If you could transport anywhere in the US near instantly how would that affect real estate prices? Would prices drop like a rock in large metro areas, or would there still be demand to live in those areas?
Depends on how much transporter travel costs. In ST-DS9 we hear that as a Star Fleet cadet Sisko spent a lot of his credit allowance using transporters to visit home. And in the Federation people still live in cities and use shuttlecraft for travel; so at a minimum transporter travel isn’t cheap enough to displace alternatives.
In some of Larry Niven’s science fiction teleportation is a form of mass transit, cheap enough and with capacity enough that “flash mobs” are a social problem.
Real estate prices would be driven by supply and demand. Everyone can’t live on the beach in Hawaii or Tahiti for example, so the best locations would be for the super-rich. Poor people would probably live in housing developments in the ass-end of nowhere: deserts, the tagia of Canada and Siberia, and the plains of central Asia and North America.
Depends on other things. Assuming the price of transport is low, people still wouldn’t live in the middle of nowhere due to lack of things like gas and electricity. And transporting would have to be cheap enough not just for you to go to the city for things every so often (I assume everyone works at home pretty much) but that you can also go to the grocery store. As for other things, Amazon will make out like a bandit with its drones.
Of course if cheap food synthesizers are part of the bargain, it will be easier.
Technologies, remember, never happen by themselves, so what other stuff comes along with the transporter will determine the answer.
If during the home inspection people are found materialized in solid walls, ceilings or partially into the foundation, I think there may be a case where you could knock the price down some.
Possibly even more, if they’re still wriggling.
Medium-sized towns would be under pressure to provide more utilities… if a city the size of, say, Dubuque, suddenly got 50,000 more people moving there, they’d need more water, power, gas and services coming into the town. This would be a boon for the grocery stores & Targets of the world. If we also assume that cargo transport is simpler & cheaper by virtue of not needing to be alive when it reaches its destination, we could assume a certain increased amount of goods being transported in from overseas which would be fresher and closer to being ripe, rather than being picked a month or two early.
The shows and the movies never make clear how widespread use of transporters is outside of military/official entities. If its exclusive to them like say nuclear propulsion is today for us, then they are an irrelevance.
I think it’s established that there’s no money in Star Trek times. Replicators would’ve messed up any kind of Economy, I reckon.
Though somebody must build and maintain all their technology, and I assume those who do don’t do it for free, so…
It’s complicated.
They do always seem to show plenty of shuttlecraft flying about… just because they don’t use money, doesn’t mean they get free transporters. My understanding from the series was that only starships had transporters because it takes the power generated by an antimatter drive to make them work. I believe the Earth was supposed to have antimatter reactors, but they were for the planetary defense grid & communications.
Instead of “location, location, location” it would be only two locations. Or maybe one.
Read “The Stars My Destination” for one take on what happens with free, wide-spread teleportation.
There is money (“credits,” usually). There is an economy. There are too many direct and implied references to wave away, and, as you say, too many aspects of the society that make no sense otherwise.
If transporter tech were developed tomorrow, it would be a toy of the super-rich and would not substantially affect real estate in ordinary markets.
Its perfectly possible that transporter tech is something that only Starfleet and assorted organisations have. I can also easily see it as not being practical for intra-Planet use, especially if its transmitter is line of sight only.
As for the no “money” bit, well its only in Star Trek IV from memory, otherwise while they don’t have money as we understand it, they do seem to have some sort of an exchange system for goods and services, so there is that.
I figure that it would depend on how this transporter technology was implemented. If it was something where transporter facilities were relatively far-flung and uncommon, like say commuter train stations or airports and correspondingly expensive, you’d see people doing much the same kind of thing that they already do- except more far-flung. They might live in say… Kansas City, and transporter-commute to Seattle every day for work. Or go meet friends in say… Prague for a Friday on the town. People would still live in metro areas where you could get groceries, see movies, etc… and all the stuff you typically do at home. The main difference being that transit time and expense would be much minimized if not eliminated. You’d still have a lot of getting from the transporter-station to downtown sort of travel left to do.
But if transporter booths were more like bus stops and/or in people’s homes like our current car/public transit model, you’d see things much more decentralized. I imagine that the new status symbols might be the view out your window and what kind of backyard you could have. There wouldn’t be much stopping anyone from spending their evenings wherever they wanted, so the big thing would be when you have someone to your house, you’d want to show off your big backyard and cool view to your friends and acquaintances.
So someone who has a cool seafront view would have high-dollar real-estate, while a house in a podunk Oklahoma panhandle town would have exceedingly cheap property values, even if both could transport to just about any streetcorner in Paris for pocket-change.
If it’s cheap enough, it will drastically raise the price of some real estate that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Maybe a condo on the peak of Everest. Ooh, here’s one I would like – a house that’s inside Victoria Falls, behind the megatons of falling water in a hollowed out portion of the cliff wall.
I’m not sure if it would be a toy. Webex, GoToMeeting, etc., still aren’t substitutes for face to face, and we no longer fly the Concorde, so I could see it being a vital business tool for the super rich.
Of course the super rich might not care about utilization, so maybe at $1 billion dollars, 30 seconds to use, used four times per day for 260 days per year means, say, in a 20 year lifetime the machine costs about $48,000 per use (discounting required maintenance, the cost of energy, future value of money, etc.). This is significantly more expensive than a one way Concorde ticket was, but maybe in the realm of chartering a plane or running your own (I don’t know).
But! If I can get utilization to 90%, I can sell 2592 trips per day! Sure, it’s all around the clock, but let’s assume people are willing to travel at 3:00 am (it might not be 3 am on the other side, after all). Over 20 years, that brings the cost of each trip to less than $75. I might not be a super-rich person, but I could probably write a business case and get the funding I need to make this a business and sell cheap travel to people who aren’t super rich. Even at a 10x markup, that’s some pretty cheap, pretty convenient travel.
In both cases, of course, we’re missing the transporter at the other end. In Star Trek’s world, sometimes you need a local transporter, sometimes you don’t. In the second case above, at $75 cost, it would still be cheap enough to cover costs by having transporters in most major destinations. Prague. Beijing. Paris. Once you’re in Beijing you can take a six hour flight to Bangkok instead of a 16 hour flight from home.
Number of trips, of course, implies one passenger per trip. If the transporter can accommodate groups of 10 or 15, then it’s trivial to schedule all London departures for a similar time.
It might not be enough to affect real estate prices early on, but I think it would very rapidly be something enjoyed by the non-rich.
Regarding whether or not a transporter is required at the other end; I think there would have to be laws requiring that they be designed to require one at both ends. Otherwise people could materialize anywhere they pleased, which would be a bad situation.
Since they can beam inside rock, that’s clearly not the limitation. Plus, you’d just need multiple stations, or have a ship in orbit to go in between.
Plus, what you say would make the society very classist.
I’m going to assume this is asking “What happens to real estate prices if transporting humans from one place to another is nearly instantaneous and very cheap”.
Real estate in tourist attractions goes absolutely through the roof. There would be a lot more vacations in Hawaii, for example, if it didn’t cost $600+ and 6+ hours to get there. And all those new tourists will want things like hotels and restaurants and beachfront.
Real estate in remote but accessible places goes up (moderately). I think a lot of people would rather live further from other people for peace and quiet, but aren’t willing or able to work from home or make, say, a 2+ hour commute for work, or live with the social isolation that comes from being so remote. Now all the downsides are gone! I’m assuming delivery of things is unchanged, but as long as there’s a road that a big truck can come down every few months, you can live way out in the middle of nowhere pretty easily if you can zap into town for your job or brunch.
Real estate in most cities goes down. Lots of the value of cities is that the high population density allows for more amenities and more powerful social and production networks. If you’re a software developer, you want to live near the SF Bay Area because that’s where your industry is located, and you can meet and collaborate. If you’re in finance, you want to live in London or New York. But if you can just get there (or, really, anywhere) in a flash, then you don’t need to live there. Aspiring Broadway stars don’t need to live in New York to make it to auditions. San Francisco and New York probably have enough tourist attraction that they might go up. But Dallas and Cincinnati are probably not going to.
Why would you want a hotel? For tourists, a hotel is a place to sleep and keep changes of clothing. If travel is instantaneous and cheap, you just use your home for that.
If we are talking Larry Niven-type transport booths (like a phone booth, step in, dial a destination number, pay a few bucks and Poof! you’re there; this system requires a destination booth as well - no random destinations possible) then I think there is another variable:
Your house doesn’t have to be in one place! You can have your living room in Manhattan, your bedroom in the Rockies, your sun room in Hawaii, your kitchen in Paris, whatever. Any individual’s rooms could be grouped together geographically - everyone has a ocean view room, all the kitchens are located near food supply sources, all the houses’ bathrooms would be in one centralized location for ease of handling the sewage, etc.