I wonder to myself all the things I could accomplish or all the places I could go or do if only getting there was cheap and quick. And I don't mean like airplane quick or even rocket ship quick. I mean almost instant quick. Teleportation. Just imagine what we could do if we were only seconds away from everywhere. We could work a job overseas and be back for dinner. We could visit anywhere in the world and by default make the world a better place by being able to get access to and help countries that aren't easily accessible per se. Let's dive a bit more into detail on the wonders (perils) of Teleportation.
1. Instantaneous Travel
We all know that, in theory, teleporters would make our lives infinitely easier, and take out the need for wasting fuel and work on things like cars and planes. Think about it, in an instant, we could just be whisked across the world to any destination. Travel would be easy and you could have friends and family all over the world of who you could see whenever you felt like. And no need to get up early for work. Just get ready and beam right over. Even look at it like Star Trek did. We could build a beam strong enough to teleport us to the moon, where we could possibly colonize. We could beam into places too unsafe to travel through. We could build places that are impossible to enter except for beaming into. We could protect treasures or anything else, even have a secret city! The possibilities are endless! Or maybe not.
The problem: You would have to imagine that the price to make and produce a teleporter wouldn't come cheap. The science behind it would have to be precise in every case, to avoid beaming part of ourselves to different locations. The ability to produce and maintain every teleporter in mass would be infinitely pricey, and the likely hood of having a cheap, public, available teleporter are pretty much shit. Which brings us to....
2. You're a new person when you come out of a teleporter!
No, really. Here's the science behind a teleportation device. A person enters, the machine scans the person (or thing) inside making sure to note where every atom is in which spot correctly, right? Well, actually, the most ideal way for a teleporter to work without having to transmit massive amounts of data through the air at a deathly rate would be for it simply to scan the targets DNA or cellular structure. It would be the same as uploading a song into your music player. Instead of moving the song from say a CD to the computer, it merely copies it. So essentially, a teleporter would do the same thing. But we can't have multiples of everyone running around every time they get teleported. So the original would have to be destroyed. So essentially, teleporters would commit mass murder everyday and the only 'original' people would be the technology fearing conspiracy theorists who thinks the government is out to get you.
3. A teleporter can cure cancer! (And other diseases, disabilities etc.)
Going back to the science of having to copy a person, it stands to show that copying a persons DNA would be infinitely easier than moving it quickly over a vast space. But think of this. People become sick, get strains of virus or bacteria, lose limbs or senses and essentially break down. But none of these things are coded in your DNA (not counting hereditary illnesses, which even so, wouldn't be a factor to if or when they become apparent). So a blind person could be teleported and come out on the other side able to see. The idea that is that you are a copy of your own DNA structure, so things that happen after you're born or essentially after you're conceived wouldn't show up in this 'new' body. It's like being born again every time you come out the other side.
The problem: Unfortunately, other things like age and strength and memories aren't encoded into DNA either. At least from what science has been able to map. So even though we can recreate our DNA, and say we were somehow able to get the right age, there would be too many factors to be able to get the right size, weight, heights, muscular overtone, etc that you had when you went in the teleporter. And even if science was able to pinpoint all of these variables, there still isn't a way to map a person's brain and their memories, likes/dislikes, or essentially, who they are as a person. So it would be like starting all over again from infancy, unless we figure out a way to control all of these things. Which, in turn, would mean we could take things out, say drop a few pounds, give someone some nice muscles, maybe blue eyes, a memory of making out with Karen Gillan etc. Essentially, the world would be able to create falsities and make people someone different, just by entering one of these machines.
Conclusion:
The teleporter seems like a great idea when you simplify it, but in reality, to be able to control all of the aforementioned variables would be quite impossible, and we wouldn't want someone to figure this out, or you end up with something out of DollHouse. Although, at one point I considered this very notion laughable and not worth the risk, but given the world we live in, maybe a worldwide drastic change would be a good thing.
