Interstellar teleporter

An interstellar teleporter is a hypothetical technology appearing in science fiction, typically in hard sci-fi, which moves people and/or other objects over interstellar distances instanteously. The matter of the physical person or object is disassembled at the point of departure and information is tranmitted so that the person or object may be reassembled at the point of arrival. This may pose a philosophical-religious concerns about the continuity of personal identity for those who believe in the soul or other non-material spirit. Is the same person reassembled at the point of arrival or is the old person killed and a new person assembled at arrival? If the former is true, then does the soul or other spirit accompany the information transmitted? The time dilation occurring during the transmission of information across the immense distances of interstellar space would make the proposed philosophical-religious problem even more acute. Does the soul travel at the same speed as the transmitted information or is it bound by different rules?

Examples

• the Door in Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s short story The Rule of the Door.
• Gate in Ken Macleod's Newton's Wake: A Space Opera. Macleod's gates are entrances to the wormhole skein, a network of Visser-Kar wormholes, referred to as Carlyle's Drift.
• Ramsbotham Jump in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Tunnel in the Sky.
• Runcible on Neal Asher's novel Gridlinked
• Springer technology in John Barnes' series of novels:
  • A Million Open Doors
  • Earth Made of Glass
  • Merchant of Souls
• Wargate in Bruce Balfour's The Forge of Mars.
• The Stargate featured in the movie Stargate and the followup series Stargate SG-1.
• An intergalactic teleporter made a brief appearance in the John Carpenter horror movie They Live.

See also

• teleportation

References

Roy Sorenson. 2003. A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195159039. Pp. 144–145.

External link

• BBC article on teleportation breakthrough