What Would Be the Good and Bad About Discovering Teleportation?

At the end of my post from yesterday, like a true Star Trek fan, I mentioned that teleportation would disrupt drone delivery which has just started to become an alternative to more conventional delivery methods.

That is certainly true, but teleportation would come with its own set of challenges, as I also mentioned briefly in the post.

I think I'm getting ahead of myself here, as we are quite far away from matter teleportation like in Star Trek, but we have achieved teleportation since 1997, if you can believe it. Quantum technology is based on teleporting state of photons over increasingly longer distances (first experiment from 1997 was for 1 meter, in 2017 the Chinese achieved quantum teleportation from Earth to one of their satellites).

We know the quantum technology is actively being developed, but maybe not many realized it is based on a teleportation technology. It is, however, teleportation of information, which is not the same as teleportation of matter, and we are apparently, quite far from achieving that.

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Instant travel of matter and humans would bring a series of benefits like instantly having access to critical supplies, trained personnel, resources, anywhere in the world (and not only) at potentially no environmental impact. How about teleporting a bunch of water from a flooded area onto wildfire? Feel like visiting Rome? Sure, go ahead! But be back by dinner!

The last remark about using teleportation to visit other places can also have a negative impact on tourism, especially hotels and any place where you'd pay to sleep, among other things. If you can sleep at home, why would you pay to sleep at a hotel? But that depends on how wide access to teleportation would be in the future, and if it has a high cost to use it.

It also reminds me of the movie Jumper with Samuel L. Jackson. The movie starts with focus on a young boy who discovers the power to "jump" (teleport) to certain jump places he focuses on. He develops that skill and well... starts robbing banks (what else he could have thought of, right? 🤣 ) and going to all the cool places he could think of. He thought he was alone, but at some point meets another like him. And then, he meets their enemies who are able to track them down and... kill them.

In this movie, the jumping ability comes naturally to a very few people on Earth, and it's not enabled by technology.

But it draws attention to some of the "negatives" of having such powers, especially when the majority doesn't.

But even if we go back to the Star Trek series, their creators imagined situations when teleportation went wrong, for example when the teleportation operator couldn't lock the target on one of the teleportation subjects and, with the dramatic effect of the movie, they die by falling off a cliff or something. But the teleporting machine itself can malfunction, and then, you don't want to be the one who receives the atomically-rearranged package.

Teleportation can also be used to surprise the enemy, or to bypass security. Also, what if a bomb is teleported to a train? Or into a room full of important people? New level of terrorism.

There may be ethics concerns too. If a human gets dematerialized and rematerialized, are they the same person?

And of course, we talked at the beginning that teleportation would disrupt transportation (and logistics). That may or may not mean loss of jobs, since these jobs are already on the list of the jobs very likely to disappear soon, way before teleportation of matter becomes viable (or even before quantum technology develops).

Posted Using InLeo Alpha

Posted Using InLeo Alpha