I was sitting with my friend, P, today after lunch, having a smoke and appreciating the beautiful weather. It is very rear in Hyderabad to have a sunny sky and still not hot. As with all good things in life, this was also short lived. As usual we blamed it on global warming (the most overused term these days).
Of many reasons we picked fossil fuel as one of the primary contributor in the global warming. With cigarette in hand and beautiful weather you tend to think of changing the world. So we were discussing many ‘what-if’ scenarios – alternate energy sources, nuclear cells, and many others.
P suggested teleportation should be our primary means of transportation. It will result is going away with all the current gas hungry means of transportation, and it will be fast, fast as in speed-of-light. Guess what, we can reach New York in less than a second, which otherwise takes anywhere from 15 to 20 hours. I liked the idea, but then I started thinking on means to implement it and its consequences.
You remember Star trek, don’t you? Well teleportation seemed so simple in it. But we have a bigger problem at hand. Our star trek fellows only have to teleport very few at a time, but here we are talking about it as a means of mass transport. So we may need teleportation station, like we have railway/metro station, bus stands, airports, etc.
We are all made of hydrogen and carbon, and so is everything else around. Isn’t it? So it boils down to the atoms of hydrogen and carbon that we really need to transfer from one end to another. Transferring them physically may not be a real good idea. What if we have huge containers of stored hydrogen and carbon on the receiving end and we just transfer the details about the composition of a particular person to that end, so that we are reconstructed at the other end. In order to do so, you have to be first broken down into these molecules or atoms (whatever you want to call them). It sounds so painful, right? Well its not my idea, I read it somewhere. If I come up with something, that will be less painful.
Now consider the consequences of having teleportation stations.
- First we need an infrastructure that can support mass teleportation,
- Huge band width to transfer the molecular information to the other end,
- Fail safe, of course I don’t want to be lost in transaction
- Each station having multiple entry and exit points
Imagine what really happens at teleportation station – you get inside one of thousands of machines, enter your destination. The machine analyzes your vital signs, molecular structure & composition and breaks you down in to the basic elements. Stores your converted form in its hydrogen & carbon containers, and transfer the information of your reconstruction to your destination, where you are reconstructed again. Isn’t it fun? No way… it’s scary…
But never mind, we will do it for the sake of our beautiful planet earth. But I still have some unanswered questions:
- What if there is a traffic jam?
- What if all the receiving ends are busy?
- What if a VIP (like a politician or film start) is on the transfer? Will others have to wait for reconstruction?
- Do they need queuing?
- When we are reconstructed, will we have our cloths on?
