Grand Unified FTL 6: Teletransport

Posted: 2024-07-28
Last Modified: 2024-07-28
Word Count: 1080
Tags: space rpg

Table of Contents

Part of the Grand Unified FTL series.

WARNING: this article may contain numbers.

Previously

We glanced at “portals”: magic doors between one volume of space and the next.

Now we look at what I’m calling teletransport, i.e. the Star Trek transporter extended to transport across light years.

How Teletransport Works

Teletransporters disassemble a person or thing into atoms, subatomic particles, or “energy”, fling them across space, and reassemble them as they were at the beginning of the process in another star system.

How they can do this has spawned numerous science fictional and philosophical papers. The latter category has codified the Teletransportation Paradox. Is the person who emerges on the other side the same as the person disintegrated for the sake of rapid transit? What if the process wasn’t destructive? Would both copies be the same person? Can you record enough information to reassemble a person on the other side, especially given the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? Isn’t tearing someone into subatomic bits normally considered murder?

And all because a TV producer wanted to cut costs by avoiding shuttle takeoff and landing effects.

(Projectors do the same thing without tearing people into subatomic particles, but to each their own.)

Questions About Teletransport

Teletransport Bandwidth

Many examples of teletransport brush aside questions of how long it takes to transmit enough information to reconstruct a human being. In Star Trek the process takes only a few seconds, possibly more depending on that week’s crisis. Neptune’s Brood limited transmission to the speed of light and the traveler’s synthetic brain patterns, but never said exactly how long it took to transmit said patterns using a giant laser.

As with Jump Drive, it’s an interesting thought experiment, if not exactly convenient for ongoing campaigns, if transmission took days, months, or years even beyond the slowness of light speed. Transport to another star, and you won’t be back “home” for years, maybe decades.

In another interesting variation, if the matter at each end comes from that end rather than a nebulous matter stream, perhaps transmitting certain equipment takes longer. The transmat station has plentiful supplies of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and the trace elements of a humanoid body and their clothing. Transmitting iron and steel may delay the process a bit, so it’s sent separately. Exotic energy weapons require exotic materials which take much longer to source. And so on. It’s easier to buy locally than transmit all your gear, especially if some of it is psionically (or magically!) enhanced.

Teletransport Variations

Psychic Teletransport

H. P. Lovcraft’s “The Shadow Out Of Time” presents a prehistoric species, the Great Race, that projects their minds forward and backward through time to swap minds with, say, a human from 1920s Earth who starts acting strangely and ends up in a mental institution.

Rules for psychic powers are beyond the scope of this document. One could treat it like brain uploads and downloads, only with alien crystals instead of barely plausible hacker technobabble.

Wormhole Transmission

The transmission beam passes through a portal that’s too small or volatile for matter, but it can transmit signals to the other side. This variant assumes sending and receiving stations at both ends of the wormhole, but range, speed, and bandwidth become irrelevant.

“Think Like a Dinosaur” features this kind of teletransportation. The Strange, mentioned above, uses some sort of psychic or metaphysical transference so it’s effectively the same thing save that “avatars” either appear in a default location or their last location before they returned to Earth.

Next

We consider another Star Trek plot device, the warp drive.