are the one that has shortened. You can't both be right, can you? Well, yes, you can. By the same token, in the cat's universe, the cat has either died or survived. In your universe, until you open the box, it is both! It defies common sense, because in everyday life we simply don't see things behaving this way, but they do happen all around us.
So where does this leave us?
Okay: now we set up the experiment this way: you enter a sealed chamber. It is closed. Instantly, your universe is separated from ours: unless we open the chamber again, we cannot tell anything about you.
Now, remember the small but definite chance that you might transform spontaneously? As long as we can't see you, that possibility exists! You are both changed and unchanged! Of course, by the same token, you could be anything else, too. Probability is overwhelmingly in favor of you staying human, but you could spontaneously transform.
Every time there is a random chance of something happening, the universe splits off into two; one in which it did happen and one in which it did not. Because there are so many random events happening all the time, there are a nearly infinite number of these universes. After you are 'in the box' there are a large number of universes in which you have transformed.
All we need then, is the equivalent of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide Improbability Drive: a way to pick and choose amongst the possibilities of Quantum Mechanics and ensure that when the chamber is opened, your wave function collapses to the result we select, instead of blind chance ruling. (Meaning that we end up in one of the many universes where you transformed, instead of one of the ones where you didn't.)
Whether the universe will actually allow such a device to be constructed and how it might be done is beyond us at the moment (though a couple of good leads are being developed). The old view was that we could eventually know everything about the universe we inhabit. The new view is that there are things that are inherently unknowable. We will, however, extend every effort to make this method work.
Once we are able to choose among the possibilities, how do we make it work correctly? We would need to make sure that the end result would be a properly functioning organism. Because of the complexity involved, this could be extremely difficult. Again, we would need enormous computing power and very good programming. We would probably start out with simple blocks of single-element material and work our way up to more complex chemicals, then finally try living things.
The implications of this method are quite amazing should we succeed. Not only would we be able to instantly transform people into what they want to be, but we could transform objects even more easily. With this method it would be the simplest of tasks to turn ordinary material into valuable material. Not only that, but we could use it to manufacture complex items that couldn't be made any other way. The extra profit from these activities would easily cover making the lives of those we transform very comfortable.
