Ooh, the ultimate thrill ride. Beam up to 10,000 feet – no parachute. Free-fall 9,999 feet, then get beamed to a … stop?
We have to know what happens to our velocity/momentum after beaming. How is it even measured? If you beam to Earth from the moon, do you come out traveling the orbital speed of the moon as measured from Earth? Or how about to or from orbit? Or just a fast car or plane?
I’m not impressed with the Cracked article.
An obvious requirement, and one that will almost certainly be met with plausible near-future technology. The difficulties are far more profound that just more computing power.
These objections seem to be based on the supposition that teleportation would involve converting your mass to energy at source, sending the energy, then converting the energy back to mass at destination. Why on earth would anyone think that this is either necessary or sufficient for any conceivable speculative teleportation technology? [ETA: ok, I suppose it looks like that in Star Trek.]
If you want to teleport anywhere more than a few miles from your current location you’re going to have to account for the differences in velocity of the different points on Earth’s surface. It’s all gotta be accounted for somehow, so if you can teleport from LA to Moscow and not get smashed to chunky salsa in the receiving booth, then cancelling your momentum from a terminal velocity fall is trivial. You’re going a thousand miles an hour at the equator, if you teleported to the other side of the Earth you’d have to cancel a 2000 mph velocity difference.
They did do that on Star Trek. The transporters had biofilters that would prevent the spread of dangerous organisms to or from the surface of a planet by the away team.
It’s kind of a cool visual for an SF movie: teleport devices where you have to equalize momentum. Each device would incorporate a rail many miles long that can be oriented in any direction, so you get accelerated to the destination velocity before you dematerialize. Teleporting through space to a distant point might involve staging posts, not because of teleportation range, but because of the velocity difference. You arrive at each staging post locally stationary, and get re-accelerated to the velocity of the next one. The denouement of the movie would, of course, involve momentum errors.
If you could cheaply and safely transport between the big cities, the economies of many flyover states might collapse. Nevada’s economy is based on out-of-staters getting really tired driving through the desert. Utah, Idaho and Wyoming are in a similar boat.
Huh? Only a very small percentage of people traveling across the continent drive. They fly, hence “flyover country”.
Also, your physical attitude. If I beam to London, I’ll arrive flat on my back. To Sri Lanka…standing on my head!
And there’s gravitational potential energy: if I beam to Denver (up 5,000 feet) I’d better pull that energy from somewhere. (Larry Niven had it come from heat-energy: I’d arrive…freezing cold!)
(Niven also postulated momentum-transfer compensators. A gigantic dead-weight somewhere gets kicked back and forth, and up and down, to counteract the momentum-change of transportation.)
I’d say, as a whole, we would end up with even less capacity to defer gratification.
You think getting Broadway tickets is hard now? Just wait.
A tiger tattoo would be nice.
Sure, but that’s all they used it for. I remember thinking that there’s no good reason they could just not transport harmful bacteria, tumors, etc… much easier than Dr. Crusher could wave her tricorder at it.
A transporter with “biofilters” is a transporter that can edit you on the cellular level. Tired of having brown hair? Go through the transporter but have them reassemble you with blond hair. Or blue hair. Or six arms. Or whatever. Hey, remember when I said a transporter that can’t be blocked is the end of human civilization? Well, if you can edit people by transporter then human civilization is saved. Everyone gets edited into a docile version of themselves, except the new aristocrats. I guess they upgrade themselves into a new master race, with whatever traits seem good to them. And the rest of us get turned into natural slaves.
To be clear, I wasn’t advocating actual editing and modification in the sense of you hop into the transporter booth with a vienna sausage, and hop out swinging a kielbasa, but rather in the sense that if you are being scanned to the molecular level, it seems like it might be a relatively trivial thing to identify tumor cells, or pathogenic bacteria, or toxins or whatever.
The next thing I thought of was more along the lines of “Why couldn’t they could keep a copy of you as a template, and if you got a hole blown in you on an away mission, they could just fill it in as part of transporting you back onto the Enterprise using the template to reproduce that part of your body, rather than having medical staff wave tricorders, etc…?”
Editing’s not much more of a step though, although it would require the ability to actually engineer said kielbasa on the fly rather than merely identifying what microorganisms don’t belong in the vienna sausage after a trip to Rysa, or rebuilding it from the template after some angry Romulan fries it with a blaster.
If there weren’t some very accurate filters, we could have world-wide epidemics… Think of something like the 1918 flu epidemic, only everywhere on the globe, in just days. Such fun.
Occasionally, I’ve had merchandise arrive damaged or simply never arrive at all. Electronically, we’ve all had emails vanish into the ether, and files get corrupted or mangled due to a glitch somewhere. What if that were you arriving damaged?
I’d hate to be the guy who transported at the same instant when lightning struck a nearby power line. I might get to La Jolla merged with a pepperoni pizza.
We’ve all seen what a glitchy HDTV looks like.
I’d bet that most transporter accidents would need to be cleaned up with a mop & bucket. Other than the ones where you simply disappear into the aether for good.
Someone would transport a bomb into the White House on Day 1.
And if they have biofilters, they have explosive filters also.
But biofilters are for people. Do you also have them for animals? Here pet hamster, climb into the transporter with me. Oops - blocked as a pest.
It of course vastly increase the computational load - not only do you have to analyze the cargo, you have to pattern match for all sorts of nasties.
Plus you might have transporter-like equipment that works in a more practical way, without scattering ones molecules.
I got merged with a pepperoni pizza today, and only had to go as far as Pacific Beach.
Besides…yes, you’ve got a valid point…but…freeway accidents, anybody? If the accident rate compares with commercial air travel, then that’s good enough.