Unabashed

In a stroke of near-Douglas Adams caliber genius, Warren Ellis has figured out a perfectly plausible way for mankind to realize teleportation:

Teleportation should be a matter of simply proving you’re somewhere else.

A teleportation device would be a little computer set up to run a single equation. And this equation would prove that you’re somewhere else entirely. You’d plug in the coordinates of where you want to be and press Enter. The machine would run, the equation would solve, proving to the entire spacetime continuum that you are in fact in the other place, and suddenly you’d be in the location relating to the provided coordinates. You wouldn’t appear inside another object, because the universe doesn’t like that. The only tricky bit, I figured, would be that the Earth moves through space around the sun and the sun moves through space with the Milky Way and the Milky Way is subject to the expansion of the universe. But people are clever and would find ways to allow for spacetime drift. I think that if you’ve cracked the mathematics to convince the universe that you’re somewhere else entirely, these small details would be easily attended to.

Interestingly, my experience in the Navy back in the early 90’s gave me a bit of insight into the way a certain flight navigation system called AHRS (”Ahars”) works, which was basically by proving where you were by proving where you weren’t. AHRS never really knew where you were, see, it only knew where you weren’t, thereby providing and exact location for where you were. So all we need to do is strap an AHRS machine to my brain and flip the switch and…well then I’ll be somewhere where I’m not. That might not be good.

written by Matt Mitchell