How Tele-transportation Will Change the World?

JupiterKid

Ok, bear with me...

This is a memory I had a couple of days ago about an inebriated debate with a good friend in my college days, probably at a party.

We were talking about the consequences of the availability of full Star Trek style teleportation and how it would radically alter the human geography of the planet.

Basically he was arguing that if everyone had access to affordable teleportation, they would mostly want to live in warm, resort parts of the world, such as the Mediterranean, Caribbean, California coast, Florida, Brazil and South East Asia. Migration would dramatically increase, to the point where a country’s population could double over the space of a year.

All these places would be swamped by demand for housing so strict controls on the would have to be enforced.

I argued that we were much more likely to see very strict controls on who has access to such radical new technology, to the point where it was hugely restricted.

Who do you think had the more credible opinion? Please feel free to add your own. :cool:

McGinniesta

Maybe we'll sort out the M50 and the rail network first

Montage of Feck

Tube Technology will be the next big thing.

Leg End Reject

That's very philosophical for a Friday night!

There's a lot to weigh up here. Not everyone wants sun and heat, people transporting from genuine conflict would be treated as 'de foreigners' etc.

The grass is very often greener until it's in front of you too, so is there an option to go back?

Leg End Reject

McGinniesta wrote: »

Maybe we'll sort out the M50 and the rail network first

Less likely option if we're honest.

Junkyard Tom

Did you ever see that film where your man has his head transplanted onto a fly, and the fly's head was transplanted onto the man?

galway_lad

> Basically he was arguing that if everyone had access to affordable teleportation, they would mostly want to live in warm, resort parts of the world, such as the Mediterranean, Caribbean, California coast, Florida, Brazil and South East Asia.

****e. YOu're just described the hotspots for hurricanes, storms and volcanoes. Popular, yes but the predictable climates of northern Europe among others would eclipse all of that outside of 19 year old instagramers.

bodhrandude

Would be handy for sneaking into festivals. 'Device transport me into the main arena.'

Insect Overlord

There would be no more need for postmen, logistics, delivery services.

Tzardine

Criminals would love it.

Imagine being able to teleport with your few kilos of powder direct from Colombia to Cabra. Or to telephone into the vaults of your local art gallery.

Kermit.de.frog

Oh I dunno OP. Didn't work out so well for Seth Brundle (ending his days as a mod on boards.ie too)

If you can travel anywhere you want with little time delay, why would you need to move to a sunny place? You could live in Ireland, jump in a transporter, and be in Spain, quicker than making a cup of tea.

Nah. People would continue to live where they wanted.. and speaking as someone who has lived in hot countries, I'd far prefer to live in a more temperate country. It's not all it's cracked up to be.

Still.. just think of the energy requirements.. OP, if you're thinking Star Trek, the newer series (discovery) goes heavily into seriously dumb science, without considering the costs for technological use.. the older versions have a far more realistic approach.

Tzardine

Presumably there was also a fly going around with the face of Jeff Goldblum.

Surprised it was not the sequel.

Kermit.de.frog

Deleted User wrote: »

star trek...the older versions have a far more realistic approach.

Have the newer series deviated much from the realism of the older ones? :P

Aglomerado

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

Did you ever see that film where your man has his head transplanted onto a fly, and the fly's head was transplanted onto the man?

Out of Africa?

touts

Have a scanning machine disintegrate me at a subatomic level so it can scan what I'm made of and in effect email those details to another 3D printer machine thousands of miles away which then creates an exact copy of the now dead me. Identical in every way and even thinks it is me except it's not because I'm dead having been disintegrated by the first scanner and it is only a 3d printed copy made of different atoms.

And you think where these photocopies will live is the dilemma?

jmlad2020

What if UFOs are flying instant transportation devices for inter dimensional beings.

**Passes the doobie**

B.A._Baracus

It is an interesting question op!
It would really change up everything. At the start it would be mad expensive to operate it (like everything bloody else) but after a while it would become affordable. If such a technology did exist it would probably be like what train stations are noe. A place you would go to so you could travel.

- Imagine it... No more transporting goods. No need for ships any more. Goods could be sent half way across the world on the same day. No need for so many planes too. In fact, no need for any planes at all?
- countries economies would be destroyed as some guy living in Poland could travel every day to a place like Ireland to work.
- there'd be a race to provide some sort of security. As who would want someone transporting in the middle of some art museum to steal or in the White House.
- travel agencies would go out of business.

I could probably go on

AllForIt

I would teleport to JupiterKids gaff and have some of what he's havin !

JupiterKid

AllForIt wrote: »

I would teleport to JupiterKids gaff and have some of what he's havin !

I can assure you, sir, that this musing in recent days has been of an entirely clean and sober nature.

bnt

A story about teleportation, Travel by Wire!, was literally the first story that SF author Arthur C. Clarke got published, back in 1937. It wasn't exactly a serious story:

Naturally, there were accidents, but we could point out that we had done what no Minister of Transport had ever done, reduced road fatalities to a mere ten thousand a year. We lost one client in six million, which was pretty good even to start with, though our record is even better now. Some of the mishaps that occurred were very peculiar indeed, and in fact there are quite a few cases which we haven’t explained to the dependents yet, or to the insurance companies either.

One common complaint was earthing along the line. When that happened, our unfortunate passenger was just dissipated into nothingness. I suppose his or her molecules would be distributed more or less evenly over the entire earth. I remember one particularly gruesome accident when the apparatus failed in the middle of a transmission. You can guess the result… Perhaps even worse was what happened when two lines got crossed and the currents were mixed.

Of course, not all accidents were as bad as these. Sometimes, owing to a high resistance in the circuit, a passenger would lose anything up to five stone in transit, which generally cost us about £1000 and enough free meals to restore the missing enbonpoint. Fortunately, we were soon able to make money out of this affair, for fat people came along to be reduced to manageable dimensions. We made a special apparatus which transmitted massive dowagers round resistance coils and reassembled them where they started, minus the cause of the trouble. ‘So quick, my dear, and quite painless! I’m sure they could take off that 150 pounds you want to lose in no time! Or is it 200?’

We also had a good deal of trouble through interference and induction. You see, our apparatus picked up various electrical disturbances and superimposed them on the object under transmission. As a result many people came out looking like nothing on earth and very little on Mars or Venus. They could usually be straightened out by the plastic surgeons, but some of the products had to be seen to be believed.

Kermit.de.frog

Kermit.de.frog wrote: »

Have the newer series deviated much from the realism of the older ones? :P

The newer series are pure muck. Amazing hand-held devices that work without consideration of a power source, and have no appreciation of the mechanics previously created from past series/movies/literature. They've decided that their audience is too dumb to realise the flaws in their logic.

McGinniesta

Montage of Feck wrote: »

Tube Technology will be the next big thing.

I'm not sold on that idea. If it was such a good idea why hasn't it been explored before now?

McGinniesta

Tzardine wrote: »

Criminals would love it.

Imagine being able to teleport with your few kilos of powder direct from Colombia to Cabra. Or to telephone into the vaults of your local art gallery.

I'm from Cabra. You must have us confused with drimnagh and inchicore.

touts

touts wrote: »

Have a scanning machine disintegrate me at a subatomic level so it can scan what I'm made of and in effect email those details to another 3D printer machine thousands of miles away which then creates an exact copy of the now dead me. Identical in every way and even thinks it is me except it's not because I'm dead having been disintegrated by the first scanner and it is only a 3d printed copy made of different atoms.

And you think where these photocopies will live is the dilemma?

The scary thing is that to everyone else you would appear to be the same person. So lots of people would do it anyway not realising it's a suicide mission.

Montage of Feck

McGinniesta wrote: »

I'm not sold on that idea. If it was such a good idea why hasn't it been explored before now?

No more pollution, no more car exhaust,
or ocean dumpage. From now on, we will travel in tubes!
Get the scientists working on the tube technology, immediately.
Chop, chop, let's go.

McGinniesta

Montage of Feck wrote: »

No more pollution, no more car exhaust,
or ocean dumpage. From now on, we will travel in tubes!
Get the scientists working on the tube technology, immediately.
Chop, chop, let's go.

It's completely impractical.

McGinniesta

McGinniesta wrote: »

It's completely impractical.

Then make it practical..

Most technological leaps were considered impractical until they were developed and streamlined. Motored vehicles were pretty useless until they were improved to the point where they offered a practical difference to horses.

the purple tin

Would it be macine-to-machine teleportation or the star trek beam me down type, OP.
It would be great boost for space travel/exploration. If we could use an unmanned craft to send a teleport station to Mars for eg, you could beam straight to it from here and start setting up colonies.

Hows that for solving the unemployment crisis?
Come and work on Mars and be home every evening in time for dinner.
It would make working in remote locations on Earth much easier too.

Like someone posted above, pollution would drop massively. Planes and ships road traffic, even roads and fuel would become obselete.

The economy would probably tank as it is tied so strongly to fossil fuels. No harm, it is time to replace it with something that is more balanced and actually works.
Saudia Arabia would be screwed, probably a civil war and overthrow of the royal family and the clerics, which might finally bring them out of the stone-age.

Now the important part would be is this technology going to be open-source and unrestricted? ie can your average Joe have his own teleporter and use it however he wants.
Or will it be controlled by a powerful multinational or government? Heavily restricted and policed and prohibitively expensive, like a plaything for the super-rich.

Ubbquittious

Initially governments around the world will jump up and down with sheer panic to attach their old-world ideals to the technology (tax, immigration and keeping out banned items) but then some fella will land a hefty bombeen into the Dail/white house/kremlin/CCP and we can wash our hands of those feckers at long last.

After a brief period of anarchy the dust will settle and we can enjoy our new teleportation technology in peace

alchemist33

touts wrote: »

Have a scanning machine disintegrate me at a subatomic level so it can scan what I'm made of and in effect email those details to another 3D printer machine thousands of miles away which then creates an exact copy of the now dead me. Identical in every way and even thinks it is me except it's not because I'm dead having been disintegrated by the first scanner and it is only a 3d printed copy made of different atoms.

And you think where these photocopies will live is the dilemma?

Which is why portal technology will be where its at in 300 years. Open a door and walk through and its still the same you.

DoozerT6

It probably will happen some time in the future I'd say. However personally I'd hope to see designated transportation points, like a train station or whatever, where the person/people are transported directly to a transportation point on the other end, and you make your own way to your final destination from there. It would be too messy to have people be able to transport literally wherever they wanted in terms of criminal activity, privacy, etc. Of course, the transport technology would be a hot commodity for criminals so there would have to be tight security and some sort of system where 'rogue' transporters could be tracked and disabled remotely if necessary, that sort of thing.

In terms of what it means in physical terms for people being transported regularly, well, that's another thing. That part is equally as important as the transportation technology itself. No point being able to transport someone from Dublin to Sydney in five seconds if they eventually become impaired in some way from all the regular dissolving and re-animation of every atom in their body

Montage of Feck

Ubbquittious wrote: »

Initially governments around the world will jump up and down with sheer panic to attach their old-world ideals to the technology (tax, immigration and keeping out banned items) but then some fella will land a hefty bombeen into the Dail/white house/kremlin/CCP and we can wash our hands of those feckers at long last.

After a brief period of anarchy the dust will settle and we can enjoy our new teleportation technology in peace

More likely that scenario would lead to a techo feudal society were the likes of elon musk, the amazon guy and the bookface android would control everything. While the masses are held in check with CCP style social credit system.

Ubbquittious

Montage of Feck wrote: »

More likely that scenario would lead to a techo feudal society were the likes of elon musk, the amazon guy and the bookface android would control everything. While the masses are held in check with CCP style social credit system.

Depends on who invents it and how quick it spreads. Elon Musk will go out of business and things not looking good for the other two lads either since people will be so busy travelling the world and exploring the different places

You're going to need a very good network to transfer the amount of data needed to reconstitute a person remotely and especially with potentially several billion users, obviously not the biggest technical challenge though.

Ubbquittious

Ubbquittious wrote: »

Depends on who invents it and how quick it spreads. Elon Musk will go out of business and things not looking good for the other two lads either since people will be so busy travelling the world and exploring the different places

Rather than Elon Musk, it'll be corporate entities that control everything. Think Cyberpunk. Less about powerful personalities, and more about corporate branding.

PVNevin

"How fast are your teleporters?"

Vinny Thomas.......

https://twitter.com/i/status/1336178629450018817

KilOit

It's suicide, your atoms that make up you are copies and not the same, basically cloning. As someone said portals are the way to go, like illustrated in the film event horizon without the whole hell side effect :pac:

arctictree

You don't need teleportation if you can just log into a remote body. Like in the move 'surrogates'. I imagine a time when you can just log into a robot in Sydney and it assumes your face and off you go....

silliussoddius

It would be useful for magic tricks.

randd1

Some questions;

- Can you, when de-atomized, remove excess fat in order to keep in shape?
- Following on from that, can you also remove clogging in your arteries?
- Can you also remove cancer's, disease's, parasites before you re-materialise?

It's a good topic OP, but surely the transporter could be used for more practical use such as the above.

the purple tin

randd1 wrote: »

Some questions;

- Can you, when de-atomized, remove excess fat in order to keep in shape?
- Following on from that, can you also remove clogging in your arteries?
- Can you also remove cancer's, disease's, parasites before you re-materialise?

It's a good topic OP, but surely the transporter could be used for more practical use such as the above.

Like in Star Trek, they used the transporter to remove a disease from somebody.
In theory, if you had your body's cellular make-up on file from a teleport from when you were 30 years old say, you could be teleported at any time and have your body reconfigured with that blueprint so you can stay forever young.
You could also use your file to make clones of you.

Ubbquittious

the purple tin wrote: »

Like in Star Trek, they used the transporter to remove a disease from somebody.
In theory, if you had your body's cellular make-up on file from a teleport from when you were 30 years old say, you could be teleported at any time and have your body reconfigured with that blueprint so you can stay forever young.
You could also use your file to make clones of you.

Which one of your clones is actually you?

the purple tin

Ubbquittious wrote: »

Which one of your clones is actually you?

Hard to say. The clones would think they are the real McCoy. They will have all your memories and experiences. Just like Blade Runner.
How would you know for sure that you aren't a clone yourself?