One of the most amazing inventions in the past couple of years changed everything. You’re probably thinking of the glow in the dark lightswitch or the modular phone but believe it or not the ability to teleport has done quite a lot for human society.
There’s one big benefit to teleportation that I think people take for granted. And it’s not necessarily a functional role that it plays, it’s actually a behavioural, societal one.
So yeah, our oceans were boiling and we had been a few years past the point of no return. At the time, I always had this thought exercise of seeing the climate crisis like a big group project – one you would do in school. You have a set of people – some are big positive or negative drivers of change. Some contribute massively whilst some others just couldn’t be arsed. And of course you have a deadline.
Now the consensus at the time was that humanity seemed like it was doing well so far. In the 2020s I would often take a step back and look around at the societal and technological progress we had made just to appreciate it. Of course, it wasn’t perfect, but it seemed like the story of humanity and the planet Earth couldn’t possibly end after this. I mean, what about all those futuristic stories? The ones full of fantastical solutions that were due to be invented in 10 years from when we were watching them – the ones that would solve all our problems? This group project would normally pull through and pull something out of their arses. But sometimes you have circumstances that mean your work does not quite meet the requirements – and you end up fucking it up collectively or delivering something half-arsed.
I think what I’m trying to say is that there may have been an over-reliance at the time on the boffins to come up with something. Had there ever been a point before where we relied so heavily on a simple solution to a global problem? Where scientific innovation was something that we depended on to solve a specific issue as opposed to overcoming hardship with the incremental, exploratory improvements to how we function as a society?
It’s kind of funny thinking about all of this now, considering how quickly teleportation came along. I remember seeing the first few headlines about it, almost like they did actually discovered life on Mars (Note: this was actually before they did discover life on Mars, just thought I would mention that). It was very surreal to recognise that, oh, suddenly teleportation was no longer theoretical and indeed a very practical reality.
At first it was a very sticky situation for everyone. We had this amazing, fantastical ability on our world (it was only sender-receiver, so no teleporting to Mars just yet) but it meant that our resource issues around transportation, food and valuables kind of got borked (in both a good and bad way).
When they started to roll out news of how these things worked, the thing that fascinated me most was the taboo, the conversation, and the big ideas it got the average person to talk about.
See, the simple way of explaining it was that the teleporter was not actually a direct transfer of matter. Yes, you may have guessed that it was something a bit less comfortable than that. But hey, if it works, right? The teleporter was remarkably similar to that Star Trek transporter theory or ***SPOILERS for the most magical Christopher Nolan film besides his Harry Potter remakes*** Tesla’s machine from The Prestige.
It didn’t actually directly transport matter, it merely transmitted the atomic information of the object in the sender module, transmitted it (depending on how good your WiFi signal was) to the sender module which then rebuilt the artifact using the information captured in the sender. So you would actually just photocopy whatever was in the sender. Oh, and I probably should have mentioned this, but it also atomised anything that was in the sender module.
Now as you can imagine this was a bit of a controversial subject – not the destruction piece (not yet anyways) but the actual photocopying mechanic. Instantly people were raising questions on why we don’t replicate everything if it’s possible and listing all the problems that could be solved. But obviously the team who managed to crack the tech foresaw this. When the team finally managed to finish the working prototype for the very first teleporter they were found 5 days after the press conference having committed suicide. All their research on replication having been atomised by themselves. Almost like something from a pre-quantum internet creepypasta.
Their reasoning was that the secret of the replicating algorithm had to die with them, as humanity simply could not risk creating more than it needed. Some agency- responsibility rather had to be provided in the use of this reality altering technology. A terrible price had to be paid each time it was used by a person.
The team that managed to perfect the replication process, however, must have felt like gods. The creation of life on a whim (albeit based on an existing design) is no easy thing to come to terms with. In their eyes, the responsibility was simply too much for us to handle, so the algorithm was inherently linked to the destruction mechanism, with no way for us to distinguish between the two when we looked at its workings. They were quite clever in how they compressed and tangled the code.
It’s funny, I used to think about the balance of the world a bit myself. I used to think that if you took too much away from the earth into space the balance of the planet would be put off, and some natural cataclysm from God or whoever would let us know this wasn’t a good thing at all. I suppose it was some version of conservation – the first law of thermodynamics, and I suppose that was an inspiration for the ethical rulings on the use of teleporters.
The more I think about it, when we started exploring the possibility of using it with organic matter, it worked perfectly. Squirrels, mice, sheep, we tried it all. We would put one in the sender, then a flash would appear, and the animal would appear on the other side in the receiver. They would always scream and tremble in fear though. We know why that is now.
Initially, we hadn’t quite managed to iron out the creases in the destruction moment. It was slow. Not agonisingly, torturously slow, but slow enough to recognise it when you were copied. The result, (the copy of you) would remember the beginning of the process. Every single atom of flesh and muscle being ripped apart from your bones before you are suddenly in a different chamber of flashing light, feeling completely fine. It was a bit like a burn: how you don’t realise it until you take your hand off the stove. Then the context of no pain stimuli makes you realise what you were feeling, and you scream.
Eventually, we did manage to adjust out feeling the destruction moment as the teleport was finalised. But this then raised another talking point at the dinner table. And to be completely honest, this is my theory on how teleportation really saved the world. Not through any functional use, but through the behavioural change it instilled in humanity. The behaviour of selflessness.
Who are you? You’re one person. A single entity. For the purpose of this conversation you’re Joe Bloggs. You are the sole entity that is Joe Bloggs, no one else is. Now say you copy yourself – you effectively destroy yourself and pick up somewhere else. If you wanted to get a Kinder Bueno and decided to go to the nearest Tesco, you would hop into a teleportation pod and transport yourself over to the shops. But YOU won’t be eating the Bueno, someone else will, with your name. You’ll be dead. You got atomised at home whilst your copy was created around the corner from Tesco.
When you create a copy of yourself, you are no longer you. When you turn on the teleporter to go and get the chocolate bar (or is it a wafer? I’m not quite sure), you’re fulfilling an objective for the greater good of Joe Bloggs, not yourself. Who are you now? You are not one person. You are not a single entity. You are a member of team Joe Bloggs, who you are helping enable in order to satisfy a need for a hazelnut cream filled chocolate bar/wafer thing.
Now if you’re the copy, then you’ll remember everything that happened before you got atomised. It would feel like you just got transported, but you won’t be able to ignore the truth – that you were created just moments ago and those weren’t the memories the atoms in your new body lived. That was someone else who handed over ownership of the entity and identity of Joe Bloggs to you.
Surprisingly, this wasn’t actually a big issue for a lot of people. Many came to terms with it when they saw how convenient it was. Super commuters now had it easier than ever before – nowhere was off limits. If you wanted to spend a weekend trip in Peru you would be able to be back home in China for an evening dinner. Global supply chains were disrupted (the good kind of disruption) so you could get anything you needed near instantly compared to before. Heck, I even managed to finally put my Duolingo to use and got a part time job in Japan. Deliveroo had a field day.
However, for many other, there was indeed a huge psychological problem. There’s still many cases of partners feeling detached from their other halves who have teleported once – there is nothing wrong with the copy, they’re atomically a perfect recreation – but the partner may fail to recognise the new body, the atoms of the copy. It’s even more sad when you hear about the parents who have disowned their children after they used a teleporter. Sometimes it is even psychosomatic, where the ‘user’ was never a user at all yet their loved ones are convinced they teleported and have decided to shun them. It really breaks your heart.
Psychologically, for the user, it was a bit of a problem at first. The trade-off on convenience for the feeling of near death, immense pain, and existential horror did not seem that worthwhile. And for a while we bumped the replication moment earlier, but this led to a whole load of problems as the original and newly created versions sometimes saw each other when the machines were in proximity. In those few moments it created a bucketload of existential dread for both parties (imagine seeing your other self get atomised alive, knowing that was about to happen to yourself). But like I said, when we managed to refine the destruction moment and proved the 100% technical success rate, loads more people accepted using them.
A funny thing though is how we look back at media. In a way, the media and inspiration for teleporters must have been what inspired their creation. Another thing that some pieces of art back in the day raised was the perspective of the user. From loads of TV shows and videogames that dealt with the subject, it always implied that the original version of the user’s perspective would shift to the newly created version. Now, yes, this was the case for the new version but the original would just be torn to shreds and that would be it. No perspective change, no switch, just death.
Going back to selflessness. The teleporter had a very important message in the way it worked: you don’t matter as much as you think you do. You are one part of a very big whole – part of a team. The human race is inherently selfish. The system at the time was based around the idea that looking after yourself and your own is always the better decision than contributing yourself to the collective good. The benefits would always be stronger if you just served yourself – after all, you only have one life. Joe Bloggs only had one life to make the most of it, to work to serve himself and his family, to look after his own. He was going to be on earth for a finite number of years before he died – why should he care about anyone else?
But as soon as he entered the teleporter, he would truly realise that he was going to die there and then, and that another man with his name, his likeness, was going to go out and accomplish his mission. The self was no longer a singular, it was now a collective. If we’re basing this around individualistic VS collectivist qualities, you would have to think about the common goal, and the realisation that the accomplishment of this goal is a collectivistic ideal – one which you must dedicate yourself to beyond any personal interest.
It is something that is passed down as legacy. Your ancestors, your descendants, working towards the common goal of saving the planet from the climate crisis. Working together, continuing the work of predecessors, and setting up a foundation for future generations to accomplish this goal beyond your lifespan. It is the same thing, just on a much more punctual level. In a way, the technology to more conveniently head out to get a Kinder Bueno helped much more of humanity realise the importance, or more appropriately, the irrelevance of sacrifice in order to achieve the common good. Whether that be preventing a climate disaster or going to the shops for some chocolate…or wafer.
minutiae+musings 