Teleportation and Migration: a thought experiment from year 3024

May 31, 2024 by mtxvp

Let's put aside a question whether teleportation is possible and imagine it has been about for about 500 years since it was invented. All the kinks were ironed out and nowadays it's an unsurprising mainstream technology, similar to a cell phone or a car, widely accessible to the public and easy to operate.

This is an imaginary layman tour into the world that may or may not have logical controversies, with brief focus on effects of teleportation on migration between various jurisdiction as compared to the world of 2024.

Teleportation defintion

We start with two types of physical objects - a box of candies (C) and a person (P). Both have volume and mass that is relatively constant in the span of few hours.

One possible way of moving a physical object from location A to location B is by means of applying some internal or external force to it: push it, pick it up, slither, walk etc. It will take some effort (or energy) and some non-zero time for the movement to happen. From our experience we know that if we don't use any additional device, taking box of candies from store to my house will take approximately 20 minutes by foot.

Another possibility is using a vehicle. if there is no traffic, or stop signs I can do the same trip one way in 2 minutes - about 10 times faster. Nothing really surprising so far. We are not asking any weird questions if I am still the same person after walking out of the car in my garage, as the one that sat in the car near the store.

Now imagine there is this device - "telegate", that is installed in every store. It looks like a door with a tablet (not like TARDIS, more like an unassuming covered opening in a wall) that can transport any physical object to any other location on earth within 1 second. Maybe it is actually moving that fast without smashing the person and precious candies to atoms due to enormous acceleration, maybe it uses some quasi-protonic-z-transformation of space time - leaving the details to boffins to figure out. The fact is that it takes no more than a second to reach any other location within 50,000km. It may take longer to go from here to Mars, I don't care. All I care is about Earth at this point.

So here you go. The definition of teleportation for our simple down-to-earth purposes: moving a physical object from location A to B within 50,000km in under 1 second, while leaving object fully intact and unequivocally positioned in the new location, while absent from original location.

It’s permissible for the fur to be gently ruffled by the wind during transit.

Brief history of teleportation

The mathematical theory underpinning teleportation, even within relatively short distances of a few kilometers, revealed the necessity for energy amounts that were unattainable through conventional means at the time. While thoroughly developed, it had to be shelved for 300 years waiting for sufficient energy source. Since the theory of teleportation showed means of tranporting physical object between two locations without any destructive changes or transformations, it was shown in computer simulations to be completely safe for being used on living organisms.

First practical teleportation experiments were performed after development of methods to safely capture large amounts of energy from splitting the atoms of a newly discovered element. This element was found in one of the asteroids hitting remote areas of Sahara. While initially thought to be extremely rare and prohibitevly expensive to use, subsequent discoveries of large deposits of this element in upcoming years on Mars and other planets allowed to bring the costs of commercial implementation to average consumer levels.

Not dissimilar to space exploration, multiple simoultaneous experiments were performed in different research labs across the globe. Experiments showed possibility of moving various inanimate objects, animals and finally number of human volunteers keen to explore this new technology. Early on safety technology was developed to prevent teleportation at any stage if there was any kind of error appeared during the process by gently pushing out the object back to it's source.

Teleportation implementation

Physical device - "telegate":
- A telegate of arbitrary size that can be installed anywhere - in your backyard, in the park, in the nearby mall parking
- Design and implementation is open source, so anyone can build one similar to putting together a drawer or a computer
- All the necessary parts are available from the nearby hardware or electronics stores
- There are pre-built options available with various designs

Energy consumption:
- Device is operated by fuel cells that capture the released energy from splitting the atoms of rare-earth element.

Costs:
- Buying or putting together one is not as cheap as buying milk, but not as expensive as building a house - average middle class person can afford having one at home, there are also telegates available in places like public library
- Similar to a vehicle, telegate device needs to be refueled after certain amount of usage. The further distances it communicates to, the more fuel it uses - causing to replace them sooner. Again stepping aside technical details, assume the fuel cells are available commercially for affordable prices.

Operation:
- Every owner of telegate has to obtain a licence from local Teleportation Registration Office
- Office registers the location of the defice in a global registry and assigning it a TelegateID
- A tablet attached to the telegate allowing to specify the destination telegate by finding it on the map or by entering TelegateID.
- Telegate at the specified location may or may not be available to connect - caller can leave a message about the intended time to visit
- Movement between two telegates is easy to detect and interrupt using specialized hardware. When interruption happens the safety circuit inside telegate safely pushes the object or person back out at the source.

Moving between countries in 2024

Depending on politicial definition there are currently about 200 countries in the world. Country governments generally frown upon uncontrolled movement of people or goods from one to another.

Leaving aside the reasons behind it, there are numerous measures that government of each country can apply to enforce control over their border:
- Deny the entry completely. Nothing much you can do about it
- Impose a tariff on physical goods. Unless the fee is paid, the goods cannot enter the country will remain in border storage facility.
- Carry an internationally recognized piece of identification - usually a passport.
- Require a valid visa to enter. The unfortunate sould who needs to obtain one, usually requires to jump through the hoops of red tape to obtain bunch of affirmative papers and submit them to the embassy along with stack of applications. In some cases they need to participate in additional "interview" ceremony, convincing the person in the window that they are not a flight risk.
- Subsequently demonstrate to a person on the physical or logical border that they have the right to enter the country of destination.
- Monitor entry or exit via such means as immigration stamps

As you can imagine, unless you are in Schengen area going from France to Germany, you will have various degrees of headache and scrutiny when traveling between countries for no obvious reason for an average travelling person trying to bring box of candies to their friend.

Effect of teleportation on transportation business

What transportation business? We vaguely remember names like FedEx and Air France. FedEx was one of these weird companies that was taking lots of money to "ship" (another anachronism) my box of candies to my friend in Europe within 2 weeks (!). Air France was even more expensive, and with fairly high probability would move me from Toronto to Paris in about 9h, not counting all the waiting to load/unload to/frome those tubes with wings. So much time and money wasted!

So yeah, fortunately there is no such industry anymore.

Effect of teleportation on migration

There are number of potential obstacles for teleportation between different countries. Different countries historically have developed different telegate standards that are incompatible with each other. While compatible teleportation device can be theoretically be smuggled into a country, the movement between two telegates is easy to detect and prevent by the border officials, to get unregistered telegate promptly located and shut down.

Since teleportation is fully trackable and recorded in real time, anyone without proper identification can be immediately send back to their original telegate. Volume of transported people and goods can be always adjusted at the destination telegate, based staff availability.

The "teleportation" companies, that were left after collapse and massive merger of former "transportation" companies operate licenced commercial telegate branches between different countries. Before entering company's telegate all the similar procedures apply, as there were before entering say commercial aircrafts of the past. Do you have visa? Is your passport valid?

Conclusion

Is teleportation going to collapse the world? I don't think so. It will certainly can bring havoc to one or more industries, but society is not going to descend to anarchy or chaos and will largely remain the same - albeit words "jetlag" and "layover" remain unused for centuries.