Teleportation: Morals and Ethics

[Mac Attack]

This might end up sounding very strange however recently with one of my friends I was discussing the possibility of having teleportation in the future and we divulged onto a topic about national security and ethics.

Now to give some backstory the idea was that every household would have some sort of teleportation machine, and also specific places in towns and cities would have these machines. The machines would regulate it so nobody would come at the same time and would have the possibility of being able to be turned off. Also, for households and other places you'd have the choice the accept of deny people and I'd guess there'd be some sort of friend system in place.

Now whilst we thought that be a really cool idea the controversial bit came when discussing random teleportation and the probable additional theft and crimes that could arise from this. For example if you had a kid who accidentally accepted someone to your house and this person was a robber/murder it would be an easy job and with an accomplice on the outside you could easily escape to another part of the world. Also, the idea that someone could build an unaccounted for machine and possibly lead a terrorist attack through this also came up.

We decided that there'd have to be some extra technological protections in place if ever teleportation would occur but I'm quite sure there'd be other problems that could arise.

So in the future what problems do you see with teleportation (hypothetically) and how would you fix this?

Edit: I know the title is currently messed up I'm trying to get it fixed.

 

[Poop Master Flex]

Interesting topic.

Hypothetically if a teleportation device was ever possible it comes to the question of how it would work. The way I see it is it would work 1 of 2 ways:

1) Some sort of Black hole like tunnel is created that a person could just step into and appear on the other side.

2) Break the body down to a molecular structure and rebuild on the other side.

The first thing to wonder is what would happen if the power source got cut? Is the person lost in some sort of purgatory like state (or floating around as molecules) until the power goes on? Can a person live a long amount of time in that purgatory like state?

To solve this I would do it like as so:

1) Make sure the power source is functional on both sides.
2) Backup power source in case the main power source fails.
3) If the power source of 1 side dies in mid teleport then send person to the side with working power.
4) If the power source on both sides die then send the person to a neutral location (a holding room of sorts) until the problem is rectified. When it's rectified teleportation resumes.
5) If the neutral location has no power then no teleport can be made until the neutral location is operational again. A little inconvenient but if you are teleporting people I think safety would come first. We can't have these people broken in a molecular state for a long period of time.

Other features I would have are some you've already touched on:

1) An accept/deny feature. Much like a phone call a person cannot teleport unless both sides agree to it. Maybe have a camera on both sides so the person can get a visual and audio representation of the person teleporting before they travel.

2) A person must stand on a scan pad right before teleportation starts. The scan pad is used to make sure the person being teleported isn't bringing anything dangerous or anything that could cause issues with the teleportation in question. This could also be a good security feature for if someone wanted to try teleport. If someone is bringing a weapon with them the call is automatically terminated regardless of if the other person accepts or not. If you don't pass the scan, you don't teleport.

3) Scan pad is also used to check if a person can do the teleport successfully without any health risks.

4) Multiple people cannot teleport simultaneously.

5) A hang up function at any time so if you accidentally accept someone by a finger slip you can hang up and the teleporter just sends the person back to where they started.

6) Some sort of DNA identification. This case if there is ever a ban on a person from the teleporter it can reject the teleport, or if its a criminal just send them to jail. In essence if you are black listed or a criminal you can't use it or you will just go to jail.

I'm sure there's some other stuff but off the top of my head that's all I can think of. As someone who tests hardware and software often most problems won't even be thought of until there is an alpha version of the teleporter made. It could be anything from a network crash, firmware crash, ect. It's insane how much actually goes wrong when building any type of technological hardware and I guarantee most won't think of the problem until it is seen.