On Teleportation
August 8th, 2008 | shivering sands
Years ago, back when I was prone to laying down for many hours in conditions of significantly altered consciousness, I had an Idea. Following the pattern of behavior that makes such people so unpleasant and scary to decent folks, I spent the next several weeks explaining my Idea to everything that moved, and a few things that didn’t. Because you know what it’s like when you’re pretty sure your brain has exceeded the speed of light and your heart sounds like a badly abused motorcycle engine and you think that maybe other people can hear it so you need to stick eggboxes to the walls and tape rubbish bags to the windows and play Diamanda Galas very very loud at 4am to drown out the sound and paint special pictures on the door with your own blood and semen to keep the police and the Upside Down People away and anyway. Idea.
Teleportation should be a matter of simply proving you’re somewhere else.
A teleportation device would be a little computer set up to run a single equation. And this equation would prove that you’re somewhere else entirely. You’d plug in the coordinates of where you want to be and press Enter. The machine would run, the equation would solve, proving to the entire spacetime continuum that you are in fact in the other place, and suddenly you’d be in the location relating to the provided coordinates. You wouldn’t appear inside another object, because the universe doesn’t like that. The only tricky bit, I figured, would be that the Earth moves through space around the sun and the sun moves through space with the Milky Way and the Milky Way is subject to the expansion of the universe. But people are clever and would find ways to allow for spacetime drift. I think that if you’ve cracked the mathematics to convince the universe that you’re somewhere else entirely, these small details would be easily attended to.
And the best bit is that it wouldn’t require the power demanded by "classical" teleportation — which, some say, demands the energy output of the sun in order to briefly render the teleportee into a controlled Hiroshima-scale nuclear explosion. I figure you could run my teleport device on a couple of AA batteries.
This is, of course, why I don’t really take drugs anymore.
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[...] Warren Ellis is thinking a good bit about teleportation [...]