How popular would teleportation be if each jaunt took 15 minutes from people’s lives?
Depends on the distance!
15 minutes being a commute for a lot of people, so possibly a zero sum game, but while mostly useless wasted time, I do ponder things, listen to music, psych myself up for work, etc. And of course, a 15 minute drive has a non-zero (if not large) of taking 15 minutes or more off your life ANYWAY.
15 minutes off my life to cut a 12+ hour trip: to airport lot, to airport, wait, fly, layover, fly, to rental to hotel, etc. Hell yes!
Now, to make it interesting, what if it was 15 minutes per 15 miles (or fraction thereof) traveled?
To paraphrase the old question, is that 15 minutes off the end of my life, or 15 minutes out of the prime of my life?
The end of your life…either by natural causes or by misadventure.
According to this (PDF) each cigarette takes 11 minutes off your life. Now that’s statistical analysis, not definitive magic, but it seems people are willing to take that exchange.
I’d only use it for special occasions like a trip overseas. I mean, you’d have to teleport yourself back, so the 15 minutes is now 30. And what about luggage - does that teleport with you, or do you get charged a separate 15 minutes for your bags. That would be another 30 minute round trip. Now you’re talking an hour off my life. That might be the hour I spent sleeping to die in my sleep, only now I would die while brushing my teeth before I go to bed. That’s not fun.
Then there’s the problem with my wife. She’s older than I am, so she might be less willing to slice 15 minute chunks of her life off like so much cheese. I could wind up teleporting myself on a dream vacation, only to have to wait three days for her to show up via conventional transportation.
TLDR: It depends.
Right now if I wanted to travel to Australia it’d take around 24 hours of my life to get there. So having to give up only 15 minutes would be a vast improvement.
I initially thought it’d be that teleportation would just take 15 minutes, me materializing 15 minutes after stepping into the machine on the receiving end, older by the same amount of time, thus effectively having lost 15 minutes of life. That seemed like a no-brainer, even for my daily commute.
But strangely, the idea of it hastening my ultimate demise by 15 minutes seems, somehow, qualitatively different. It’s one thing to decide the time I have now isn’t worth more to me than the convenience of subjectively instantaneous travel, and another to take some chunk off of my future budget, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
That said, for long, tedious travel times, yeah, still would be a massive convenience gain. I mean, the accumulated stress, bad airline food, and high altitude radiation probably already shave off some chunk of life expectancy…
If it just lops off time at the end, meaning avoiding more of older age, it seems like a way of leading a fuller life as modern travel is mostly routine, boring and last longer the 15 minutes, though it could be argues it’s also time that many do use as a meditative session, even if they aren’t doing that on purpose . So a quality vs length of life equation. I do wonder how much time that would cut off if that is the preferred method (for routine trips longer than 15 minutes), we tend to spend a lot of time in travel.
I have solution-- take some drug that will render you unconscious before you get teleported. It might not seem like a lot of time, but 15 minutes with nothing to do? Long jaunt! Longer than you think! It would be eternity in there…
If it takes 15 minutes off the end of your life, and you die by misadventure, how does that work? Do you die fifteen minutes before the accident? Particularly inconvenient if you are driving a car.
Look at it this way: if people had the ability to safely shut off their minds and be rendered unconscious for 15 minutes during commutes or long-distance travel, would they? I know I would - it would make the trip feel shorter. This is the same thing, only vastly more efficient, because your trip actually is shorter, which frees up more time per day.
In short, I’d teleport for any trip that would take me more than 15 minutes to travel any other way. Unless, of course, the journey itself is the destination.
Presumably by cumulative damage to your body or something.
I crunched the numbers. Let’s say you have a one hour commute (each way). Over a 45 year career, that’s roughly 18000 one hour trips or 750 days sitting in a car/bus/train/whatever.
The same number of teleports would cumulatively shave 187.5 days (or about half a year) off the end of your life. Since those years tend to suck anyway, that actually might not be a bad deal.
Now the question I have is are those 15 minutes absolute, or are they countered at all by the health benefits from less stress and less time sitting in a car?
Humanity is pretty short-sighted, so very popular. The downside for Americans would be that there’d be no food/beverage service.
ISWYDT
I see in my haste to make a jokey answer off the term ‘jaunt’ I missed the point of the OP, that it’s about shortening one’s life by 15 minutes, not taking up 15 minutes of one’s life in the transpo process.
My somewhat more serious answer would be absolutely not, because what else is it doing to me? The old transporter problem: Unless a transporter could be proven to me to work by something like space-folding and not the manipulation of molecules in your body, no way. Because a transporter that works, Star Trek-style, by disassembling your molecules and re-assembling them in another location is basically killing you and creating a copy. Even if the transporter is using the exact same molecules or atoms to recreate you, the cessation of consciousness may very well be killing you. So you step into the transporter and…you’re dead. Blackness and nothing, forever.
On the other end emerges a reconstruction of you, who thinks it is you, has all your memories right up to entering the transporter, and is you for all intents and purposes. But it’s not the ‘you’ that walked into the transporter. That ‘you’ is now dead and gone.
To level set myself, I thought about averaging 1 round trip per day. That’s a half hour shaved or roughly 1/50th of a day lost for each round trip, which means 1 round trip per day for 50 years is one lost year.
If I’m shaving time off of a 30min commute, I’m not sure that plays. An hour each way seems a much better bet. However, you have to DO something with that time. Gifting myself an hour each morning to fart around doesn’t hardly seem worth it. However, losing the extra car, the transportation costs, vacation costs, etc is a wonderful thing.
The danger is in overusing it, not really seeing the danger with each use. You lose 3-4-5 years on the back end you’re really hurting yourself, like you never get to meet your grandchildren sort of hurting yourself. If you limit yourself to averaging 1 round trip per day, you can save up trips for emergencies or convenience.
Leaving aside the entirely valid question of whether the teleportation technique wouldn’t be actually killing me each time I used it:
15 minutes off my life in exchange for avoiding a 15 minute walk or drive in nice weather? No way.
15 minutes off my life in exchange for avoiding four hours in airports, another couple of hours getting to and from the airports, and three hours on planes, any or all of which times may expand drastically due to circumstances beyond my control which I have no way of predicting? Sure, I’d do that.
15 minutes off my life in order to get me out from under a tree up in the woodlot and instantly into the ER? Hell yes.
I’m presuming, however, that the teleportation is done either by a learned mental technique or by some smallish doohicky I can reasonably carry around with me. If I’d have to travel to a teleportation booth somewhere, that would make it entirely useless for the accident-in-the-woods situation, and at least somewhat less useful for the air travel situation.
Any point A to any point B, with a safety that stops you from teleporting into an already occupied space. It is a natural ability recently unlocked, not a device, and it won’t take you off planet.
But Star Trek (at least from the movies and TNG on) stipulated that you were conscious during the transport process and perhaps even able to carry on a conversation with a person who’s transporting with you. We need to put a pin in the whole “destroying and recreating” idea because it’s a distraction.