Teleport This

By Dr. Michael Robinson

Like many of the most popular ideas in science fiction, teleportation requires suspension of disbelief. The more you know about physics, biology, and other sciences, the more you realize that teleportation cannot work. Still, it’s a fun idea, and it helps make science fiction shows and movies much less expensive because characters can just appear and disappear.

Teleportation just bashes right against accepted principles of physics. For the concept to work, a machine would somehow have to locate matter at the subatomic level (something quantum mechanics says is not at all certain), record it or at least strip it and line it up, and then move it while accounting for all sorts of things like the kinetic energy of teleportation subjects in motion. And anything missed or mistaken could result in some kind of systemic collapse of biological functioning, rendering most living subjects not so living when the process is over. 

But, again I cannot stress this enough: teleportation looks cool on screen. 

Kodi Smit-McPhee portrays Nightcrawler in X-Men: Apocalypse (Twentieth Century Fox).

I have often wondered about how pragmatic teleportation could truly be. Many years ago, I wrote about how beaming people around the Star Trek universe probably created all sorts of unforeseen problems. My favorite example was the impact of teleporters on the tourism industry. Imagine all those people trying to beam over to see the Eiffel Tower or the Grand Canyon. And you think theme parks are hard to get into now, then imagine trying to get into Disney World when the entire world wants to do the same. At best there would be frustrated travelers upset about wait times for a technology that should be instantaneous. At worst, there would be mixed-up piles of goo where multiple tourists beamed into the same place at the same time. 

All this makes me think that teleportation might actually be far more valuable as a weapon than as a mode of transportation. Consider, for example, the superhero known as Nightcrawler. The preeminent teleporter of the X-Men, Nightcrawler, avoids some of the messy teleportation ideas mentioned above by moving through other dimensions as he “bamfs.” The process is exhausting for the unaccustomed, so Nightcrawler will sometimes teleport multiple times with a foe in tow. In the most dire of situations, Nightcrawler has also been shown to teleport only part of an opponent. He usually only does this against mechanical foes, like the mutant-hunting Sentinels. This is taxing for our hero, but it does serve as a kind of proof of concept.

Imagine, for example, a teleportation device usable upon others. Moving a target to another location far away works well (this is the fighting style of Popinjay, a teleporter from the Wild Cards novels). A teleportation gun that did not return its target at all would just be a disintegration ray. But how about a teleportation gun that only moved part of a target? 

Got your nose? No, got your arm! No, your feet! No wait, your whole head! And it’s now beaming back about 20 feet away from the rest of you. Good luck with that. 

I know what you’re thinking. Wow, that’s grim. And it takes a lot of fun out of teleportation we discussed earlier.

Fine, the teleportation gun does not have to be that lethal a weapon. Imagine, for example, that the gun is paired with a teleportation pad well behind enemy lines. Technicians on your side stand by with a ready supply of less-than-fatal items– thousands of gallons of water, foam, glue, etc. On the front line, you point your teleportation gun over your enemies and rain down nonlethal defeat from above.