I was lucky enough to grow up in an age when people weren’t as worried about safety. Especially transportation safety. That’s why:
- I remember the brief glorious moment of flight when jumping an old beater car over a railway crossing, followed by the thud when the engine falls out on touchdown;
- I know the exact sound of a windscreen and face collision after an abrupt stop;
- I know how fast a VW Beetle has to take a corner before the kid riding the running board flies off;
- I can boast of walking four miles through a blizzard after breaking four ribs in a mid-winter car wreck.
It was a glorious time to be alive.
Science fiction offers even more exotic transportation choices—choices that even I would avoid. Here are six of them.
The Orion Drive
Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise (1983) is a tale of conflict between technological exuberance (on the part of the Northwest Union) and technological prudence (on the part of the conservationist Maurai). The Northwest Union is planning to use what advocates might call “externally pulsed plasma propulsion” and skeptics might call “riding a series of small nuclear explosions from which your pusher plate may or may not protect you.” The Orion drive was an actual proposal, the brainchild of Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson. It offered a rare combination of high Delta-v and high acceleration at the cost of, well, pretty much everything implied by “a series of small nuclear explosions.”
Advocates of Project Orion were sure that the engineering challenges were surmountable, but since the Partial Test Ban in 1963 effectively doomed efforts to build one, we will never know. We can only guess. All I know is that I wouldn’t ride a spaceship where the barrier between me and a nuclear detonation, even a very small one, was an ablative plate assembled by the lowest bidder1.
Matter-to-Energy Conversion
Steve Gallacci’s Albedo: Birthright (1985) is a sequel to his mil-SF comic, Albedo: Erma Felda: EDF. It is set in a time when civilization was recovering from an interstellar dark age. Its characters sometimes gain possession of imperfectly understood ancient technology. Ancient starships seem to offer renewed access to the stars but…there is a catch. The ships are powered by total conversion of matter to energy. Failure modes include turning all matter in contact with the power plant into energy. This is bad enough if the starship is still in deep space; it’s worse if it’s on a planet at the time2.
Hyperspace
John E. Stith’s Redshift Rendezvous (1990) features journeys through a hyperspace where the speed of light is only ten meters a second. While this does allow space travel (as well as Mr Tomkins-style physics lectures), I don’t think it would be a good idea. At least not for meatsack me—my biochemistry has been honed by billions of years of evolution in an environment in which the speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second. I am not at all convinced that said biochemistry would keep functioning if you changed a fundamental physical constant.
Subatomic Particle Energy
Bob Shaw’s A Wreath of Stars (1976) and Gregory Benford’s The Stars in Shroud (1978) use similar conceits, if for rather different purposes. In Wreath, conversion from regular matter to anti-neutrinos3 affords its protagonist escape from an irate dictator. He finds himself in an intangible world (which is doomed, so it wasn’t much of an escape). In the Benford novel, conversion to tachyons allows faster than light travel. In addition to issues I will discuss in a later essay, both of these technologies have the same apparent drawback, namely: unless the process is absolutely instant (I don’t see how it could be) this would probably shear all the complex molecules and chemical structures in one’s meatsack body, as different bits are converted at slightly different times. Do not want to be converted to mush, fog, or plasma. No thanks.
One-Way Teleporters
Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s All The Colors of Darkness (1963) and Harry Harrison’s One Step From Earth (1970) both use teleportation devices whose portals are one-way only. When I was young, I worried about what might happen to molecular bonds as one passed through a one-way barrier that was impervious to forces in the other direction. Later in life I decided that these were event horizons and might permit safe transit. What kills you in a black hole isn’t the event horizon but the tides and the singularity. BUT…what happens to someone halfway through one of these if the person behind them becomes impatient, grabs the traveller by their backpack, and yanks them backwards? What happens if you trip while partway through? (Nothing good, is my guess.)
Transporters
Finally, I am leery of any teleportation system that depends on destructive scanning and distant replication; examples range from Anderson’s The Enemy Stars (1958) to some versions of Star Trek. Very small errors could result in unpleasant consequences, as demonstrated in that unimpeachable historical document, Galaxy Quest:
There are other problems with this mode of transport. Consult your friendly internet for a whole lot of angry argument re: this matter.
This segues into a worry I had as a six-year-old: does identity survive when every atom of one’s body is replaced? This occupied my thoughts quite a lot in 1967 and 1968, as my seventh birthday was approaching. My parents had once mentioned that all the atoms in one’s body were replaced every seven years. They neglected to add that this was a continual, gradual process4. I was under the impression that it would happen all at once on my seventh birthday. I wasn’t at all sure I’d still be me afterward. Although I could see why the duplicate might think it was.
Now, I think continuity of identity over the years is merely comforting illusion—still, I am not stepping into a zap-and-duplicate teleporter. But don’t let me stop you.
Buy the Book
Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction
1: Merely declining to use the device wouldn’t necessarily protect you from it. Externalities of the Orion Drive included non-zero death rates from fallout and the chance that one could fry satellites in orbit. But of course in those days, there was no globe-spanning satellite network. Most of the radioactive debris from higher altitude detonations would end up in Canada and other polar latitudes, where nobody associated with the project lived. An acceptable cost.
2: Murray Leinster’s much earlier Proxima had a very similar arrangement and an actual, on-stage, demonstration of the failure mode.
3: Bob Shaw was not a hard-SF author.
4: Similar confusion reigned when my parents relayed to me the sad news the family cat had been run over by teenagers. I am very, very literal-minded. I was not told that the teenagers were riding in a car at the time.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
Do you technically die when using a transporter? Let’s say the soul is real and there’s an afterlife. If you use a transporter, do you die and your soul moves on to the afterlife? Does your replacement at the destination have it’s own soul? Was it instantly created?
Like a human fax machine?
Not really? Would you like to see my human fax machine?
Not really?
Couldn’t resist.
Oh, here we go. Cue the the edgy “transporters are murder machines” crowd. No, just no.
Hill hopping. In a 73 Pontiac Grand Am with a 400 cubic inch V-8. And somewhat questionable brakes. While not realizing there was a car stopped on the other side of the hill. Fortunately the brakes worked that time. Later, for some reason, a head gasket blew. Most of the local hills that could be hopped have been somewhat tamed by the highway department.
“Footfall” by Niven and Pournelle has an Orion powered spaceship launching from Puget Sound.
” the family cat had been run over by teenagers.”
Rather the opposite happened to me this summer. I was home in Canada, my dog was still in the UK. My dog sitter texted me and said “some guy” had run over my dog in the park. Then talked as if nothing significant had happened. I had to guess that he didn’t really mean run over by a car, as they shouldn’t be in the park. So, I waited until morning before asking “WTF? Run over…how?”
And no, she wasn’t hurt.
The fine structure constant is proportional to e^2/c (where e is the fundamental electric charge). If you are depressing only c, electromagnetism gets stronger with unknown but presumably large effects on chemistry as a whole as electrons now pull at each other much harder.
(And what about the protons in the nucleus? Did you just make electomagnetic repulsion between them stronger than the strong force holding the whole thing together?)
3: I think one can argue either side of the transporters = murder machines perfectly validly. What counts as sufficient continuity varies from person to person.
See also Wil McCarthy’s Fax machines, which also allow editing on the fly. Which I guess is one way to avoid qualms about whether or not the version at the far end is the same as the one who went in: just edit those out.
I _think_ Linda Nagata’s Vast had a side plot about someone who edited certain qualms out of their copies without informing them they’d been edited. The original died, leaving no hint the duplicates were … not quite faithful to the original.
“Think Like A Dinosaur” transporters. If anything goes wrong …
And isn’t it about time someone wrote a novel or story called “A Nicoll Event”?
duplicate comment/throw out airlock
@9
Sure it wasn’t a a transporter reflection in an ion storm?
My brain keeps reading your article using the voice of Reverend Mord (from The Hidden Almanac). This is intermittently hilarious. I suspect that the Reverend would have about the same opinion of these technologies as you do.
I think the best coverage of the identity issue with teleports in a work of fiction is still the one in Rogue Moon by Budrys. The problems with out-of-phase scanning are briefly touched on and far too easily solved in the later stages of the Venus Equilateral series, which also make matter duplicators a perpetual motion machine (you can duplicate a charged battery, and use it to run the duplicator while you do it again.)
Langford’s The Space Eater had two distant locations connected by a wormhole, meaning matter could get from A to B without the whole disintegration/reintegration step. If only the hole through which the travellers were crammed was wider than an inch.
Stith handwaved this with a “lifebelt” that generated a field around your body that kept it working. From the passenger safety briefing:
This replaces the original concern with ones like “how dependable is this gadget, which was probably built by the lowest bidder” and “how secure is the protocol that the crew’s lifebelt disablers uses” and “how long can I actually survive while it’s turned off or if the battery dies”.
In several of Cordwainer Smith’s stories, interstellar travel is for the most part highly dangerous both physically and mentally for anybody who’s not in hibernation. In “Scanners Live in Vain,” spacecraft pilots (Scanners) have to become cyborgs and have their sensory apparatus (senses of taste, smell, touch) disabled so they can withstand the “pain” of space travel. In “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul,” spacecraft pilots are kept alive through machines that accelerate their metabolism so they end the voyage prematurely aged. In “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” spacecraft are menaced by extradimensional creatures (“Dragons”) that cause insanity, and can only be fought by “pinlighters” (telepaths in mental link with cats) who are at constant risk of succumbing themselves. In “The Burning of the Brain,” spacecraft captains are in mental link with their ships; in the story, a malfunction destroys the return program and the captain has to re-create it by connecting his brain directly to the ship, which ends up destroying his intellect. There are probably other examples, but those are the ones I can think of offhand.
Just to interject another example of the Orion drive. This makes an appearance in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem where the contact vessel works on this principle.
@16 Anthem was such a great novel and one that more people should know about. Hard core philosophy mixed with awesome science fiction. Great stuff. –
On the star trek transporters I always thought they sent your molecules after breaking you down to them to the location of transport rather than destroying you and recreating you – this being the difference in the star trek transporters and the classic twilight zone episode dealing with transporters.
I think Trek transporters work however the plot of the week requires them to work.
One other note on the Orion drive. When you are speeding up you are moving away from the blasts. When you have to slow down, you turn the ship around and now you are plowing into the blasts. That shield/plate better be very good at deflecting all that nuclear waste away from your ship.
There was a series of shorts in Analog in the 80s; I don’t remember the author or titles, unfortunately — what I do remember is that it worked by duplicating objects (including people), and that the society had embraced a made-up religion/philosopy of “reformed sufism,” holding that you were already a physically different person each moment, so there was no risk here.
Ah, a brief search shows that it’s called “Reformed Sufi,” by Ray Brown, and there were four stories: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?40480
Compared to some of the options mentioned here, Dune’s method of folding space via the Holtzman effect seems relatively tame, until you start thinking about whether you really can trust a transportation system that apparently can only be operated properly by drug addicts.
@17/dwcole: Originally, Star Trek transporters were portrayed as matter-energy converters. They converted you into energy, beamed the energy and reconverted it into matter. TNG changed this into converting you into a “matter stream”. You don’t get destroyed in either version, but it also doesn’t make sense that a transporter malfunction can duplicate people. Yet it did in “The Enemy Within” and “Second Chances”.
What if the transporter was just snagging versions from nearby universes rather than duplicating people?
For Orion drives, the ablative shield is (kind of) the easy part. One of the real tricks is: How do you precisely position the second and subsequent atomic exploders on the far side of it? You’ve got to position them at a rate of one every few seconds, and if one’s off-center, your spaceship spins rather than accelerating.
Tossing them them out a hole in the middle of the shield would lessen the risk of them being off-center, but then you have to not only have a functioning ablative shield, but a shield with a door in the middle of it that you can keep opening and closing after it’s been subjected to all of the blasts.
The proposed solution was to chuck the exploders in from the side, but that means the timing on when they explode has to be quite precise.
There were several books where FTL within a single unverse is impossible, but moving to a universe where one was several light years from one’s position in this universe was possible. All star travellers also migrated from universe to universe but generally the differences were so small they could ignore this.
@25: The Old Man’s War series is like that (with the differences being too small to notice). F M Busby on the other hand had an FTL method that almost always took you to an alternate universe in which the differences were too large to ignore.
Ah, Busby. Someone whose books I should enjoy more than I do.
@23/James Davis Nicoll: That could explain “Second Chances”, but not “The Enemy Within”, because those were halves of a person instead of real duplicates. Sort of a high-tech version of Calvino’s The Cloven Viscount, with intact bodies but a split mind.
@26 Well, maybe… the in-universe scientists of OMW have reason to believe that isn’t the way the universe works. To say more might be a spoiler of the later books.
I adore Galaxy Quest.
I would add the Jaunt from the Stephen King short story of the same name.
“It’s longer than you think, Dad! Longer than you think!”
Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol series has teleportation and immortality via sub-atomic fax machine. The series then goes on to describe all the horrifying technical implications including limited buffer memory, dealing with duplicates, and obsessed stalkers copying your data for criminal purposes.
Man in A Cage used something different, called Free Mass Acceleration. The gizmo apparently set inertia to zero for the duration of the trip, allowing acceleration without limit (even past c). Unfortunate side effect: it drove you insane unless you already were.
@21/Ian,
“…. a transportation system operated by drug addicts.”
Yeah, something fishy about those Guild Navigators.
GROANNNN!
CS Friedman’s This Alien Shore offers you FTL with a side effect of radical mutation or through predator infested hyperspace piloted by violent paranoiacs.
Yeah, but when you were a child did you walk uphill (both ways), backwards, and barefoot through the snow to get to school? ;)
I personally love Margaret Cho’s tke on that – she said her parents would say, “We got a nuclear bomb dropped on us when we were children.” There is NO WAY t top that.
I loved Vonda McIntyre’s “Superluminal”, an expansion of her novella, “Aztecs”. Pilots give up their hearts, so that their blood flow remains continuous, in order survive the rigors of travel through extra dimensions. The higher the dimension, the farther you could go in a single jump. But travel was very erratic and pretty dangerous.
Anderson’s Maurai weren’t aliens. They were another human culture, centred in what had been New Zealand.
Dr McCoy complained that the first transporter trip kills you.
A friend once said he intended to commit suicide by throwing himself on a copier and copying himself until he faded away. A transporter seems faster.
@40,
Dying during an attempt to reproduce yourself is definitely the way to go.
There’s a classic Twilight Zone with teleportation??? Elaborate.
@21
Like any city Metro?
@42,
Well, there was the swimming-pool-as-transporter episode, if that counts.
I actually saw that when I was still young enough to wonder, “Wait, how does that work?”
@42, @44 “Valley of The Shadow” has a gizmo that can dematerialize/rematerialize anything, including a dog and the protagonist.
In “It’s a Good Life,” Anthony can wish anything into the cornfield. That sort of counts.
@39: Quite right – the Maurai are humans (who don’t even encounter aliens, as I recall).
@28: I liked Busby’s “reset button” stories Balancing Act, Backup System and Wrong Number quite a bit. I was a little meh about the “All These Earths” – but it’s certainly on topic.
John Scalzi’s “The Collapsing Empire” has FTL through something called the flow. Problem is the flow is collapsing, and you could be caught out light years away from help when it does.
I was always fascinated by the space drive in Bill the Galactic Hero, where the ships moved by getting wicked big, shifting just a tiny bit, and then shrinking again. The threat wasn’t so much to the ship as it was to nearby planets that might be nudged by the travelers while they were embiggened.
Sorry, there was a miscommunication during rounds of edits before submitting and I did not see how my unclear phrasing had been changed. My fault.
@40/MByerly: “Dr McCoy complained that the first transporter trip kills you.”
Perhaps in the reboot films? In TOS and TNG he only complained that the transporter scrambled his molecules.
First, let us give honorable mention to the Infinite Improbability Drive.
Second, on the thread “The Ship of Theseus Problem Reveals a Lot About SciFi”, CoolBev@16 described a story in which a transportation device “destroyed you and built a perfect replica at the receiver”. This was acceptable to a certain religious sect who had their own ideas about the immortality of the soul, and “the upshot of this was that the Universe was soon inhabited with followers of this sect, as no one else was willing to travel.”
David Goldfarb @35 on that thread was able to identify this as the “Reformed Sufi Series” by Ray Brown. A bit hard to find, unfortunately. I haven’t been able to read it yet myself.
#6, electrons don’t pull each other.
James, do you ride trains and suchlike built by (effectively) the low bidder? I myself was only hours ago in an aluminum alloy tube suspended in mid-air by wings held on by bolts and welds maintained by contract workers, IIRC, in South America, working for Delta Airlines. I’m currently alive.
So, what exactly is wrong about total matter-to-energy conversion?
First of all, there’s no such thing. Energy is a property of matter, not a “thing” in itself.
So, most real-life matter to energy conversion is really matter-to-high-energy-electromagnetic-radiation. That, indeed, is not something you’d like to be anywhere near unless it can be directed and even then, a minor shielding mishap might wipe your spaceship clean of all those pesky organics.
However… radiation isn’t the only for of energy. Now suppose you could convert matter directly to kinetic energy… that would be a whole different ball game.
Heinlein? Tunnel in the Sky?
Hey now. The Ramsbotham Gates are virtually flawless. If the only thing that can stop them (temporarily) is a nearby nova going off then your odds are pretty good… the main problem I’d have is that dressing in Old West cosplay seems to be a near-obligatory part of using one.
My head-canon for the transporter in Star Trek is that it’s an Ancient/Precursor device reverse-engineered by the Federation to the extent that they can build their own versions, but they don’t actually understand how it works and all explanations are rationalisations of its malfunctions. “This thing we call the Heisenberg compensator, because when it goes wrong we’re never sure which universe the transportee will end up in.”
I don’t like this “lowest bidder” trope. If I took that seriously I would never board an airliner. I do, because I trust the authorities to mandate proper inspections.
(written in the UK, so not yet under Trump’s control)
“My parents had once mentioned that all the atoms in one’s body were replaced every seven years. They neglected to add that this was a continual, gradual process4. I was under the impression that it would happen all at once on my seventh birthday.”
LOL! OMG how horrible for a 6-year-old to go through this misunderstanding!
The Orion Drive also makes an appearance in Niven and Pournelle’s Footfall, although IIRC it’s used more as an act of desperation to mount a surprise attack on aliens in orbit, rather than as an actual sustainable space program.
As for crummy methods of space travel, I’d give the prize to the orgasm-powered spaceships from Norman Spinrad’s The Void Captain’s Tale, which essentially turn the Void Pilots into junkies uninterested in anything but their next high and eventually burn them out entirely.
I am reminded of the Orion-like propulsion system used in Niven and Pournelle’s Footfall. As the craft ascended into orbit, one of the less-technical passengers commented that having a nuclear bomb go off under you to push you into orbit was like “God was knocking at the back door, and he wanted in BAD!”
@1: That’s actually a significant plot point in China Mieville’s Kraken.
In Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds, two “lighthugger” ships (traveling as close to the speed of light as is possible) are involved in a chase sequence. The chasing ship develops technology to suppress the mass of her ship in order to push closer to and break past the speed limit, and it goes spectacularly wrong (I don’t recall all the details, but there were some pretty serious consequences of trying to cheat physics this way).
I dunno, seems that we are just matter and little to fear many of these devices, that is if they worked, which as far as our science knows they don’t. But still, live a little bit. :)
I will if Kitchener’s Light Rail system ever gets all its trains from f*ing Bombardier. But I admit I hate flying even though I know the stats and that most serious mishaps require a few things to go wrong at the same time. I am not in any sense a control freak but the less control I have over a process, the more I freak out. Planes are pretty much the epitome of transportation options with the least control from me.
@50 JanaJansen
He made the complaint in James Blish’s novel, “Spock Must Die!”. Spock replied that a difference, which makes no difference, is no difference…
@57 David Evans
I, myself, never board an airliner…
@40 and @50 If I remember correctly, Doctor McCoy’s concerns about transporters were expressed frequently in the James Blish novelizations of the classic Trek episodes. I can’t verify that, as the books are long gone, but that’s my recollection.
Dick’s The Unteleported Man fits in here somewhere.
One of these days I wanna read a transporter story where (a) the immaterial soul is a thing (i.e. mind-body dualism) and the transporter doesn’t transmit it, but (b) the soul of the transmittee isn’t destroyed by transportation, but instead has to catch up with the body it’s attached to … while limited to the speed of light. (See also “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson, only wrt. souls and jet lag.)
Expect lots of lulz if the effect isn’t noticeable at intercontinental range, but is only an issue the first time somebody is transmitted out to Pluto orbit, at which point the reception committee have to figure out what to do with the VIP zombie who was dropping in for a junket inspection …
Drum, self-owned, banging; There is an in-depth call-out to Project Orion in my Empire Games trilogy, and its interesting side-effects—and a method for launching one without causing collateral casualties—are key plot points. Indeed, its uses are the pivot of next year’s trilogy finale, Invisible Sun (forthcoming from Tor).
@65, 67: So this is James Blish’s interpretation of McCoy? I’ve always thought that his dislike of the transporter was simply part of his general distrust of machines, which also shows up in remarks like these: “The machine is capable of almost anything but I’ll still put my trust in a healthy set of tonsils. Now, open your mouth” (“The Man Trap”), “I think it’s wrong, too, replacing men with mindless machines” (“The Ultimate Computer”), “Well, Bones, do the new medical facilities meet with your approval?” – “They do not. It’s like working in a damned computer center” (TMP).
2 corrections, one to a comment and one to the article –
The comment mentioning Cordwainer Smith: “The lady Who Sailed the Soul” : The pilot’s metabolism was *de*celerated, not accelerated. Various portions of her metabolism were in fact decellerated to different ratios, limited by the medical technology of the time.
As to Lloyd Biggles’ teleporters (from the Jan Darzek series), the question of halfway through is answered in a scene during the grand opening of the network. a potential passenger trying a short-hop (a few yards, always-on) demo teleport link shoves her umbrella into the ‘porter and stops. Go read it for more.
“(See also “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson, only wrt. souls and jet lag.)”
And, rather earlier, “Strata” by Terry Pratchett. Interstellar travel is instant but the human soul can’t go faster than 0.6 light years per second…
Niven’s “Flash Crowd” comes to mind as well. I would love an instant teleporter to just zip around anywhere. I could meet my friend in Dallas for drinks, then zip on over to LA to see some other folks, then home to change. I’d be a lot more social if it didn’t involve planes, trains or automobiles.
@71 JanaJansen
I quoted what I could remember – I don’t want to claim to know, for certain, Blish’s interpretation of McCoy :)
I do remember loving that novel, and I do remember McCoy being super-competent in it…
Can I add wormholes to this? A common SF gimmick (in several Star Trek episodes and other SF novels). But unless both ends are stable, you can end up anywhere.
@65, @50
The kickoff for Spock Must Die! is that McCoy asks whether or not the person coming out the other side of the transporter has an immortal soul or not. Scotty can’t let it go and devises a way to create a copy of a person using the transporter, so the original never goes anywhere. Shenanigans ensue …
Two quotes on matter teleportation and souls (to work off cstross’s comment above and then some)
And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?
— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “We Must Dissent”
and
“How ever fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of an Arcturan Mega-Camel.”
— ancient Arcturan Proverb
@73/ajay: Strata is my favourite Terry Pratchett novel. Perhaps I should get one for my nephew.
@75/zdrakec: I read some of the Bantam novels when they were new, but not this one. McCoy being super-competent sounds good.
@77/ssircar: That doesn’t sound quite like the Star Trek I know. I don’t think the characters ever mentioned immortal souls or the possibility of an afterlife. Not prior to TSFS.
@79 JanaJansen
I loved it.
Antique Trek novel “Spock Must Die” offered the soul question. In the story, and on the cover I think, a modified Transporter creates a duplicate of Spock, obviously an evil one. Of course in TV episode “The Enemy Within”, very early on, Captain Kirk beams up from planet Alpha 177 and two of him arrive, and everyone else has to pick which is the evil one (this could be a spoiler, but if I don’t say which one?)
Elsewhere – “An ancient Arcturan Proverb ‘How ever fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of an Arcturan Mega-Camel.’ […] would mean, in these days of hyperspace and Improbability Drive, that most people’s souls are wandering unprotected in deep space in a state of some confusion; and this would account for a lot of things.”
As for hyperspace… I think James White saw it mostly as a means to an end (one Sector General visitor explained that technically a ship in hyperspace was a mathematical object without physical existence and this was not unconnected to the difficulty they had in sleeping during the flight), but also, if a large ship had multiple hyperspace generators, any departure from perfect synchronisation between them would and did leave a debris trail a light year long, to be searched, though the bit of ship with a working generator might make it home.
I have to add Stargate (SG1, etc) to the list of matter transmitters, along with the ship from SG Universe.
+1 for Niven’s “Flash mob”, Niven did a whole treatise on the whole Physics of instant transportation.
David E. Siegel (12): I seem to remember that the first or second teleport story in Venus Equilateral explicitly says it cannot make fuel (and thus does not violate VE’s charter, which allows it to relay information but not energy).
sdzald (19): Outside significant gravity wells, there’s no difference between acceleration and deceleration.
James Davis Nicoll (27): “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds”
@44 – The swimming-pool Twilight Zone episode you mention is “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” and was the final episode of the series. (#156, airing in June of 1964.) I don’t know that I’d call it a transporter. More like magical wish-fulfillment, or a magical portal to another dimension (as alternate realities were referred to in the series.)
As to flying cars, I can report from experience that 1977 Ford Thunderbirds not only fly reasonably well, but can land well, if piloted correctly. Thunderbirds are not, however, aquatic fowl. The neither float nor swim. (That said, their exhaust systems do sound rather like outboard motor exhausts, when submerged, if their engine is still running. Bloop…bloop…bloop…. I scraped the inside of its windshield all dammed Winter, that year, until its carpet fully dried out, come the Spring….)
As to ships I’d never travel upon, I hereby nominate the ‘Transporter Ship’ of “Black Omne” (Formerly “Omnedon,”) of Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath’s The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix – Star Trek TOS novels published in 1979. This ship contained a Star Trek transporter which was capable of dematerializing the ship and ‘beaming’ it many light years’ distance in an instant, after which the ship would continue under standard Warp Drive until the transporter unit recovered and could beam it again. Of course, the question as to how the sending unit could function while it itself was being dematerialized / was dematerialized, and reassemble everything again at its destination point was left as an exercise in suspension of disbelief for the reader.
Nevertheless, I recall the books as being a fun read at the time. Being a teenager when I read them might’ve helped that some.
Dubh (84): Poul Anderson (in the universe of Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry), or possibly someone else, postulated ships that travel ftl by teleporting themselves onto a receiver mounted on their own nose.
My own version of the soul-lag effect is that the human soul can travel no faster than a de Havilland Mosquito (which seems obvious when you think about it). This explains why you feel disoriented after a long flight even in the same time zone (like London to South Africa, say). It also explains why the Apollo astronauts all sounded so monotonous. They weren’t actually experiencing any human emotions on the moon at all. If they’d stayed for a long period, then after about (calculates vaguely) three weeks or so their souls would have caught them up and it would have gone something like this:
Aldrin: “Okay, Houston, I’m exiting the habitat now. No changes to the EVA plan that we discussed at 0530, I’m going to proceed to the rim of the crater and deploy another seismic package, and then see if I can retrieve some samples from the olivine outcrop that we observed on our last EVA.”
Capcom: “Roger. We copy you leaving the habitat now.”
Aldrin: “Okay, I am stepping out of the airlock now. I can see… HOLY SHIT! I’m on the MOON! I’m actually on the Moon! This is so fantastic!”
Armstrong: “Dude, I know! We’re on the Moon! Wait there, I’m going to come out and take a load of pictures!”
Aldrin: “The MOON! WOOOOOO!”
My favorite drive, which I would surely use—better in than out—is the “Better Than Light” drive from the Spaceship Zero RPG/album/radio plays by Mythos punk band The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets.
First, you dissolve the crew into essential salts, like in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. A force field protects the ship. Then the BTL drive destroys the Universe with a new Big Bang, slowly flies at sublight speed to where your destination will be, and waits 13.5 billion years. At which time, the crew are reconstituted, and it’s just like you travelled light-years away instantly!
Except history’s slightly different, and frogmen are in control of Earth and offworld colonies.
Look, nothing’s perfect, OK?
Of course, the question as to how the sending unit could function while it itself was being dematerialized / was dematerialized, and reassemble everything again at its destination point
I can imagine a handwave where the teleporter contains two teleport engines (for want of a better word) so that each one in turn can be taken offline and transported by the other.
@85: In Niven’s Flashcrowd universe, there was a self-teleporting spaceship as well.
@89,
In the Dune Encyclopedia, there was a character who could be considered to be a self-teleporting spaceship. In that story Holtzmann had been in a terrible accident, and was cyborged as basically just a brain fitted to a one man spaceship. I liked that version a lot better than that of the Butlerian Jihad novels in fact.
I adore the Dune Encyclopedia.
@84 As for flying cars, I’d add the 1950-1951 “bulletnose” Studebakers. A friend of mine was driving one on the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey into a strong headwind, and he swears it caused the front wheels to lift off the ground.
THE FLY talked about the practicalities and errors that could happen with matter transport across spooky distances.
Written in the late ’50s and published in PLAYBOY.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fly_(George_Langelaan)
How about the Stargate? Apparently it’s similar to riding a rollercoaster and if something is blocking the other end you’re like a fly on a windshield.
Extremely unpatriotic language is used in “The Onion” version of news coverage of the Moon landing in 1969; here.
https://www.theonion.com/july-21-1969-1819587599
The banner headline is “HOLY ****, MAN WALKS ON **** MOON”, and then they keep this up for a full tabloid-size news page. The astronauts and Houston are… uncensored.
I enjoyed it.
This may not meet Tor community standards, I know.
James Nicolls @@@@@ #23 – This is the key idea of John Brunner’s teleportation novel ‘The Infinitive of Go’. Differences between universes are almost infinitesimally small on short distances, but increase dramatically as the distances increase. IIRC the first sign noticed is when (in a paranoid Cold War setting) the teleporter is first used to transport secret documents between the American Embassy in Moscow and the Washington DC office, at which time the courier doesn’t get the password he expects on arrival, so he immediately triggers the incineration of the secret documents and kills himself to avoid capture.
The end of the book has some really great flourishes on the concept as the scientists start to figure it out – they begin sending into the transmitters written questions about them and getting back different questions, then figure out to instead start writing down and sending what they’ve learned, and getting corresponding responses from their colleagues in other nearby universes, laying the groundwork for multi-universe collaboration.
What’s this? All these years of James the Invulnerable, Pyrophoric Lad, Defier of Conceivably Rabid Squirrels — and now this unseemly whimpering of “If it’s all the same, I’d just as soon not become a rapidly decohering wavefront”…?!?
Play up! Play up! and play the game!
Do not EVER ride in the Star Trek transporter. It runs afoul of the No-cloning theorem.
It seems to me that the problem with the Star Trek Transporter can be solved by linking the two brains together and not destroying the original until the copy is verified. So for a brief moment, you would have two bodies, and then your original body would be disintegrated. It could also use a buffer – you would be uploaded into the system in an intermediate stage, as seems to happen with Stargates. So you would go from A -> AB -> B -> BC -> C, with A = original, B = buffer, C = copy.
I would be fine with flying in an Orion drive ship. It’s not like a chemical drive ship is *much* different… you still have a relatively thing skin of metal protecting you from an explosion.
#99, if your chemical rocket explodes, you are dead. Burning is not exploding.
Exploding is just burning really really really fast.
I’d argue about the distinction between burning and exploding but I am currently distracted by a discussion where soup ends and stew begins.
sdzald @@@@@ 19 (late I know): space doesn’t work that way. There would have to be some kind of “wind” blowing your exhaust in your face, and if there was, the wind would be your main concern all by itself.
Clifford Simak – Way Station, the teleport leaves bodies at each point to be dissolved by the transmitter for re-use.
J.P.Hogan – Martian Knightlife, the system copies a body, and the original has to be disposed of, so leading to an interesting story of competing clones.
In New Trek it was that dang holodeck, but in Classic Trek it was the transporters that stuck in my craw. (And the fence at the edge of the galaxy… fly over it dudes!)
Matter to energy (a lot of energy) then back to matter at a remote destination without a receiver. Yeah. Right. McCoy was right, it’s preposterous.
Shoulda done “Dirac jump” thing where you just convince all the particles that they aren’t here… they’re over there. Actually kinda sorta allowed by quantum physics. In a SF way, anyway.
But, no, we got M-E-M conversion, and don’t get me started on replicators…
@97: “…not again.”
Ladies and gentlemen,
May I present the Hyperion Cantos:
“The Gideon drive, a Core-provided starship drive, allows for near-instantaneous travel between any two points in human-occupied space. The drive’s use kills any human on board a Gideon-propelled starship; thus, the technology is only of use with remote probes or when used in conjunction with the Pax’s resurrection technology. The resurrection creche can regenerate someone carrying a cruciform from their remains.”
Death, and a slow resurrection by an alien symbiote.
No, you’re alright, thanks – I’ll just drive.
Andy
@69, @73: Douglas Adams, in the original radio “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” at least, quoted “an ancient Arcturan Proverb ‘How ever fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of an Arcturan Mega-Camel.’ This would mean, in these days of hyperspace and Improbability Drive, that most people’s souls are wandering unprotected in deep space in a state of some confusion; and this would account for a lot of things.”
This sounds to me like a fictional proverb which was created to say that you cannot outrun your soul, or perhaps your self or your responsibilities, and which now means the opposite. I’m assuming that an Arcturan Mega-Camel is fast; perhaps I should not. Maybe they’re big but slow. In context, Adams is describing rather an absurd explanation for displaced people causing disruption, having acknowledged that very little happens when everybody stays at home: that you’re connected to where you are from by “quantum packets of guilt”, responsibility, but when you’re elsewhere, your guilt tethers get tangled up in things that aren’t normally your business.
I’m informed elsewhere that “There’s a German saying that Die Seele geht zu Fuß: your soul travels on foot, and when you’re in transit it takes some time for your spirit to catch up.”