What If Teleportation Existed?
I was taking some back roads home through the countryside, and the butterflies were just starting to emerge. As I plowed into a particularly large one, I thought about how destructive automobiles are to unsuspecting animals just going about their day. There is always a dead deer, armadillo, opossom, raccoon, squirrel, hawk, buzzard, turkey, cat or dog on the road.
One morning I even passed a white goose standing in the ditch on the opposite side of the road. Later that evening when driving back home, I passed by the same goose and realized its mate had been killed and it had been standing by it all day.
Scenes like this stick with me and I started to think about ways to prevent all the death and destruction associated with automobiles. Being a science fiction buff (there are four lights!), the idea of teleportation immediately popped into my head, and I began to think about all the things that would change if teleportation was a real thing. I'm talking about the good old "beam me up Scotty" type of teleportation. Not the teleportation around quantum physics and quantum computing.
Fewer Deaths?
Everyone probably knows someone who has either died or been seriously injured in a car wreck. I had to pull shards of glass out of my skull after someone ran a red light and flipped me over a few times. Would we see fewer deaths with teleportation as a mode of travel?
Human Deaths
Conservative estimates from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration put annual automobile deaths around 40,000 every year in the United States 1 2.
This number doesn't take into account deaths from other modes of transportation like planes, buses, trains, and even bicycles.
Animal Deaths
Extrapolating from various samples, scientists have put estimates at around 365,000,000 vertabrates3 4 and 32,500,000,000 insects5 being killed each year in the United States by automobiles. Tack on bird strikes and animals wandering onto train tracks and this figure goes even higher.
Fewer Oil Wars?
If teleportation existed, there would be hopefully (albeit a naive hope) fewer wars started by impotent politicians over finite resources like crude oil. While it seems like the lower of our species will always find a "reason" to kill other humans, one would hope that with teleportation, the rest of us would stop giving these subspecies the power to do so.
No one is ever going to agree (or commit) to a solid number of deaths caused by the administrations of George W. Bush and Donald Trump's invasions of Iraq, Venezuela, and Iran for their oil. How many would you guess were killed? 500,000? 1,000,000? 2,000,000? Higher?
Time Savings?
When I still had my corporate job, I would have to drive only 10 miles to and from work each day. This daily trek still took me about 45 minutes to an hour each way. Other relatives of mine have spent upwards of 2 hours each day sitting in traffic to go to work.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the average commute time for workers to be around 54 minutes total each day.6 With an estimated 143,000,000 people physically commuting to a work place each day, the math gets interesting.
143,000,000 people x 54 minutes x 250 workdays in a year = 32,175,000,000 hours each year spent commuting.
That is about 3,672,945 years spent sitting in a car every year.
If the average life expectancy of a person in the U.S. is around 80 years old, that translate to around 45,912 human life spans spent each year in traffic.
Thinking back to the wars over oil, how much oil do you think is needed for gasoline, tires, and automotive parts to get these people to and from work?
Stronger Relationships?
Putting aside (again naively) all the ways human beings could use teleportation to inflict violence on other humans, teleportation could allow us to build and nurture relationships. I for one would spend more time visiting friends and family who live in different states and countries.
If we could get past our urges to do harm, we might even be able to use teleportation to build a true global community to share ideas, culture, and discovering new ways of making life better.
Wouldn't understanding each other a little better solve a wide swath of problems and fears we create for ourselves?
If you could teleport, what would be the first thing you would do?