If easy and affordable teleportation was invented, how would laws regulate it?

[szputnyik]

Let's say that a form of teleportation is invented that works off electricity, and is cheaper than transportation by any vehicle.

I can think of two options:

1. It is treated similarly to air travel today:

If I want to travel from Budapest to Berlin, I go by car or public transport to the teleport station, which is similar to an airport, pay for the electricity my teleportation will consume, I'm beamed away to Berlin in less than a second, on the Berlin side, I'm greeted by German staff, then I rent a car or get on the bus towards my destination.

2. It is basically unregulated, at least inside a country or inside the Schengen Area:

If I want to travel to Berlin, I type in the address in my smartphone from the comfort of my living room, push the start button, a teleport beacon built into the ceiling instantly transmits me to the address in Berlin, the electricity that my teleportation used is added to my monthly electric bill.

Obviously, the second option would require further, smaller regulations even for teleportation inside a country, for example to block out a burglar trying to access private property.

I'm also wondering what would be the long-term effects of option 2. Would people get so lazy to use teleportation for moving around inside their houses?

[KerbMav]

Back in the days of Doom we used the term transporter frag - so some regulations will have to be established to prevent this from happening.

[MajorThomas]

Read the Ringworld series by Larry Niven. The Puppeteers use teleportation discs both in their homeworlds and on their General Products starships (at least the one our protagonists used).

The physical issues are well discussed: Such as instantaneous changes in velocity if teleporting from one part of the world to another... your velocity vector would change by 3,000 kph if you immediately popped over to the opposite side of the world. So short hops are recommended, else you have a lot of heat to deal with.

The Puppeteer city is full of these discs, arranged at the edges of city blocks so you can jump one or two blocks ahead and cross the entire city while strolling. It's very cool.

Also, the energies required are huge, so the assumption is that, in order to have teleportation technology you also need unlimited energy such as might be delivered by Fusion power.

On the other hand, anything the Puppeteers create is super safe, so it's assumed they have airtight regulations on safety, setting the standard for the other sapient races of the galaxy. Exactly what those regulations might be...are a mystery.

[SciMan]

I was just about to mention the tele-frag problem myself.

The solution would probably be very similar to that used to avoid packet collisions in internet switches/routers. Whatever the system ended up using, it would prevent the teleport process if the destination is occupied.

Of course that assumes an instantaneous teleportation system. If the process takes a certain amount of time to complete, it gets more complicated.

Other than that, I expect payment would work more like a subway train system does than an airline does. You would buy a certain amount of uses, or if it takes more energy to go further, a combination of uses and distance. There would also probably be monthly plans available similar to how some cell phone contracts work.

[Kerbart]

Also read Alfred Bester's “The stars my destination†which describes a society where people can teleport at will. Homes have intricate labyrinths as entrances to ensure visitors don't know exactly where your living quarters are so they can't come back to rob the place blind.

Not that it deals with other aspects of teleportation that much (aside from the main characters' abilities being the major plot) but it's an awesome novel.

[xenomorph555]

Security guard notices a columbian man exiting from the US's main tele-station, "YOU STOP RIGHT THERE", the guy starts running but is pinned sown by police. The police then pull 4 bags of cocaine out from his shirt...

[vger]

Security guard notices a columbian man exiting from the US's main tele-station, "YOU STOP RIGHT THERE", the guy starts running but is pinned sown by police. The police then pull 4 bags of cocaine out from his shirt...

Considering a teleporter would have to break you down and store all of your data before sending you to the exit-port, the computer would know the details of everything you were carrying. There wouldn't even be a need for agents. The computer could just NOT reassemble your contraband. You'd pop out the other side wondering what just happened to your cuban cigars.

[xenomorph555]

Considering a teleporter would have to break you down and store all of your data before sending you to the exit-port, the computer would know the details of everything you were carrying. There wouldn't even be a need for agents. The computer could just NOT reassemble your contraband. You'd pop out the other side wondering what just happened to your cuban cigars.

Too bad, it could have been a funny tv show...

[Mazon Del]

Honestly I agree that it would be regulated much like air travel today, if only for the reasons why it was banned in the Eureka universe. Namely that the risk of terrorism or destablizing military applications was too great.

So, even if it was otherwise practical for someone like Google to set up a company only use teleport-net, they would not be allowed to (or at least it would require a hell of a lot of money) so that the government could definitely provide oversight on the use of the system. It would likely have checkups like at least two locations in the US would be "Teleport Control" where a man at the station to transmit, another at the station to receive, and someone at the massively protected "Teleport Control" Would all need to provide input to allow a transport to occur. This, while a little cumbersome, is still better than air travel is today and largely protects against misuse by non-state actors.

Really one thing that is rarely brought up when discussing teleportation seriously, but is presented in a great deal of sci-fi (I get that it's sci-fi, but so is/was teleportation, so hear me out) is that what we end up using as teleportation does not strictly require the dissection of an object at the atomic level. An example: Lets say in our quest to figure out more about wormholes that we discover how to cheaply make "short range" wormholes. Enough to get around the Earth with only 2-3 stops. But making them arbitrarily large is just stupidly hard. So our teleportation is just opening up one of these wormholes and stepping through. At no point is it possible for a system to arbitrarily declare that it is not going to let through a given aspect (such as the cigars, or a nuclear weapon, etc.). Now, to be fair, our current attempts at teleportation do generally speaking require the sort of knowledge that I just mentioned. But again, this doesn't mean that is the method that will win.

[Godot]

It would be treated as murder or suicide, I guess.

After all, while at the destination location of your travel a copy of yourself would be created,

the original version of yourself at the origin of your travel is getting destroyed

[frizzank]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Such_a_Beautiful_Day

It's Such a Beautiful Day by Isaac Asimov

Basically since everyone uses teleporters no one goes outside anymore and people that do are considered "Dirty"

[mielgato]

At first, I want to say hi to everyone, i'm new and not american/english, please bear with me :3

@Godot, then I want to react about your message : if we are talking about quantic teleportation I do concur (due to intrication, sorry if it is not the full term or mistaking), the "you" the other side from an ethical point of view can be considered as a copy and not the "actual you".

I think star trek picture very well what's happening during a quantic teleportation, as said by nearly everyone, your body's atoms configuration would be saved by a quantic supercomputer, sent to coordinate X,Y,Z at S speed then reconstructed weither by automated mean from the home computer (requiring to beam the data where you want to go I guess)

Weither by a terminal at your destination (safe to think this kind of technology could allow you to copy and store yourself in a quantic/numerical state and be restored in case of fatal and unwanted/unfortunate death, limb severed, uncurable disease... Thus begining the age of the cyber human)

But this technic implies a big flaw, does the "you" you've stored is really you, or not just a copy thinking it's you, when the "actual you" is dead, because of the demolecularization needed to store these very data and send it elsewhere faster than light (this is getting complicated and steam already blow from my ears)

the Stargate from SG-1 would be the wormhole way of teleportation, a hole connecting two points in the universe by folding it, then it's safe to think you are not demolecularized and would just "pop" the other side (considering you put through your arm only, while your body stay in new york, your arm appear the other side from the event of horizon, if you pull it back, your arms dissapear from paris and is still your arms when fully in new york. but a lot of flaws can be foreseen, as the strain caused by the wormhole to the body, the energy needed to open both side of this wormhole with enough input to keep it open a minute or two, and does wormhole really not demolecularize yourself ? Just to give a few.

In both case, it would be strictly regulated, at least for a few decades or a century, until peoples get accustomed, because of the need of heavy installations at first and for reasons already mentionned, I think that once we become a truly space faring species teleportations regulation would ease a bit, if not completly dissapear as privates at first and then commoners would get access to their own teleporter gradually like the cars was at first reserved to the elites when it really came out first, and then begun to become a part of everyone everyday life, so is the informatic.

I may be wrong, if that's the case i'll be glad to have a proper explanation, i'm not confident about my knowledge in this topic =)

[MajorThomas]

Considering a teleporter would have to break you down and store all of your data before sending you to the exit-port, the computer would know the details of everything you were carrying. There wouldn't even be a need for agents. The computer could just NOT reassemble your contraband. You'd pop out the other side wondering what just happened to your cuban cigars.

Well, that turns the teleporter into a surveillance device. I would hope they don't try to introduce "Big Brother" into a transportation tool. That would be my Customer Requirement #1, just teleport safely, reliably and do nothing else.

[Whirligig Girl]

My somewhat more tech savy friend believes an equivalent of a ip ban would be sufficient.

[vger]

Well, that turns the teleporter into a surveillance device. I would hope they don't try to introduce "Big Brother" into a transportation tool. That would be my Customer Requirement #1, just teleport safely, reliably and do nothing else.

Well if it works like Star Trek transporters, it would HAVE to record ALL information about you and what you're carrying. Even data. Otherwise you could teleport a harddrive but when it arrived, it would suddenly be blank. You could encrypt the data when it gets sent but there's still going to be that doubt about whether or not somebody is poking around.

The only alternative is a more magical type of teleportation. Or something that doesn't require 'de/reconstruction' but then that's not really teleportation anymore in the classic scifi sense. It's an artificial wormhole.

[KerbMav]

It would be treated as murder or suicide, I guess.

After all, while at the destination location of your travel a copy of yourself would be created,

the original version of yourself at the origin of your travel is getting destroyed

Oh, shut up Bones/Pille!

Well, that turns the teleporter into a surveillance device. I would hope they don't try to introduce "Big Brother" into a transportation tool. That would be my Customer Requirement #1, just teleport safely, reliably and do nothing else.

I would love to live in a world build of your confidence in humanity.

Well if it works like Star Trek transporters, it would HAVE to record ALL information about you and what you're carrying. Even data. Otherwise you could teleport a harddrive but when it arrived, it would suddenly be blank.

There is no need to specifically store the data on a transported hard drive, because for teleportation to work, you have to reproduce at the destination the position and situation of every particle, which includes the position and speed of an electron in a molecule even. So, your savegames are safe.

[RuBisCO]

How do these teleporters work, is it a little walk through wormhole or is it like startrek and your deconstructed and reconstructed some other place? I would think how it works would really effect the legality of the device.

[szputnyik]

How do these teleporters work, is it a little walk through wormhole or is it like startrek and your deconstructed and reconstructed some other place? I would think how it works would really effect the legality of the device.

I've imagined it to be a teleport beacon that is a big, stationary device that is accessed with a separate, handheld controller. Once you get in range of the device, the controller links up to it, you type in the location of the beacon at the destination, a beam from the beacon strikes you, and you disappear, the beacon transmits you to the beacon at the destination, a beam strikes out from the destination beacon and you appear in its wake.

If it is treated similarly to air travel, then there are no handheld controllers, just a heavily guarded control room for each beacon, that is controlled by staff with the oversight of policemen and border guards.

[Red Iron Crown]

The most important consideration, to my mind, is whether the teleportation tech requires a terminal at either end. Is it Niven-style, with a teleportation apparatus at each end? Or is it Star Trek style, where a terminal is not really required at either end? The former is easy to regulate, the latter offers far more challenges.

[Scotius]

If you have technology to transfer hundreds kilos of matter into energy, and then convert it back on demand then all kinds of contraband will be pointless.

[cantab]

If it requires a device at each end, it'll be commercialised sooner. Early on it will actually be light on security because it'll be so expensive. Multi-millionaires make unlikely terrorists. When it becomes more mass market I think the security arrangements would be lighter than for airlines, because it makes no sense to have a long security process for a short journey. Arrangements more like what train stations have would be likely.

If it allows teleporting to an arbitrary location it'll remain classified military technology for a lot longer. Only well after a "jammer" is invented will it come into civilian use, and such jammer will of course prevent many criminal uses.

[Seret]

It would be treated as murder or suicide, I guess.

After all, while at the destination location of your travel a copy of yourself would be created,

the original version of yourself at the origin of your travel is getting destroyed

Depends on what sort of teleportation you're envisaging. Take the Altered Carbon novels, where people digitise their mind and transmit that, where it's downloaded into a new body at the destination. From the traveller's perspective it's teleportation. The body they left behind could either be stored for their return or rented out to someone else, and a new body (synthetic or natural) bought or hired at the destination.

Teleportation is a purely sci-fi idea, so it might work any way that you imagine it.

[Javster]

I imagine you'd have to apply for it in advance like you book a flight.

One thing though: is it...

2 teleporters are linked

a network of teleporters

a teleporter which teleports you and itself anywhere?

Edited July 30, 2014 by Javster

[Red Iron Crown]

It's also interesting to think about the economic consequences if teleportation was trivially inexpensive, say as much as riding the bus. A lot of industries would be turned on their heads, and things like immigration and real estate values would have to change drastically, too.