# How would a working teleporter affect society? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 1, 2006, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-working-teleporter-affect-society/378671 "2006-11-01T01:01:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/73ab20/32.png) [@Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alive_At_Both_Ends)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2006, 11:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-working-teleporter-affect-society/378671/41 "2006-11-02T11:09:13Z")
[QUOTE=erie774] No need to send an invading army through a teleporter, you can bring in a “natural” disaster. Set up one teleporter in the sub basement of your embassy in the enemy country with a date timer on it to receive. The other teleporter is dropped into the ocean with a date timer set to send either continuously (essentially an open gate like Stargate) or at the minimum interval. On the day in question you evacuate the embassy through a different teleporter. When the teleporters with the timers start up, they will try to teleport the ocean from one place to the embassy. By the time the water level gets above the main floor the current would be too strong to get anyone down in the basement to shut off the machines. Eventually the water will flood out the building, the street, the city and fill all low lying area. You could turn any major city into post-Katrina New Orleans. [/QUOTE] Seems a bit silly. Why not just teleport a nuclear bomb, primed to go off in a few seconds, into the embassy and have done with it? Or if you don’t have a nuclear weapon, teleport a conventional bomb into (say) the White House. (I don’t believe the White House wouldn’t have a teleporter booth.) Instant decapitation strike! ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2006, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-working-teleporter-affect-society/378671/42 "2006-11-02T12:07:46Z")
[QUOTE=Alive At Both Ends] Seems a bit silly. Why not just teleport a nuclear bomb, primed to go off in a few seconds, into the embassy and have done with it? Or if you don’t have a nuclear weapon, teleport a conventional bomb into (say) the White House. (I don’t believe the White House wouldn’t have a teleporter booth.) Instant decapitation strike! [/QUOTE] The White House wouldn’t have a teleportation booth for just that reason; the Secret Service would point out the obvious security problems. Some other more secure location, 10 minutes away by helicopter, would be fine. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2006, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-working-teleporter-affect-society/378671/43 "2006-11-02T16:27:06Z")
I was drawn in by the title, but the OP’s conditions put me off. What is being described is an expensive toy, nothing more. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2006, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-working-teleporter-affect-society/378671/44 "2006-11-02T20:13:21Z")
[QUOTE=Valgard] “The Theory And Practice Of Teleportation” from “All The Myriad Ways”, I don’t have my copy handy but it’s a great discussion of what various types of teleportation would do to society. [/QUOTE] The key variables are: 1. Does it require apparatus on both ends? (Niven dismisses the “no” option fairly quickly – “you don’t get a society; you get a short war”) 2. What’s the maximum (and minimum?) range? 2a. Is momentum and potential energy conserved (which creates obvious issues for long-distance teleports on a planetary surface)? If so, can the system auto-compensate? 1. What’s the maximum (and minimum?) payload? 2. How much does it cost? 4a. How does the cost vary with payload and range? (Flat cost for any teleport operation up to the limits of what the sytem will handle? Proportional to mass and/or distance? A combination of a flat minimum cost to activate the effect plus extra for mass and/or distance?) From answers to these basic questions, a great deal can be inferred about how teleportation would be used, which modes of transportation would become obsolete, etc. For instance, if momentum and potential energy are conserved, long-range jumps on Earth don’t work (except for the special case of the point at the opposite latitude and same longitude), but a chain of short-range ones can substitute (but might be prohibitively expensive, depending on the answer to question 4). ---
**Author:** ![Billdo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/billdo/32/315_2.png) [@Billdo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Billdo)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2006, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-working-teleporter-affect-society/378671/45 "2006-11-02T22:15:07Z")
I just did a search, and the cheapest advance purchase round trip First Class ticket from JFK to Narita (11/23/06-11/25/06) was $12,810 for the 14 hour flight. That means that the price per round trip use is approximately $130,000, or about $65,000 each way. Put another way, you would be paying $58,500 extra to save 14 hours in transporting a person from New York to Tokyo, or almost $4,200 per hour saved. At that cost, it would be a highly unusual situation where it would be a cost-effective method of transport for persons or goods. I could maybe see a few terminals being set up in world financial capitals to transport top executives and government leaders, but other than that, I can see little commercialization possibility, and little overall effect on the world. (Hypothesizing about why it would cost so much, and why the costs wouldn’t come down with development, I would spectulate that the primary cost might be the energy necessary to take the mass and volume to be moved, move it to the receiver, and adjust for the change in orbital momentum, etc. I would also hypothesize that the transporter might have to take an equivalent mass or volume of material from the receiver and transmit it back to the other station to keep things in balance.) ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2006, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-working-teleporter-affect-society/378671/46 "2006-11-02T22:23:54Z")
[QUOTE=Zebra] No matter how far you move away, your mother can show up on your doorstep at any time. [/QUOTE] She’s not a problem; the problem is your _mother-in-law_. 😃 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-a-working-teleporter-affect-society/378671.md?page=2)