No matter how far you move away, your mother can show up on your doorstep at any time.
It would also mean that all manufacturing jobs would move to where ever the cheapest labor is.
How do you figure teleportation as I described would do that any more than is already happening? Remember, it costs 10 times the amount of a first class ticket from NY to Tokyo to teleport a human size body, regardless of the distance. What business is going to pay that much to bring its workforce to and from the factory each day?
The price of teleportation would come down. It would not stay constant. It would come down. They don’t transport the workers, they transport the products. They transport the raw materials. You’re cavet that the cost is 10 times the ammount of a first class plane ticket is less probably than the making of the machine. Such tech would be developed to bring the cost down. With the cost that high, there wouldn’t be much impact. It would just be like private planes.
Other better uses,
Fresh, really freash produce from around the world delivered to anywhere.
This includes drugs, agricultural pests, and interesting new diseases.
Zebra’s right.
The price would come down.
…and the technology would advance.
In less than 20 years after introduction, the cost would be so low that most airlines would have gone out of business or switched their business models to include teleportation.
Boy, this long and no one’s mentioned The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester?
It doesn’t meet the requirements of the OP, but long before Larry Niven, Bester’s book explored the social implications of cheap and booth-less teleportation. Transportation companies go out of business, thieves are able to easily get into secure locations (and to keep teleporting to the night side to stay ahead of the law). A social hierarchy of teleporting abiklities develops. Interesting stuff.
It’s interestin that Niven’;s “Flash Crowds”:, even without actual teleportation, have become a real phenomenon due to the organizational possibilities of the internet. Although they seem to have petered out as a fad.
Dan Simmons suggested that cheap teleportation could lead to ghouses built in physically discontinuous units, united by teleporters, even with different rooms on different planets.
But, if the OP’s rules of limited and expensive teleportation are followede, the results are different. Instantaneous couriers and executive transportation. some very specialized military uses. I can see a lot of engineering and scientific uses – you;d suddernly be able to send things to formerly remote locations, like to the ocean floor. Or, once you’ve set up a booth on another planet, even with the high cost of teleportation, it’s still probably cheaper than space flight, so you have a relatively inexpensive way to explore and colonize the moon, Mars, and the planets. Put a booth on a space probe, and you cvan drop an infinite number of subsidiary probes along the route.
Not if your family’s willing to pay for it. I mean, I only manage to avoid family visits every month now (to Colorado) because I just can’t take that much time off. With a teleporter I might be expected to come up every weekend.
Worse yet, they could come here.
When it absolutely needs to be there…Right Now! FedEx, UPS, DHL, et al would be all over this. They could charge a premium to help cover their costs and would ship a number of items at the same time to further reduce costs. The sheer volume would bring their costs down too. Stacking up enough pallets to fit through a 20’ x 20’ door and zapping them around the globe through strategically placed distribution hubs would almost eliminate their airplane fleet and all associated costs. Pilots, planes, fuel, airport fees, flight time, weather delays would all be obsolete. They would still need trucks/drivers to get packages from the hubs to final destinations, but it would still be improved.
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.
Except now you’re getting into conservation of energy issues: you can’t lift tons of mass miles higher without inputting energy somehow.
It might work if you teleported the water in the proper direction relative to the rotating earth. Your incoming water would appear with an upward and sideways motion relative to the receiving booth.
Do it in the other direction to pump water back into the ocean.
I think that’s a problem with any teleporter, so it would likely have been solved. But I can’t believe that the teleporter wouldn’t have broken down long before the volume of water got dangerous. It would be simple to arrange as a security measure: simply insure that the structural integrity of your receiving unit can’t handle that much weight.
The OP said teleporting a normal sized human would be very expensive so I’d think teleporting a large chuck of ocean would get pretty darned expensive, pretty darned fast. If it costs roughly $1,000/200lbs; then how much would it cost to create a Katrina-sized disaster?
Sorry, the OP said it’s ten times the price of a NY-Tokyo ticket, so it’s more like $10,000/200lbs or so.
Actually I stipulated that the primary limits of the teleporter’s capabilities are based on volume, not mass, since it warps space within the booth. That said, there’d be a practical problem with the teleport-caused flood too, since I can’t imagine the casing & mechanism being durable enough to handle thousands of gallons of water. After all, why would it be designed to do so, when designing it otherwise is the simplest way to avoid such a misue of it?
Well, batch mode would be easier for the scan-and-transmit style of booth. But the wormhole-style of booth might not have as much problem with continuous mode.
Some of these conditionals seem rather arbitrary. Unless you’re going to provide a coherent basis for some of the limits of this technology, this becomes less fun. Some of them I could buy initially due to new technology, but the technology would improve and remove the limitations.
Stationary relative to the Earth and each other… does this rule out a jump to LEO or not? Daisy chaining/port-bounce… is this a valid application?
Because I’d envision them pearled along a space-elevator cable. Maybe not an interplanetary expressway, but a low-energy way to get most of the way out of the gravity well is still very useful.
I’d expect both of those limitations (or at least the relative to Earth one) to be overcome eventually.
Are booths matched pairs or can any booth link to any other booth?
What happens if you teleport one booth to another?
What happens if you teleport a booth to itself? (potentially interesting hazardous waste disposal mechanism, there)
You could have a really great restaurant. Why have one chef, when you can have any chef from anywhere in the world prepare a course and then the teleporter bring it to you.
Now, does the booth need to send things through in “batches,” or can I keep a portal continually open, like a tunnel? (Even if only for something fairly small, like a bunch of high-tension cables?)