Teleportation should be prioritized not because it sounds futuristic, but because it targets one of civilization’s fattest recurring burden-fields.
Forget sci-fi, this is about intelligently letting demand find pathway.
Right now, moving basic goods pulls a whole chain behind it: shipping, chokepoints, security-risk, military overhead, insurance, spoilage, warehousing, delay, fuel and diplomacy-pressure. Ever wondered if the organic grade of a good declined, when it is wrapped in plastic and shipped across an ocean? We pay those costs so often that they start looking normal.
So yes, “teleportation” sounds far-off. But the burden it points at is not far-off at all. It is already here, already expensive, already consumptive.
That is why it matters.
The frontier deserves priority if it:
- Assists to collapse a vast drain,
moreso than it powers dominance of the wealthiest populations. - Reduces the need for security,
to a greater extent than the ground lost by how it is applied. - Eliminates civilizational hollowing,
without complicating barriers by the increased speed of transmission.
Otherwise it is not a burden-remover,
it becomes another hunger-field dressed as progress.
And it’s got a tech-tree.
- Spatial measurement and positioning
- Structuring a container
- Entry-exit precision, routing and approximation
Forget beams, copy-paste and wormholes. Regardless of the specifics, each of the above logistics are required capacities. After that, comes the particular medium; do you prefer horse-cart, bicycle, car, atv, plane, space-plane, helicopter or a leisurely walk?
While pursuing the path is consumptive, transporation-costs are already occurring at a massive scale. It feeds collective addictions, to which there is no end. Aiming for a technology that at least reduces the consumption, instead of merely expanding the resource-demand, is less like fantasy and more like intelligently managing resources.
The real question is not whether teleportation sounds strange.
It is whether the next advancement in science is random, driven by greed or guided by compassion.
If you wonder what you could do towards reaching that end, producing that outcome, subscribe.
While I was fascinated by teleportation since before I was a teenager, I was likely inspired in part by other content.