Re: How long for teleporters to replace airliners?
- From: mcv <mcvmcv@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 23 Dec 2007 13:03:54 GMT
Wildepad <noreplies> wrote:
On 22 Dec 2007 15:11:28 GMT, mcv <mcvmcv@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Wildepad <noreplies> wrote:
I think they'd be too expensive to affect communities one way or
another. If you put a transmitter and a receiver in the gatehouse, for
example, you'd be adding about $140M to the community's infrastructure
costs for something that most of the residents would never use.
Something that most of the residents will never use? In poor, rural
communities perhaps.
You expect rich people to want to walk all the way from their home to
the gatehouse, and vice versa? And pay an extra million or three for
their house for the privilege?
I don't doubt house prices near such booths will go up, but a million
or three? That seems a bit extreme.
Once they're in their car, most people would far prefer to drive an
extra couple of miles to a local tp site hosting a variety of units
rather than using their community's one-destination tp.
How local, and exactly what do you mean by "community" here? A city
is also a community. I can easily see every big city to have there
own teleport station. A couple, even.
Note that my original response assumed any booth could connect to any
other booth. When they work in permanent pairs, they become slightly
less attractive, but only slightly. You still only need a low power
booth to get to the nearest hub. From there you can go whereever you
want. At the moment, if I want to go wherever I want, I need to take
a train or car to go to the airport, and suffer all the waiting and
traffic congestion that goes with it. If I could walk down the street
to a booth I share with my 23,000 neighbours (I live in a city) to
teleport to the airport, that'd be a lot easier and faster.
Ofcourse to what extend such "feeder" booths are feasible depends on
how this scales with distance. If doubling the range means 10%
extra cost, and a booth with a range if 5000 km costs $70 million,
then one with a range of 20 km (from here to the airport) costs
about $30 million. This means short feeder lines are relatively
expensive, and long distance lines are relatively attractive. Even
so, my local train station must have cost a couple of million too,
and is porbably a lot more expensive in operation. That is, a ticket
to Central Station is less than $6.18, but a ticket to the next city
costs more than that, which means that that these booths will
quite quickly replace intercity trains, but can't compete with
current intracity traffic. Looks like a booth to get from here to
the city center won't happen for quite a while, but my wife would
use them daily to get to her work in a different city (her commute
is about 2 hours by train at the moment, and she really likes the
idea of instant teleportation).
How many booths each city will eventually have will depend on how
much they'll be used. If traffic jams on the highways are replaced
by long lines in front of the booth, there will be more booths.
They'll definitely be popular for transport between Amsterdam and
its biggest suburb (which is actually the 5th city in the country
in its own right), as that highway is currently permanently jammed,
the trains overcrowded, and there's no room for new roads.
Teleportation would solve a serious infrastructural problem here,
and that's definitely worth a few million. Hell, the government is
willing to spend billions on mediocre temporary solutions.
And assuming such large scale adoptation of this technology leads to
price drops, I think they'll eventually show up in smaller communities
too.
I would expect the opposite -- large scale adoption of the technology
might very well mean price increases, depending on the quantity/type
of materials involved in its construction.
If rare materials are required, yes. But I thought you originally
specified that these machines used common materials and a tiny one
would cost a few hundred bucks. When they are initially introduced,
prices would soar upwards with the demand, but as the market adapts
to deal with this demand, prices would drop again.
Prices of new technology always drop after a while. Although much of
this depends on the extend to which the new technology can be refined.
If this new technology drops fully developed out of the sky, and no
new refinement and development is possible, then I suspect prices
won't drop.
I think the main issue is showing that it works and convincing people
that it's safe. Once those things have been established, I think
everybody with money will want to invest in this.
What tests would be necessary to prove them safe, how long would those
tests take, how long to discredit the detractors, etc. etc. etc.
Originally, scientists will just teleport small objects over small
distances to prove the concept works. Once that's been published (and
it'd be a huge hit in both the scientific world and the mainstream
media, sparking exactly the kind of speculation we're currently
engaged in), scientists everywhere will start testing the limits of
this system: how well it scales in range and volume, whether you
can teleport living creatures (mice ofcourse), etc. The first
non-scientific use will probably be militaries and large businesses
using them to transport small packages, but pretty soon important
businessmen will want to be able to teleport straight from New York
to Tokyo for a meeting.
With these immense economic and strategic possibilities, you can bet
that there will be enormous pressure on the scientists to prove these
things safe and usable as soon as possible. I expect the first
commercial long distance line to open within a year. Within a decade,
they'll be everywhere.
mcv.
--
Science is not the be-all and end-all of human existence. It's a tool.
A very powerful tool, but not the only tool. And if only that which
could be verified scientifically was considered real, then nearly all
of human experience would be not-real. -- Zachriel
.
- References:
- Re: How long for teleporters to replace airliners?
- From: Dan Goodman
- Re: How long for teleporters to replace airliners?
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