(First draft written while waiting for a flight to Chicago.)
I
greatly enjoy time spent in different locations - all of my best
memories involve foreign locales - but I don't enjoy the process of
getting there, the actual travel itself. Our family didn't travel at
all when I was younger, so I when I began to travel as an adult, I had
no background or experience to draw upon.. As such, even at the age of
52, going to the airport feels like having to take a really important
test that I can't study for and which I could fail at any moment,
especially when I'm crossing the border to the United States.
So, let's talk about teleportation.
On
the face of it, easy access to mechanical teleportation would be
fantastic - when I say "easy", I mean something on the level of taking
the bus: not universal, not free, but affordable and accessible. Step
into a booth, swipe your card, pick a location, press GO, open the door,
and you're at work. Or in Zimbabwe.*
But, as always with new technology, it would have both a
positive and a negative effect. In the case of
teleportation, the effects would probably be massive, changing the world
on the same sort of scale as the introduction of the computer.
Science
fiction author Larry Niven has written a lot of good stories and essays
on mechanical teleportation, which detail the various issues involving
the collapse of all the transportation and shipping industries at once and the subsequent economic issues,
the problems involving smuggling and crime (including the end of
location as an alibi for murder) and a myriad of other issues.
Niven also addresses the physics behind the process and the various problems that would need to be overcome. For example, if you teleported to the other side of the world, you would have to land running at
1670 kilometers per hour to compensate for the simple fact that the other side of the world is rotating in the opposite direction.
But what actually happens when you teleport? How does it work?
Well, in theory it kills you.
In
some way shape or form, you cease to exist. You are scanned and
disintegrated, then rebuilt at the far end, but is it still you? There are several science fiction stories that look at this question - notably, there's a teleporter in China Miéville's entertaining novel
Kraken who goes insane because he's being haunted by the ghosts of all his previous selves who were killed by the process.**
“This is why I wouldn’t travel that way,” Dane said. “This is my
point. For a piece of rock or clothes or something dead, who cares? But
take something living and do that? Beam it up? What you done is ripped
a man apart then stuck his bits back together and made them walk
around. He died. Get me? The man’s dead. And the man at the other end
only thinks he’s the same man. He ain’t. He only just got born. He’s got
the other’s memories, yeah, but he’s newborn. That Enterprise, they
keep killing themselves and replacing themselves with clones of dead
people. That is some macabre shit. That ship’s full of Xerox copies of
people who died.”
And there are creepier options. After all, why should the machine disintegrate you when you're scanned? Or delete the template? Or just make one copy at the far end? The most chilling take on this process comes from Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, who posit the use of doppleganger copies of people being used for suicide exploratory missions in space in their
Cuckoo novels. After all, if the original person doesn't go anywhere, and they get a lot of money, why would it matter what happens to their copy - or copies.
Even more disturbing is the possibility of error in the process, as demonstrated in a couple of episodes of
Star Trek, but nowhere more graphically than in
The Fly (either version, although the 1983 remake has better special effects.) Personally, I think I'd want to see a whole lot of other people try the damn thing out before I set foot into a transportation booth.
You know, suddenly security lineups, immigration scrutiny and airline delays seem a lot more tolerable.
* Should anyone reading this actually live in Chitungwiza and work in downtown Harare, feel free to substitute "Vancouver".
** Not to mention the controversial question of the soul. The next time you watch something from the
Star Trek franchise, imagine that everyone on the
Enterprise is actually a soulless zombie - creepy, isn't it? No wonder Denise Crosby seemed so stiff.
