SF: matter transmitters
TRX
April 20, 2012
60:
Airports are already major disease vectors. Increasing the number of travelers
would aggravate the problem.
One of the older SF writers managed a novel on that very thing, but it wasn't a very good story, and my mind refuses to cough up the author or title.
Assuming you could stairstep transits to handle the momentum problem in a practical way, and that costs aren't excessive, you'd probably wind up with a new cargo container size compatible with the transmitter, and you'd do to the whole world's cargo transportation industry what the original cargo container did to the British shipping industry in the 1960s.
Depending on the cost of operating the portal, the conservation of momentum might work *for* you. A stream of room-sized chunks of something heavy would make a nice weapon.
Or... grab the incoming cargo with arrester cables like an aircraft carrier, and use them to drive turbines to make power or pump water.
Or... the Earth spins. At any given time any portal near the equator is pointing *somewhere* along the ecliptic. Spread a dozen portals around the equator and you could flip chunks of seawater out to a spacecraft, something like an Orion system of intermittent propulsion. Given that your water/air mass incoming would expand in vacuum, you could bleed off pressure for some minor vector correction. For extra zip, drop the transmitter part down in one of the deeper parts of the ocean. You still have to get your spacecraft up there, but once in orbit you have an essentially unlimited amount of low- velocity reaction mass.
TRX
April 20, 2012
118:
@76:
One thing I don't think anyone's mentioned yet: the most likely players to get
this whole thing started are governments.
--
They'd have the capital... but read up on the history of the various attempts
to build a tunnel under the English Channel. Every time someone started
getting money together, the whacktards would go all paranoid about Ye Virgin
Isle being invaded by armies from France, Germany, or whatever country was the
rabble-rouser poster child at the time. Apparently, being able to flood the
tunnel and pump it out later wasn't good enough to keep England secure from
the various wogs.
Public (and government, and corporate, and pressure group) opinion can be a powerful and frightening thing...
TRX
April 20, 2012
121:
@87:
As mentioned in the Niven piece someone linked to, the output booth has to
have nothing in it to start with, so whoever's manufacturing vacuum pumps
makes money hand-over fist.
--
Just flush the gate to the one you have up in vacuum somewhere.
Hmm, there are still widespread commercial applications for vacuum...
TRX
April 20, 2012
127:
@113:
we do get a genuine teleport gateway of the Stargate kind as opposed to the
Star Trek scan, dissolve, transmit and rebuild kind.
--
Charlie didn't specify, so I assumed something like the Stargate "wormhole"
method, where there is only ever one object, which is somehow translated into
a different spatial position.
BTW, on at least four episodes of Stargate, the gate worked by scanning objects and sending a data stream to the destination gate, which somehow built copies. It was a major continuity problem.
[I watched the DVD set; it was amazing how many alien planets looks like the woods around Vancouver, as opposed to a quarry in Wales.]
TRX
April 20, 2012
130:
@109:
Even if FedEx and UPS figure out early on that they need to invest in
transports and roll them into the chain as fast as possible
--
And which non-governmental organization could go on a spending spree at only
40m per gate?
"Tired of airport hassle? Train too slow? Travel by Amazon.com!"
There'd probably be an Amazon terminal within easy travel distance of most people. After all, the first thing they'd do is start dropping gates everywhere they could, so they could take in all that potential profit they're pissing away on Fedex, UPS, et.al. And they wouldn't even need their own warehouses if they put gates in the warehouses of their larger suppliers.
TRX
April 20, 2012
133:
@129:
Cities tend to spread east-west as that's energetically easier. Short-haul
transportation tends to go further in the north-south directions as a
result.
--
Of course, if you're translating from one latitude to the equivalent latitude
in the other hemisphere your velocities are the same, so there's no momentum
problem.
Unfortunately, it might work for a slice of the east coast of North America and the west coast of South America, and northern and southern portions of South America and Africa. Not only is most of the land on one side of the planet, the bulk of it is in the northern part. So maybe it's not such a big deal.
TRX
April 20, 2012
135:
If a gate is only 40m - doesn't matter if it's pounds or dollars - given how
much some buildings cost, the cost is low enough that, say, your child's
elementary school could have one of its own.
Sound crazy? Los Angeles' RFK Community School cost US$578m, Ed Roybal Learning Center cost $377m, and #9 Visual & Performing Arts High School was $232m. Those are public schools, not Ivy League colleges.
That also seems to be in the ballpark price range for new office buildings and shopping malls.
TRX
April 20, 2012
138:
@132:
Maybe you don't have to match velocities.
--
For some reason I was thinking of braking the load on the receiving end, but
you could accelerate it on the sending end just as easily.
A 3g catapult launch into an empty box might be hard on the nerves. Best not put any windows in the transport pod...
You'd also have to deal with the possibility of having the receiving gate go offline between launch and translation. A 1,400mph impact for some long- distance cargo might get ugly.
TRX
April 20, 2012
140:
@137:
Same magnitudes but with different signs. Assuming the center of the earth as
the reference point.
--
opposite latitude = north/south, not east/west
Think Spain vs. Central Africa.
TRX
April 21, 2012
194:
@183:
how do you secure the destination to make sure that a malicious agent doesn't
change your destination to the Marianas Trench?
--
That assumes the booths are addressable. Different use patterns would occur if
the booths could only communicate with one other booth; say they were made in
matching pairs.
You'd be back to something like a railroad/airport terminal, and a lot of freight and passenger handling and timetables to make the connections.
It would still be very useful, but not nearly as handy.
TRX
April 22, 2012
216:
Where I live, the primary means of travel is by automobile. Distances are too
great to walk (even if there were sidewalks, and it's unlawful to walk on the
shoulder or road) or bicycle (same thing).
The flip side is, anywhere you want to go, there's a road to it. Anywhere there's not a road is a place where you bring your gear and strike out cross- country, assuming the dirt bikes and 4-wheelers haven't already blazed trails for you.
Many urban areas are technically accessible by car, but practically by point- to-point "wormholes." You get on the bus, the train, the elevated railway, or the subway, vanish from the road system, and reappear somewhere else, in a different neighborhood or even a different city. City dwellers are (I expect) used to thinking in terms of terms of routes and stops. One block to the U- Bahn, a short ride, and two more blocks to your destination is "closer" than somewhere only a mile away if the bus connections aren't optimal, etc. So they probably don't think of the transit system in relation to some physical location. At least, I don't think I would.
Assuming this, adding transfer booths would just add another set of routes and points to the ones that are already there.
Just musing... I've never actually seen a subway, though I saw a commuter train once when near DC.
TRX
April 22, 2012
247:
@232:
Over the longer term (10-50 years) this is going to have a profoundly
corrosive effect on national governments that define citizenship by territory
rather than by nativity.
--
Let, oh, the island of Jersey offer Jersey citizenship to anyone who would pay
a modest tax or annual fee for the privilege of being a Jersey citizen. You
could wind up with a nation whose majority of residents had never set foot on
their "native" land.
Your GNP is no longer tied to the physical aspect of being a rock in the middle of an ocean; you don't need "lebensraum" for your population, and all of your production can be Not In My Back Yard. So the "nation" becomes a group of voluntarily affiliated citizens, not a geographic area.
Of course, once it was shown to work, other nations might offer the same deal, leading to citizens choosing their country by what their country could do for them, not what they could do for their country.
All it would take is *one* EU nation to spread its citizenship around, and you might wind up with, say, 200 million profitable, tax-paying citizens of, oh, Finland or Luxembourg, which would make EU power politics... interesting.
TRX
April 22, 2012
248:
@235:
Imagine a future Apple Store. The storefront is a glassy cube with a produce
display surrounding ... a teleport.
---
Following that train of thought... you only need *one* Apple Store. It would
be cheaper to drop a booth into an area that had a high enough customer
density than it would be to build another store.
For that matter, you'd only need one of a lot of types of businesses, at least as long as they could be effectively managed at whatever size they needed to be.
Side effect: with only one store, any problem affects all your business, simultaneously.
TRX
April 22, 2012
249:
Slashdot Effect: pursuant to some news story or tweet, half a million incoming
visitors overwhelm local resources. Food stockpiles are depleted and can't be
renewed while the booths are jammed up with incoming people; accomodations
filled up long ago, people are crapping in the bushes because the sewer system
gave up a few hundred thousand flushes ago.
Though people could flick in at a whim, flicking them back *out* takes organization, and probably a lot more time to set up than incoming. You have a massive footballer-style scrum of people who want to leave jamming the gate terminus, and one local constable trying not to get crushed.
TRX
April 22, 2012
269:
@261:
That will tend to drive super-metropolitan development.
--
I disagree. Shortly after gate technology becomes available at 40m a pop,
cities are stone dead.
Cities exist because of travel time. When a gate is instantaneous, the only real travel factor is the distance between gates. There's no reason you couldn't work at a brokerage in London, hit the pub in Yucatan, visit your Mum in Loch Dubh, and sleep in your survivalist fortress in Montana. Because the pub in Yucatan is, depending on gate availability, closer than the one across town, and Montana is closer than the London suburbs. Sure, you could gate from the City to Milton Keynes, but who would live there when they could have a nice place in Spain for 1/3 the price?
TRX
April 22, 2012
271:
@252:
3) I've just realised that using "jaunting" to refer to teleportation has
placed me in time and space among SF fandom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tomorrow_People :-)
---
"Jaunte" from Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination." A researcher named
Jaunte developed a method of personal teleportation using mental powers. As
long as you could visualize the proper coordinates, you could jaunte anywhere
with no hardware needed.
Parts of the plotline involve people who can't jaunte (cripples, in their society), and security issues (when anyone can jaunte inside your sealed vault, the only practical defense is "security through obscurity."
It's considered one of the classics of SF, and deserves the label as far as I'm concerned.
TRX
April 22, 2012
272:
@270:
---
"Local" depends on travel time, not physical location.
Where I live, if you ask someone "How far is it to Wrightsville?" They'll reply "About an hour and a half," not how many miles away it is.
If you live a block from a gate, a restaurant near a gate in Islamabad is more "local" to you than a similar restaurant ten blocks away.
TRX
April 23, 2012
313:
@280:
I can't begin to imagine how this would change military base design,
---
J.E.B. Stuart famously said that "Victory goes to the one who gets there
firstest with the mostest." I was three volumes into Churchill's history of
WWII when I realized most of his discussion was about logistics. My brother
recently retired from the USAF; his career field was basically "tactical
logistics." And, depending on whose story you accept, the internet evolved
from a system developed for the US Army to communicate with its suppliers. It
takes a *lot* of people to support a single combat soldier, aircraft, or
armored vehicle, and most of those are involved in logistics - fuel, parts,
weapons, food, all have to arrive at the right place at the right time.
Previous comments have already mentioned supplying submarines or dropping portable gates onto the battlefield, but as you've pointed out, gates would dramatically affect the support infrastructure. Logistics are a big chunk of military expenditure; not only are gates dirt cheap (by military standards) as well as secure and instantaneous, they also mean a big chunk of the support infrastructure just... goes away. You're talking about a significant savings in money once a reasonable gate network is in place, enough to buy new shiny toys instead of paying for truck drivers, fork lift operators, etc.
TRX
April 23, 2012
314:
@282:
Splintering - people sharing an interest can very easily live together
--
In the USA, there are already entire communities centered around golf courses,
airstrips, or race tracks, which are common property maintained by residence
fees. Of course, there have long been communities based around art, common
religious practices, senior citizens, etc.
Back in the '60s Mack Reynolds postulated urban communities (skyscraper/habitats) centered around common interests - cooking, music, etc.
TRX
April 23, 2012
315:
@300:
I wonder how long it will take for the momentum problem to be solved?
---
You're moving gate to gate; your motion relative to the sending gate is zero.
Since you're not actually moving through the intervening space, your motion
relative to the receiving gate should also be zero, the way I look at it.
If you're moving *only* in relation to the sending gate, then you'd have to account for momentum.
So whether you'd worry about momentum would depend on whether the gates were relative to each other, or the receiving gate was just a convenient site for the cargo to wind up.
As a minor aside, previous discussion mentioned either wormholes or data transmission as possible methods. Modern physics seems to be trending toward looking at particles with information theory. If I remember right, that was the mcguffin used in wossname's "Moving Mars". Instead of boring a hole in spacetime or destructively scanning someone, you just persuade all their component subatomic particles that they're really "over there" instead of "right here."
TRX
April 24, 2012
341:
> Yes, I'm trying to make them largely
> useless for military purposes.
Ain't gonna happen. Perhaps 3/4 of any military is logistics. Anything that benefits logistics directly benefits military operations, even if it just allows quickly shifting cargo point-to-point on the home front.
Consider the Lend-Lease operations during WWII, for example. Or supplying Rabaul or Malta during their seiges. Or just keeping British forces supplied in Afghanistan now.
You can try to make your gates useless for delivering bombs, but that's only a small part of military operations.
> Because the military applications
> are, in the final analysis, much less
> interesting than the civilian ones.)
Maybe less interesting, but highly relevant, unless you don't think any other government, religion, or social system could be worse than the one you live under now. The military are like network administrators; just useless parasites until things go pear-shaped.