You can teleport - what do you do now?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Someone else just started a thread about what you’d do if you could turn invisible, so what the heck I’ll toss out my own hypothetical I was thinking about this morning.

You just found out you can teleport. The goal is to make as much money as possible. You can break laws and generally be a criminal, but you’re not a killer or anything. After you gain some experience, you realize the following:

[list=a][li]You can only teleport once every 24 hours. Whatever mysterious energies allow you to teleport need that much time to regenerate. In an emergency, you could maybe jump after 18-20 hours, but it would be dangerous, you’d end up with a screaming migraine, irregular heartbeat, confusion and short-term memory loss. It’s not something you’d casually attempt.[/li][li]You can jump to wherever you can see, to a limit of about a mile. After that it becomes increasingly inaccurate and if on a clear day you tried to jump someplace 10 miles away, you’d likely end up miles short or far off target. You could jump to the moon but you’d end up 1,000’s of miles off target but you could still try because;[/li][li]There’s no limit to how far you can jump. On earth (or theoretically any planet) your mind has a natural “homing” ability so that as long as you know generally where you are on the planet’s surface, you can jump to any place else you’ve already physically been. The limit to this is for instance if you were blindfolded and taken someplace and confined to a windowless room and had no idea where on earth you were, your homing ability would be unable to get a fix on any other location known to you. Jumping to places you’ve been but can’t see is safe because your ability more or less pushes matter out of the way at the arrival point. It’s strong enough it displaces air, atmospheric moisture, even water if you wanted to teleport waist-deep into the ocean or something. If a person or animal was standing where you wanted to teleport, they’d be gently pushed aside. But a solid wall or rock wouldn’t budge, and you’d be able to “feel” that before you jumped and adjust accordingly. [/li][li]You can teleport yourself, your clothes of course, and whatever you’re touching/holding to about the size of another human being. So no, you can’t teleport cars, yachts or buildings & such.[/li][li]If the world’s governments & populace learns about you, you become instantly known worldwide, and hounded probably for the rest of your life. But you can tell your best and most trusted friend, if you really want. Heck, you can tell anyone you want, keeping in mind you’ll be hounded if everyone finds out.[/list][/li]
If you’re dead-set against breaking laws, that’s fine but again, you can engage in criminal activity. If you don’t want to get rich, then tell me what you would do with the ability. But, I’d like to know the best ways of getting rich, at least at first.

For instance, you can’t just teleport into a bank vault and steal all the money because you’d be stuck in there for 24 hours. You wouldn’t want to walk into the vault on a bank tour, grab some money and teleport, because everyone would see you.

2

I have always felt that Nightcrawler was one of the weakest of the X-Men and he doesn’t have to wait long between jumps plus he’s a skilled acrobat. If I had the abilities outlined I think I would just experiment with it for a while and only after I knew all the limits of my traveling abilities. After I knew what I could do I would use it to surprise my friends and family.

You could also put on a great stage show. I’m thinking specifically of the film “The Prestige”.

3

See, the trick to all of this bank robbery stuff lies in getting yourself to the crime scene, and then teleporting yourself out to safety–basically a “snatch and run” operation.

I’m not sure what I’d do just yet. I have illusions of grandeur of walking in and finding bin Laden, and then transporting us to an LZ with a waiting helo, but that assumes he’s still alive.

Tripler
I think we know where he is. . . we’re just using him as a ‘lab rat’.

4

I would teleport into cave systems, and look for deposits of great value. I’ll take whatever is needed to breath with me. Nobody will find me when doing this, because they can’t get to where I am.

5

I would go back to Ireland, then go to Scotland, Lebanon, Africa… :smiley:

6

That’s the thing. You can jump in or jump out, but not both.

What you could do is pack a lunch and a portable toilet, and jump someplace that has lots of loot but no surveillance and just sit there for 24 hours, but what sorts of places like that are there?

But you’d have to have been there already in order to jump there, so someone would have to be able to get to where you are, right? The only way that would work is if it was a known mine that gave tours occasionally, but you knew was going to be unvisited for 24 hours, while you chiseled away at the deposits.

7

It’s probably a pretty boring answer, but I’d say weekend trips. I’ve never been to Europe, China, Japan … this would be a perfect way to save on airfare and long flight times.

8

I saw a documentary on Fort Knox, and while the exterior is heavily monitored, the interior is not (or at least wasn’t). Apparently they let a few public people in during the 70s to verify that, y’know, there was actually gold there, and the vault they opened had the original seal from when the gold was first put there. If you could manage to figure out how to get into one of those vaults, and assuming that there is no new detection system inside the vaults you should be ok.

Besides that, there have to be vaults that are closed for the weekend somewhere. Easy enough to pop in over the weekend.

9

Ah, but you would have to have already been there in order to jump back there. So, you would have had to come up with the cash to go there the old fashioned way first. How do you come up with the cash, assuming you can’t already afford it? You can’t really jump there line-of-sight, because you can’t generally jump accurately that way more than a mile or so and even making wild jumps as far as you can possibly see, that wouldn’t get you across an ocean. Remember also, only one jump per day.

10

Well first off, start fathering as many children as possible to try and propagate my teleport gene. :smiley:

Start the bidding between package companies for instant transport jobs involving a few small packages between Los Angeles and NYC distribution centers or small high value packages to difficult to reach areas after an initial in person visit.

Need those loose diamonds at the office in london 3 min from now…BAM!

11

If the goal is to make money, does it count if I save money? Cause I could go home and see my Mom, and that flight costs me about $2000AUD for cattle class.

I miss my Mom. :frowning:

Cheers,
G

12

Every Government/Spy Agency/Terror Group/etc on Earth would be after your @ss.

Good thing you could go to Mars.

13

I don’t need to have been there before hand to jump. I just have to use my ability to feel there is rock where I’m trying to teleport. It was stipulated that you had this sense with the teleport power. The reason is to prevent merging I assume. As for accuracy I’m not going miles deep, pressure and heat would also be a problem then.

14

It seems both immoral and risky to steal money - why have law enforcement chasing you?

My first legal million dollars comes from the Randi Challenge:

At JREF, we offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.

After that I’m torn between the chat show circuit or working for the Govenrment.

15

I’d probably do that. Have my sperm frozen anyway. But I wouldn’t want a bunch of teleporters running around too soon. Let me make my millions first, then I’ll decide if I want to raise a secret family of potential teleporters, or go ahead and let people world-wide raise their own little teleporters.

I was thinking about that, but you’d have to be careful who you revealed your abilities to. Again, I’m working on the assumption if the world found out, you’d be hounded. But if you could find some wealthy clients who need packages delivered instantly, no questions asked, that could be one way to make money.

Sure, why not? Just keep in mind your friends and relatives would start to wonder how you can afford all these “flights” or ask questions like, “why don’t you let us pick you up at the airport? What flight are you on? Why do you always just show up at the front door? You’re acting kinda mysterious.”

That’s why you have to be careful who you reveal this to. Mars is out of the question, most likely. You would have to have had some government send you there first and even then I’m not sure if you could get an accurate fix on it, since it’s constantly orbiting the sun, as well as rotating. You only know for sure there doesn’t seem to be any distance limitation to your ability, but you can only get an accurate fix on your jump destination in relation to where you are now. That is, if you know you’re in New York, you always know where Moscow is in relation to you, but if Moscow was constantly moving, or in general you couldn’t tell where you were in relation to Moscow, it’d be difficult and maybe impossible to get a fix on it. Does that make sense?

The idea of jumping to another planet is fascinating, but very complicated. Likely you wouldn’t be able to nail it in one jump, so you’d have to be able to survive in space on your own for awhile. Can you jump with that much equipment & supplies? Also, we’d be dealing with rotational velocities, orbital velocities, etc.

The problem with blind jumps is the increasing inaccuracy. If you’re jumping someplace you know, and you can sense there’s something solid there, you can for instance, teleport into the backyard instead of the living room. But when blind jumping a great distance, your ability would only tell you whether there’s something solid or not. So you don’t have to worry about jumping into the ground, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if the open space you’re jumping into was ten feet off the ground, or 500 feet. Or maybe you teleport over a lake, or into the middle of freeway traffic. Nightcrawler could escape an underground facility by jumping really far straight up, and hoping it was far enough, but not too far up. Then he can immediately jump again. You can’t jump again so if you guess wrong, you’re screwed.

The point would be to not have LE after you, as I see it.

Well, if you want the world to know about you it’s your choice, but it seems to me that could lead to a loss of control over your own destiny. Are you sure you want to work for a government? The pay might be nice, but can you actually resign, with all you now know and can do?