We traded energy cost for time when we stopped walking, and replaced it with an animal and a cart, and again with cars, and airplanes. We save time, but the energy input is greater.
Who’s to say that teleportation wouldn’t be a trade off between 5x the energy to take a jet, but instantaneous?
Digital goods aren’t physical; teleportation is physical.
Considering that
Power = WorkDone / TimeTaken
and lets just say for this instance that WorkDone is same for the jet and for the teleporter[1], which is kinda wrong, but won’t matter anyway as you see further.
Now, someone will ask, what if WorkDone in case of teleportation is actually close to 0.
But that won’t happen, simply because the minimum value for WorkDone in that case would be equivalent to the change in gravitational potential, making it a significant amount as compared to the other limits.
Oh and digital goods do have an energy cost, btw.
because calculating work done in such a scenario is kinda hard ↩︎
Now, someone will ask, what if WorkDone in case of teleportation is actually close to 0.
Assuming the laws of physics still apply, work done is work done. You can improve efficiency, but that just means minimizing energy lost in the process. A boulder on top of a hill has X potential energy. Roll it down that hill, and that potential turns into kinetic energy that does work, like smashing a house at the base of the hill. If you move that boulder back to the top of the hill, the laws of thermodynamics say you need to put all that energy back into the boulder. Energy is always conserved. You have to do work to put the boulder back whether you use a bulldozer or a teleporter.
Even ignoring simple changes in altitude like this, you still have to consider momentum. We live on a big spinning rock. Let’s assume you live at the equator. On your daily trip around the globe you are zipping along to the East, which seems like a constant to you, but it isn’t. The direction East changes relative to the Sun depending on the time of day. At midnight, for example East is the same as the direction the Earth is moving in it’s orbit. If the Earth were to suddenly disappear, you would be flung off along the Earth’s orbit. At dawn, you are on the front of the planet in it’s orbit and East is pointing towards the sun. If the Earth disappeared now, you would be flung off towards the sun. At noon East is pointing back along Earth’s orbit and at sunset, it is pointing directly away from the Sun.
I’m rounding for convenience here. The Earth is about 24,000 miles in circumference at the equator. Since it spins once per day that means the surface and you are zipping along with it at about 1,000 miles per hour. Now, unless the warehouse teleporting your goods to you is very nearby, it will have a significantly different momentum. Let’s say the warehouse is around 6,000 miles East of you. That puts it about a quarter of the way around the globe. When it’s dawn for you, it’s already noon for them. If the warehouse teleports something to you without accounting for that difference in momentum, the results would be dramatic to say the least.
Assume it is dawn at the warehouse. That means that their momentum is towards the sun at about 1,000 miles per hour. It’s midnight for you so you are moving 1,000 miles per hour in the direction of Earth’s orbit. When your product appears at your house, it is moving towards the ground at 1,000 miles per hour when it appears. If the warehouse were instead 6,000 miles West of you, then your shipments would appear and shoot through your roof at 1,000 miles per hour.
Similar things happen if you want to teleport to points North or South of you. As you move away from the equator, your relative velocity gets smaller and smaller the closer you get to the one of the poles. Someone standing at the North pole, for example, is spinning in place very quickly compared to someone at the equator who is whipping around the globe each day. If you teleport something from the equator to a point 6,000 miles due north of you, it will appear moving West at about 500 miles per hour because you are moving around the Earth at 1,000 miles per hour while the destination is only moving 500 miles per hour. Something teleported to the North pole from the equator will appear and fling off parallel to the ground at 1,000 miles per hour.
Yeah, really a lot of components in calculation of work.
And every component can be a separate research paper.
Good that I didn’t try to articulate all of them.
Teleportation is a made up technology so the rules around it are made up. But if we set some basic rules for it that are at least somewhat ground in science fiction.
You will probably need a receiving pad for the teleported items to arrive to as the earth is constantly moving through space so you need to anchor the teleporting location, that will probably be expensive
In order to follow the first law of thermodynamics where energy has to be conserved at the minimum the energy required for moving the goods will have to be used by the transporter and probably with some amount of inefficiency so if we say it takes the same amount of energy as it currently cost but with less labor and less warehouses it can easily cost several dollars and would scale based on distance
So you would probably be responsible for paying those energy costs and the teleporter pad costs
If the deconstruction and/or reconstruction phases cost a ton of energy, it doesn’t matter if the sending phase has a high energy bill.
But since you have transmit data on each atom, you will have huge amounts of data to send.
For example, 1kg of carbon has about 5*10^25 atoms. Humans aren’t made entirely of carbon, but the rough order of magnitude will be similar. Let’s go with a 70kg human and we end up with roughly 10^27 atoms.
Let’s say we have good compression techniques and a single byte is enough to store all data of one atom. That means, we need to send about 10^28 bits of data.
In September 2023 the total bandwith of the global internet was about 1.2 Pbps, or 10^15 bits per second.
So to transmit a single human being with the speed of the entire global internet combined it would take 10^13 seconds or about 300 000 years. I think that kind of data transmission could cost a little bit of money.
Compare that to the cost of shipping 70kg of human being anywhere on the planet. By plane, it will cost in the order of a few thousand Euros and it will take one day, two at most, not 300 000 years.
Again, the 1kg of carbon was only used to come up with the rough amount of atoms for 1kg of weight.
Last I checked, humans, same as most other things, don’t just consist of pure carbon. Also, you need to include position data as well, so even in our 1kg of carbon no two atoms are exactly the same since no two atoms are at the same exact position and same exact rotation. And no two atoms are bonded to the same exact atoms.
If you send just the data of “dump 1kg of carbon atoms there”, you will turn a diamond into carbon dust when teleporting it. I don’t want to see the result of what happens if you teleport a human that way.
And you actually don’t only have to take the atomic properties into consideration but also the subatomic ones. The 1 byte per atom was already purpousely a ridiculously low guess. It’s much more likely you need data in the order of megabytes per atom.
Sci fi makes teleportation look easy. Press a button, disappear here, reappear there.
In reality, every single component of teleportation is so hard that we don’t even have a clue how this could theoretically be done with future tech. We don’t have a way to scan anything (let alone a human being) with nearly the level of detail that we’d need. We don’t have a way to deconstruct the item that is supposed to be sent. We have neither a way to store nor to send the enormous amounts of data required. And we have no concept of a clue how to do the reconstruction.
Just to visualize this a bit better: it will be much, much easier to clone objects than to teleport them, because teleporting is cloning plus deconstruction.
So if you understand that creating objects out of thin air is resource-intensive, then that necessarily means that teleportation will be even more difficult and expensive than just cloning objects.
Not necessarily. Still takes energy to move it. Depending on the energy required, could still have a cost
The cost will be comparatively less, and negligible given that digital goods don’t have “energy” fees (and never had, btw)
You can’t possibly know that. What if moving someone instantaneously costs the same amount of energy as moving it through 3d space?
Why?
We traded energy cost for time when we stopped walking, and replaced it with an animal and a cart, and again with cars, and airplanes. We save time, but the energy input is greater.
Who’s to say that teleportation wouldn’t be a trade off between 5x the energy to take a jet, but instantaneous?
Digital goods aren’t physical; teleportation is physical.
Considering that
Power = WorkDone / TimeTaken
and lets just say for this instance that WorkDone is same for the jet and for the teleporter[1], which is kinda wrong, but won’t matter anyway as you see further.
Then,
Powerteleporter = Powerjet × TimeTakenjet / TimeTakenteleporter
then going with “instantaneous”
With limit(TimeTakenteleporter ⟶ 0)
Powerteleporter ⟶ ∞
Now, someone will ask, what if WorkDone in case of teleportation is actually close to 0.
But that won’t happen, simply because the minimum value for WorkDone in that case would be equivalent to the change in gravitational potential, making it a significant amount as compared to the other limits.
Oh and digital goods do have an energy cost, btw.
because calculating work done in such a scenario is kinda hard ↩︎
Assuming the laws of physics still apply, work done is work done. You can improve efficiency, but that just means minimizing energy lost in the process. A boulder on top of a hill has X potential energy. Roll it down that hill, and that potential turns into kinetic energy that does work, like smashing a house at the base of the hill. If you move that boulder back to the top of the hill, the laws of thermodynamics say you need to put all that energy back into the boulder. Energy is always conserved. You have to do work to put the boulder back whether you use a bulldozer or a teleporter.
Even ignoring simple changes in altitude like this, you still have to consider momentum. We live on a big spinning rock. Let’s assume you live at the equator. On your daily trip around the globe you are zipping along to the East, which seems like a constant to you, but it isn’t. The direction East changes relative to the Sun depending on the time of day. At midnight, for example East is the same as the direction the Earth is moving in it’s orbit. If the Earth were to suddenly disappear, you would be flung off along the Earth’s orbit. At dawn, you are on the front of the planet in it’s orbit and East is pointing towards the sun. If the Earth disappeared now, you would be flung off towards the sun. At noon East is pointing back along Earth’s orbit and at sunset, it is pointing directly away from the Sun.
I’m rounding for convenience here. The Earth is about 24,000 miles in circumference at the equator. Since it spins once per day that means the surface and you are zipping along with it at about 1,000 miles per hour. Now, unless the warehouse teleporting your goods to you is very nearby, it will have a significantly different momentum. Let’s say the warehouse is around 6,000 miles East of you. That puts it about a quarter of the way around the globe. When it’s dawn for you, it’s already noon for them. If the warehouse teleports something to you without accounting for that difference in momentum, the results would be dramatic to say the least.
Assume it is dawn at the warehouse. That means that their momentum is towards the sun at about 1,000 miles per hour. It’s midnight for you so you are moving 1,000 miles per hour in the direction of Earth’s orbit. When your product appears at your house, it is moving towards the ground at 1,000 miles per hour when it appears. If the warehouse were instead 6,000 miles West of you, then your shipments would appear and shoot through your roof at 1,000 miles per hour.
Similar things happen if you want to teleport to points North or South of you. As you move away from the equator, your relative velocity gets smaller and smaller the closer you get to the one of the poles. Someone standing at the North pole, for example, is spinning in place very quickly compared to someone at the equator who is whipping around the globe each day. If you teleport something from the equator to a point 6,000 miles due north of you, it will appear moving West at about 500 miles per hour because you are moving around the Earth at 1,000 miles per hour while the destination is only moving 500 miles per hour. Something teleported to the North pole from the equator will appear and fling off parallel to the ground at 1,000 miles per hour.
Yeah, really a lot of components in calculation of work.
And every component can be a separate research paper.
Good that I didn’t try to articulate all of them.
Teleportation is a made up technology so the rules around it are made up. But if we set some basic rules for it that are at least somewhat ground in science fiction.
You will probably need a receiving pad for the teleported items to arrive to as the earth is constantly moving through space so you need to anchor the teleporting location, that will probably be expensive
In order to follow the first law of thermodynamics where energy has to be conserved at the minimum the energy required for moving the goods will have to be used by the transporter and probably with some amount of inefficiency so if we say it takes the same amount of energy as it currently cost but with less labor and less warehouses it can easily cost several dollars and would scale based on distance
So you would probably be responsible for paying those energy costs and the teleporter pad costs
This really depends.
Teleportation consists of three main phases:
If the deconstruction and/or reconstruction phases cost a ton of energy, it doesn’t matter if the sending phase has a high energy bill.
But since you have transmit data on each atom, you will have huge amounts of data to send.
For example, 1kg of carbon has about 5*10^25 atoms. Humans aren’t made entirely of carbon, but the rough order of magnitude will be similar. Let’s go with a 70kg human and we end up with roughly 10^27 atoms.
Let’s say we have good compression techniques and a single byte is enough to store all data of one atom. That means, we need to send about 10^28 bits of data.
In September 2023 the total bandwith of the global internet was about 1.2 Pbps, or 10^15 bits per second.
So to transmit a single human being with the speed of the entire global internet combined it would take 10^13 seconds or about 300 000 years. I think that kind of data transmission could cost a little bit of money.
Compare that to the cost of shipping 70kg of human being anywhere on the planet. By plane, it will cost in the order of a few thousand Euros and it will take one day, two at most, not 300 000 years.
Who’s to say compression wouldn’t exist, e.g. this is a 1kg of carbon. All of their atoms are exactly the same. This doesn’t require so much energy.
Again, the 1kg of carbon was only used to come up with the rough amount of atoms for 1kg of weight.
Last I checked, humans, same as most other things, don’t just consist of pure carbon. Also, you need to include position data as well, so even in our 1kg of carbon no two atoms are exactly the same since no two atoms are at the same exact position and same exact rotation. And no two atoms are bonded to the same exact atoms.
If you send just the data of “dump 1kg of carbon atoms there”, you will turn a diamond into carbon dust when teleporting it. I don’t want to see the result of what happens if you teleport a human that way.
And you actually don’t only have to take the atomic properties into consideration but also the subatomic ones. The 1 byte per atom was already purpousely a ridiculously low guess. It’s much more likely you need data in the order of megabytes per atom.
Sci fi makes teleportation look easy. Press a button, disappear here, reappear there.
In reality, every single component of teleportation is so hard that we don’t even have a clue how this could theoretically be done with future tech. We don’t have a way to scan anything (let alone a human being) with nearly the level of detail that we’d need. We don’t have a way to deconstruct the item that is supposed to be sent. We have neither a way to store nor to send the enormous amounts of data required. And we have no concept of a clue how to do the reconstruction.
Just to visualize this a bit better: it will be much, much easier to clone objects than to teleport them, because teleporting is cloning plus deconstruction.
So if you understand that creating objects out of thin air is resource-intensive, then that necessarily means that teleportation will be even more difficult and expensive than just cloning objects.