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[–] 24 points 17 hours ago* (5 children)

Everyone always focuses on the Ship of Theseus or the existential parts of this, but the societal impacts would be crazy.

Millions of people teleporting to the most beautiful places on earth and wrecking them, highways and boring parts of cities abandoned, mass death of people teleporting into a crush crowd at Mecca, landmarks toppled under the weight of teleporting tourists and bosses teleporting into your house for a "work from home" meeting, weapons and bombs being teleported into war zones...

Things would eventually find a new normal and teleporting food and resources around would remove the need for ships and trucks, you could explore the world much more easily and there would be lots of science to do in hard to reach places, marine biologists would have a field day exploring the deep ocean, doctors could teleport cancer cells out of patients, space agencies teleport probes, bases and astronauts to the moon and around the solar system...

Like it would be such a huge upheaval with so many implications. It's interesting that people really fixate on the "would I die though? What does dying even mean if I'm still around?" part, even though I think that's maybe the least interesting thing. I guess it taps into a very primal survival instinct?

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  • [–] 8 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

    Can I just teleport the poop out of my colon and the piss out of my balls, so I don't have to get up to go to the bathroom?

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  • [–] 4 points 13 hours ago

    Depends on how the technology works. It's more likely that you would need someone's how to receive or both ends, even if it were technically possible to just teleport randomly from point a to point b I feel like that feature would be disabled on commercial models precisely to stop the above from happening.

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