I’m currently sitting here at 3AM, three hours before my flight home to San Francisco is due to take off, hoping that it actually will take off, as i’m flying by way of Memphis and the weather there has been less than ideal as of late, and i’m thinking to myself, “why couldn’t we just teleport?”
Now, i’ve long had this theory that teleportation was actually invented some time ago, but that it’s been held back by a conspracy of auto and oil companies. Anyone familiar with some of their past practices wouldn’t find this at all a surprise. But right now i’m trying to think of what would actually be bad about teleporation. Here’s a few things:
Nowhere would be safe. If some psycho wanted to kill somebody (or rape, mug, etc), s/he could just beam in somewhere, attack whomever, and beam out. Damned near impossible to catch.
All those really cool bridges in San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere would go to waste. (though when you think about it, they’d be damned cool places to set up shop).
Tourist and shopping crowds: Think the lines at Disney World or Versailles are bad now? Imagine how they’d be if getting there became just as easy as going to work in the morning. Likewise, why would you bother shopping at your local department store when you could do it in Manhattan or Paris? All but the biggest and most scenic or historial cities would crumble, while the latter would be overwhelmed.
Extreme loss of cultural identity: if everyone could go anywhere and everywhere, there’d be very little in the way of regional variations. We’re talking mass homogenization here.
Even more environmental damage: okay, assuming the teleport machines themselves didn’t pollute more than cars do, there’d be a sizable dropoff there. But if people were able to spread out to anywhere and everywhere they wanted (work in New York, live in Montana), there’d be some pretty significant damage to what remains of natural habitats.
I’m sure there are others, but my brain isn’t functioning too well right now.
zyz, teleportation would solve my getting-the-hell-out-of-California problem! Instead of convincing the company to let me relocate to the Bothel, Washington office (which has not, and probably won’t be successful), I could live in Washington and still come to work here.
Um, I know much of this is meant in jest, but assuming that teleportation would involve moving energy from point A to point B, the process would need to involve both a transmitting device and a receiving device. After all, you can’t just get TV reception on your wall, can you? If private teleportation “receivers” could operate like telephones, with an assigned “number” and the ability to block unwanted/unknown transmissions, there would be no problem.
Ray Bradbury wrote a story about a society that had Doors. Capital D. These were teleporters, and one day one of them broke down. A young boy had to walk to school. After being outside for the first time in his life, he decided he liked Outside. Even after the Door was fixed, he still preferred to use the door (lowercase d). Everyone decided that he must, therefore, be insane.
All of the nice, out of the way, vacation spots would be ruined since everyone could easily get to them.
Smuggling would go way up. Watching your borders with radar, border potrols, coast guards would be useless. Even if most teleport centers were big government controled airport-like centers, there would still be small town teleport centers, corporate teleport centers, rich people teleport centers, etc.
If you set it up where you can teleport anywhere, not just center to center, then tornado magnet [moble home] sales would go WAY up. Buy one off a lot and have it sent anywhere scenic [with a generator for power, get water sent weekly, propane monthly].
Shipping companies, airlines, cruise lines would go out of business. Lots of people out of work.
As the OP mentions, the environment would be ruined if you had point to point teleportation. Everyone with a snowmobile would be at the north and south pole for an hour of fun. Yellowstone, Everglades, etc would be trampled in a week. The only way to save them would be to put up guard stations and give orders to shoot any teleporters spotted off of official viewing platforms [teleport on and off].
Since teleportation is really just destroying something and one location and making an exact replica of it somewhere else, you would also have the problem of people screwing with their machines so the original is not destroyed and they create an army of themselves to take over the world, or at least cause havoc. (“No officer, I couldn’t have stolen all that gold from Fort knox, I was in Tiajuana at the time”)
Terrorists would just have to teleport a bomb somewhere, it would be too easy to blow stuff up. No need to rent a truck, or launch a rocket…just put it in the teleporter and BLAM! no more Washington DC…
Didn’t Larry Niven write a short story called “And all the Bridge Rusting”? Even if not, he write several stories exploring the implications of teleportation including most of the ones you hit upon, crowds, crime, and despoilation of natural areas once people found they could live anywhere. One rather interesting take on teleportation was the notion of “flash crowds”. If something interesting happened, people would teleport in from everywhere and eventually the crowd itself would be a reason for more people to teleport in, and eventually you’d have riots, looting, and theft. Alibis for crimes were a lot harder to develop, because in seconds you could be anywhere. So you could duck out of a party for a few seconds and commit a crime across the country.
Niven made a few assumptions – teleportation was a public utility (like phones) and you needed a booth to teleport from. So homes had secure antechambers that you’d teleport to, and people would check you out before letting you in.
It would damn well suck for my parents… cause everytime I am not in my room mom would yell at dad:
“if you hadnt gotten her the new teleporter 3000 she wouldnt hang around with her wasted friends in England all the fucking time!”
well… eurotrash stays eurotrash…
Xizor has it right. Energy transmission would require that the original be destroyed. Would you enter a transmitter knowing that you would be vaporized, even if you knew an exact copy would appear at the other end? I don’t think so. The Captain Picard we see on TV is actually a 300th-generation copy. I’ll stick to fossil fuel, thank you.
Just to add a word in favor of the teleporters (seems y’all want to trash 'em)
As Homer Simpson has shown us; the magic of Teleportation would allow me to take a piss in my living room and have it land in the bathroom upstares (or anywhere else i should so choose, MWAHAHAHAHA)
Yeah, so Bart ended up trading heads with a fly, i’d never have to leave the TV room ever again!
Upham
Most people here seem to assume that teleportation involves the creation and destruction of objects. However, perhaps the teleporter simply causes a spacefold and point to point congruency.
Flash crowds would be a problem, yes. However, the despoiling of out of the way area’s might not be. If the TPBooth needed a large energy source perhaps? The TP Center has it’s own nuclear reactor…then it becomes a matter of NIMBY.
Here’s the fun one…the TP system has one small problem, energy conservation…I TP to the other side of the planet and get smeared against the wall because I’m travelling at 10000mph in the wrong direction.
and with dialling the number of the place where you want to go… What about when you get a wrong number? Or a crossed line? or there’s already someone standing in the booth…
And just think what telemarketers would be like… shudder
