Practical and Social Aspects of Teleportation

The idea for this blog post came to me after a friend mentioned teleporting on Facebook. I suggested she teleport over to my local pub some 100 miles away from her for excellent cider and music. If she'd had the technology she'd have been able to do that and still be home in time to make cocoa for her fiancé.

It got me thinking about how cheap and effective teleportation might affect our lives. It certainly would make keeping up with far-flung friends easier. Of course, this is nothing new  - other bits of technology have done that - the car, telephone and Internet  spring to mind. These were not always instant solutions - cars still cost money to drive and a few decades ago, a long distance phone call was ten times the cost of a local call even within the UK. Still, if teleporting was possible, you'd be able to enjoy a real hug.

Another factor, familiar to traffic engineers is that if travel becomes easier, congestion rises to meet it. That would be unlikely to affect a friend teleporting 100 miles for an hour or two in an obscure pub but what if it applied to journeys to our local racecourse? Certainly the traffic jams in the town would be reduced but there's still a need to have some way of ensuring that in crowded places you didn't teleport into a space already occupied by someone else.

Maybe the technology would sort this out. You'd program in your desired coordinates and the "the system" might book you an empty space nearby to safely teleport into. Still might be a bit of a bang as your arrival displaced all that air.

Assuming that telporting technology was fairly low energy (and it might not be) then the roads and the energy consumption of  transport might fall away and reduce "Global Warming" - provided that total energy used for travel didn't increase now it was so easy.

It would also mean that it really didn't matter where you lived. You could live somewhere cheap and nice. Teleporting in to work would be easy. If the weather was foul at the weekend, you could go somewhere nicer. Immigration? Well, you might teleport into a job in a more developed country but you could go home to "the old country" in the evenings. Suppose you were a former miner in South Wales - you could teleport in to a job where coal mining was still economic. Then you could go home via a supermarket in a an inexpensive part of the world to get your groceries.

The more I think about it,, teleportation is the way forward!