11 KiB
[MK][DC] So You've Learned to Teleport
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Author: u/Darth_Hobbes Ankh-Morpork Guild of Assassins*
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Score: 47
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Created: 2015-08-20T16:02:29
Post:
Comments:
u/artifex0 [+11] (3 hours later)
So, let's say your teleportation works by you imagining some object, like Paris or a spot on the surface of the moon, moving you and anything you happen to be holding or wearing to a location near that object, and matching velocity with it.
I think that reflects how the power works in most popular depictions, but it has some interesting implications. Suppose you fire a bullet, teleport to a location and velocity matching the bullet, fire another bullet, teleport to that one, and so on. You could speed yourself up to any velocity you'd like. Now, do that instead with nuclear bombs in space- teleport to the fastest object you can, fire one off, teleport to a velocity matching some of the resulting particles (or shrapnel, if you need a solid object and have some material tough enough to leave near the bomb and not to be vaporized), fire another one off, and so on. I'll bet with a few very easily stolen nuclear weapons and maybe some material made from carbon nanotubes, you could reach relativistic speeds.
You could then use that velocity to skip time. Wait a few seconds at a speed close to c, and centuries pass on earth. In that way, you could make safe long-term investments, and instantly see centuries worth of return. You could preserve knowledge and technology through any dark ages, wait until civilization reached some utopian pinnacle, and, assuming money still existed, buy half of it- all in the span of a few subjective days or weeks.
u/Geminii27 [+8] (11 hours later)
- and you'd be the equivalent of someone time-traveling from centuries ago, in terms of culture and language. Only it would be worse because of the rate of change of technology - someone traveling from even fifty years ago to now could end up with massive future-shock if all the current technologies and social changes were dumped on them.
You'd need to have your money managed by someone (or a trust) which would be prepared for your return and able to bring you up to speed on everything, and who wouldn't simply have gotten so used to having trillions of dollars and corresponding financial power that they'd simply kill you with a 22nd-century weapon you couldn't even recognize, and carry on as they had been doing.
It's also assuming that there were no financial meltdowns, bankruptcies, corruption, or loss of records during that entire time which resulted in your finances vanishing or being stolen, commandeered, or confiscated. Even assuming law enforcement works roughly the same way in a couple of centuries, what are you going to say - "My money was stolen in the collapse of BigCorp eighty years ago; do something!"?
u/artifex0 [+5] (13 hours later)
Well, every investment comes with risk. With enough diversity and probably a heavy investment in government bonds, at least some of the investments would probably survive, and the return on those would be astronomical. Future shock would put you at a serious risk of being scammed, but barring a collapse of society, I think the forces that would prevent people from just killing ordinary stockholders and stealing their assets would apply even to someone several centuries old. Realistically, despite my quip about buying half a civilization, I think you'd become about as rich as a very rich old family, and only personally, rather than financially, outside the bounds of normalcy.
Granted, society might become strange enough that the idea of owning stocks and bonds would no longer apply, but there's no reason you couldn't check in every few years to see how things were going, and move to hard assets if things started to look odd. If the entire idea of people owning things became obsolete, you could consider just skipping that part of history.
Also, if your wealth ever was completely wiped out, so long as civilization was possible, you could probably always find a society willing to buy some ancient artifacts or information, and from there you could try again.
u/PeridexisErrant [+5] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (14 hours later)
If the entire idea of people owning things became obsolete, you could consider just skipping that part of history.
As the Culture says, "money implies poverty". Why not settle down in this post-scarcity society?
u/artifex0 [+2] (22 hours later)
That would be a great idea if the society is actually post-scarcity and liberal, but a society lacking those aspects and also property would be limiting to the time-traveling teleporter at best, and nightmarish at worst. Money may imply poverty, but in an impoverished society, it also implies rights.
u/None [+2] (15 hours later)
The thing I really dislike about discussions on skipping time or immortality is how people seem to forget the difference between a vampire living till present day from say...Victorian England or Ancient Rome and someone from present day living up until a corresponding point in the future.
The vampire would find it far, far easier to gather the wealth and power over centuries without being discovered than any modern child of Facebook and Instagram ever will. Like, we're hoovering up everyone's data today, can you imagine what sophisticated tools we'll develop later on?
Of course, if you're some sort of powerful entity or organization unconcerned with the law or being outed...ignore the above.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+9] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (35 minutes later)
Larry Niven, Theory and Practice of Teleportation, goes into way more detail...
u/PeridexisErrant [+3] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (8 hours later)
Link for the interested.
u/Geminii27 [+5] (12 hours later)
Hmm. One thing Larry didn't seem to go over before publishing was that system-seeding probes wouldn't need to toss out a colony plus a teleport gate - they'd only need to toss out the gate. The entire colony could then be fed through that gate.
Come to think of it, it'd make more sense to toss gates out the back of the probe continuously as it made its way across the galactic disk. Each gate could then start shooting its own probes off at right-angles to the original probe's path, meaning instead of having a single spider-web line of colonies across the galaxy, we'd have an expanding cone with the center of the base sitting on Earth.
Fire two probes in opposite directions and eventually we'd saturate the galaxy in probes and colonies - the only limitation would be setting up mining and refining facilities at a sufficient rate to feed the geometrically-increasing material requirements of the probes.
u/Meneth32 [+8] (3 hours later)
Video says it's episode 8 of a series called "Your superpowers and you", but I can't find any reference to it. Fake series?
u/NNOTM [+7] (5 hours later)
It was a joke. He mentioned it in the comments.
u/None [+7] (7 hours later)
I'd actually enjoy a Tom Scott superpower deconstruction/munchkinry series.
u/NNOTM [+2] (7 hours later)
Yeah, that would be pretty nice.
u/None [+6] (6 hours later)
In episode 1 you'll learn how to travel through time. It came out on the 9th of May, 2093. It's worth the 2 hours of watching.
u/distributed [+5] (3 hours later)
Anyone know of more videos with similar themes?
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
Seconding the recommendation in the video description for the Jumper series by Stephen Gould (which I've linked in this subreddit before). Exo is probably my favorite of them, because it's mostly about .
u/westward101 [+4] (14 hours later)
If you can move instantaneously, you get to see the future.
If you hang out at the sun, you can teleport instantly to Earth and have 7 minutes of foreknowledge of what the sun will do. Set up a solar flare prediction market and make millions!
Could you leverage instant travel for high frequency trading purposes...maybe not between New York and Chicago, but New York and Tokyo?
Watch out for Jeff Bezos though!
u/NAG3LT [+3] (17 hours later)
Could you leverage instant travel for high frequency trading purposes...maybe not between New York and Chicago, but New York and Tokyo?
Only if you can create two portals connecting the cities and put a cable through it to a high frequency trading machine. Otherwise your reaction time is too slow to compete with computers with their ~200 ms ping from NY to Tokyo. Or you need a supplementary power of super-speed and reaction.
u/Chronophilia [+3] sci-fi ≠ futurology (a day later)
I feel like there should be better uses for an FTL portal, but I somehow can't think of them. It doesn't seem right that violating such a fundamental law is only really useful for arbitrage.
u/redrach [+2] (2 days later)
You could make a killing delivering goods around the world. It's what the teleporters in To the Stars do when the mages in it form a company.
u/AmyWarlock [+5] (15 hours later)
7000 Joules, which you can get from a sip of cola
At 1000 mph, I get 7 million joules, you'll need a bit more than a sip of cola, more like twice the amount you'd normally eat in a day. Although you're already throwing physics in the bin anyway so probably doesn't matter much
u/eniteris [+3] (3 hours later)
Tom Scott is an amazing youtuber. He has a few other science-fictiony videos on his channel as well, in addition to giving great talks at Thinking Digital.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (a day later)
I was hoping he'd mention the required change in momentum when teleporting cross-country, since I wrote a quick story about that myself.
You see, teleporting north-south is about as dangerous as teleporting east-west, but for different reasons. When teleporting east, the ground is moving at the same speed but in a different direction, so you find yourself going up. When teleporting away from the Earth's axis (south in the northern hemisphere, north in the southern hemisphere, straight up near the equator), the ground's direction is the same but its speed changes, and you find yourself going west.
And there's variation depending on your latitude - jumping 100km north at the equator is safe, but doing the same at the poles will probably get you killed. Jumping east-west is exactly as dangerous no matter where you do it (proof left as exercise).