Teleportation

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare, Chris Wragg, and Peter Coghill of Aleph, and this week we're discussing teleportation. Nick, take us somewhere by whatever means. Yeah, so the other week, I was in Hazelmere with Peter, and I was wondering, I was looking at the trains, and it turned out there were loads of trains going into central London in the evening. And I was like, well, that's weird because rush hour is the other way around. People are coming out of London and going back to the provinces. And Peter correctly pointed out, because he's an engineer, that for the trains to come out of London, they have to get into London in the first place. I hadn't even considered this. That's why he gets the big bucks. Exactly. So I was thinking, you know what would be great is if you could teleport the trains back to central London, not have to drive them back. But then it occurred to me that if you could teleport a train, you could just teleport yourself home. And that's why you get the big bucks. Exactly. So it's like, well, teleportation seems like it solves one problem, but it might actually solve some completely different problem that I hadn't thought of. So I think what we want to talk about is, well, what if we could have teleportation? First of all, how might it work? And then, you know, what impact do we think it might have on society if we could teleport ourselves around? And also then, you know, what kinds of questions does it raise about, you know, sort of the identity of the teleported thing and the, you know, are you the same person who was teleported and all of those questions. So lots of things to worry about. I think about this a lot. OK, right. This is rather exciting. Yeah. When you're running late. Well, I mean, that doesn't really happen. So, OK, well, look, this feels like it might be a slightly messy one, but let's jump into the mess. Fraser would still be late even if he could teleport himself because he would just, he'd leave it right to the last minute and then he'd realise.

Speaker B: 00:02:20

He needs a time machine as well.

Speaker A: 00:02:22

Yeah, that's right. Right. Because if you have a teleporting device, well, let's just, you know, add a little bit. Yeah, you just literally get out of bed one minute before your meeting in central London. Yeah. And you still turn up late. But also I'm disappointed by your besmirching of my reputation. I'm disappointed by that. OK. But I'm as disappointed by these two. I mean. Not jumping to your defence. Who, as ever, have not leapt to my defence. And I'm and also I'm aggrieved or outraged by the fact that, I mean, of all of us, you're the one who's always bloody late, not me. Enough of

Speaker C: 00:02:55

this. Whoever wants to kick off, kick off. Well, I think we're going to discuss some of the ways it might work.

Speaker A: 00:03:01

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Peter, I've got some advice from a physicist I know, but Peter might have.

Speaker C: 00:03:08

Well, I've got no advice from any physicist I know, but I'm an engineer. You're an engineer. I winged it. Yeah, go on. So I've just grabbed some numbers. So assuming we go for a model where the individual is in some way deconstructed at the origin and then reconstructed at the destination. And there's a few, well, you know, I'm not wanting to totally rain on our parade, but there's some serious practical considerations to consider.

Speaker B: 00:03:36

Go for it. OK. And we thought it was going to be easy. Yeah. Yeah. And we thought it was going to be easy. Boring.

Speaker C: 00:03:41

But these don't sound too complicated. We're Aleph Insights, right? We can do this. You're Aleph. I must point out, I am an engineer. I'm not a physicist. So I'm probably going to make a some thoughts. So first point, matter manipulation. It's pretty hard, right? We've got 3D printers now, but they're probably not good enough, I wouldn't have thought. They don't print on a molecular level.

Speaker A: 00:04:11

We need to go probably for an atomic level 3D printer as well, don't we? Because unless you've got every type of molecule that someone's made off to hand somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. You can have to build the molecules. They're really slow as well.

Speaker C: 00:04:23

It's quicker getting the train, to be honest. And yeah, exactly. So yeah. So or even at a subatomic level, because then you're dealing with fewer particles. If you had a sort of fundamental particle 3D printer, you could probably deal with that. But that's hard, right? But we'll solve that another day. Then I thought, well, it occurs to me that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us that we can't be entirely sure of both the position and speed of any particle, such as an electron or whatever size particle we're dealing with, even atoms. So we're never going to get perfect reproduction on the other end. It's always going to be a poor facsimile.

Speaker A: 00:05:03

You're going to come out slightly a fly.

Speaker C: 00:05:05

You're going to come out slightly different. Like Mike TV. This may or may not have immediate effects. Maybe you're a very different person because your atoms are slightly to the left than they were when they went in. Yeah. But I think there might be a sort of interesting degradation effect with multiple trips. Like photocopying someone. Yeah, like photocopying someone. You start coming apart the edges a bit. OK, so those are two quite big ones. Power requirements. This is probably the easiest to solve, I think. So assuming you've got a human body plus clothes and suitcase and whatever it is they're carrying, 100 kilograms. Einstein's mass energy equivalence tells us that that is approximately 8.98 times 10 to the 18 joules. That's 9 exajoules. That's right. Is that a lot? That's quite a lot. Put that into perspective. It's more than 8 exajoules, that's for sure. The single greatest instantaneous release of energy that humans have ever produced was 58 megatons, equivalent to about 243 petajoules. So that's equivalent to about four Tsar bombers going off. You have to both deal with the energy of deconstructing somebody, converting their matter and putting it somewhere, probably back into energy, and on the destination end.

Speaker B: 00:06:34

So that's both ends of the journey.

Speaker A: 00:06:37

Yeah, but this is what I asked about my physicist contact. He said, if you want to turn it from matter into energy, you can only really do that with antimatter. Basically, the way that you balance up matter, you can't just take matter, positive matter, and turn it into energy, right? You've got to have some antimatter to begin with. Where do you get it? Well, you can make, apparently you can make antimatter and normal matter from energy, right? So that's how we do it. So we got some, assuming we get some antimatter first, we destroy you with the antimatter. We beam the energy and the information to reconstruct you to the destination. Okay, so you're transporting the energy, are you? Yeah, and then the energy is then converted into the positive matter to make you. And this is the brilliant bit, a little jar of antimatter. But we've got to get that antimatter eventually by the slow train or something, has to be physically transported back to, there's going to be a deficit of matter somewhere.

Speaker C: 00:07:37

Well, I was imagining a world where we wouldn't transport the energy, but we would transport the information. And we would end up with a big surplus of energy at the destination. Yeah. Sorry, at the origin and a huge deficit of the destination. But assuming that there's people going backwards and forwards, you could probably balance it all out. But you're going to need a pretty big sort of battery capacitor.

Speaker A: 00:07:58

So this is the same problem that we have with the trains going into Waterloo. Yeah. That we've got to somehow get that energy from the place where everyone is.

Speaker C: 00:08:05

ms. So the UK energy usage in: 2021

Speaker A: 00:08:36

But you'd need that to create the first bit of antimatter. Yeah. Which would charge the initial transport. Yeah. So we basically do nothing for a year other than make antimatter with this energy that we're making. Yeah. And then we've got our first transport. But once you've got that and the energy's in the lube,

Speaker C: 00:08:53

you're all right. Oh, yeah, that's fine. Yeah, it's a brilliant time. But that's just the matter recreation. Yeah. What we haven't taken into account is the amount of information, the energy required in taking a blob of matter and putting it into the right structure. Got to be built. Yeah, that's right. There's probably a big, big wadge of energy there, which I didn't really know how to go about calculating. So we're going to need a hell of a battery to momentarily store all this stuff. Yeah. And then finally, bandwidth. Right. So there's a nice little paper by the University of Leicester. So they calculated the number of bits of information represented by a single human cell as 10 to the 10 bits of information. Now, assuming that we can take one cell, which contains everything we need to know about the person, because it's got their DNA, their mitochondrial DNA, and we can sort of extrapolate from there and build them. So assuming we're... OK, yeah, interesting idea. We've got a bit of compression there.

Speaker A: 00:09:53

Well, except for then you'd be recreating them as a baby and they might not like that.

Speaker C: 00:09:57

Well, no, but if you... Got to take all of their memory. You send a sort of pattern with them of what their brain looked like and everything else. Right. Also, their brain contains approximately two and a half times 10 to the 42 bits of information. Oh, that's a lot. That's a lot, right? Yeah. So, right, if we're a bit strapped for cash and we can't afford any of these, we're just using Wi-Fi version 6, say. Yeah. That's 10 gigahertz in perfect conditions. It would take about 243 tera years... OMG. ...to transport somebody over that link. The universe, by the way, is only 14 billion years old. If you want to go fully lossless and you aren't happy with this sort of extrapolating from a single cell model, it gets about 30 trillion times worse. Right. That's a long time buffering, isn't it? That is really... I have to say... That's a long time. It's a big buffer, too.

Speaker A: 00:10:55

I think you've done some brilliant maths there. And I'm disappointed because I thought... It's no good just getting the BT Infinity upgrade router. We're going to need... It probably won't do the job. Right. Crumbs. Well, I'm in fear for our parade on our sunny day that it feels like some, you know, stormy clouds might be gathering in Pittsburgh.

Speaker C: 00:11:15

All of those minor problems aside... Yeah, they're just... They're just engineering challenges.

Speaker A: 00:11:19

They're just practical ones, yeah. But we've got, I think, quite a concrete way forward in our teleportation company. Well, yeah, talking of blobs of matter, Nick, go on. So I think what we're saying is that it can be done in theory. Yeah, we'll get it done next week. Yeah. Yeah. So it can be done in theory. Yeah. So the gist being, and I think there's some sort of deficit at one end, which is interesting to me, like, I think what we're saying is there's no way of doing this, which doesn't mean that something is being drawn from one end and used at one end and sort of created at the other end. So it is interesting that that's the train's problem again. But in the sort of simple model, it's matter. Like, if you could take existing matter and turn it into a person, then you're already using up matter at that end. And you're kind of getting leftover matter when you've disassembled the person at the other end. Even if you try and do it with, you know, creation and destruction of matter itself, then you're ending up with a deficit of antimatter. And then you've got, you know, the energy problem, which, as Peter says, you know, either you transmit the energy or you use it up. But the point is that it's not free. The idea that this could be sort of free, which I'd kind of imagine there might be a way of doing it, but there just isn't. It feels a bit tricky. So anyway, I think we've sketched out how it might work.

Speaker C: 00:12:45

Other potential models, if we can find some way of contorting space time so that distance is no longer a thing, that might be an option. But we'd need a physicist on board for that.

Speaker A: 00:12:59

sail ship ever made, built in: 1852

Speaker C: 00:17:44

It's about a day with check-in and security. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: 00:17:47

But the point is, it's like we brought, we brought months down to a day. And teleportation only really saves us like, you know, most of a day. Yeah. Yeah. And so is it actually going to make much difference? Yeah. Chris?

Speaker B: 00:18:01

Well, and yet that's the difference. I think it's that, that last bit. The, you know, the thought, how often do we go to Australia? Never, never been. Right. Quite. Okay. It's too far, right? It's, it feels too far away, right? And so there is actually a difference. Now, I'm not saying that if you had to walk there and then paddle your way there, that that would be in some way comparable to flying there. But I still think of that sort of length of flight as a real barrier to me, to me traveling that distance. And to the point where it actually dissuades me from doing it. And I think the idea that you could just sort of walk through a door and be in Australia, that would be hugely, hugely different. So, you know, I mean, if you look at the number of journeys between Australia and, say, the UK, they've obviously gone up, right, from where they were. But they're not, it's not a daily occurrence. And most UK residents haven't been to Australia. Right. So, so the difference it would make is potentially enabling everybody to go whenever they wanted.

Speaker A: 00:19:23

I wonder, to be fair though, I mean, what you're not factoring in is the fact that we've actually met quite a lot of Australians here. That's true. And that's probably putting us off. Yeah. So you've got to level that out, that bit of data as well.

Speaker B: 00:19:35

Yeah, why go to Australia when you could go to Wandsworth? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker C: 00:19:38

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, sorry, Peter. I wonder, I mean, trepidation about travel, for me, is less about the time, or has been less about the time, it's more about the cost, really. So I wanted to, for you, Chris, is it the cost as well? Because Australia...

Speaker B: 00:19:54

Well, yes, I mean, perhaps. I mean, it's not cheap. But if I could pay twice as much to get there instantaneously, I definitely would.

Speaker A: 00:20:04

I suspect that might be a similar conversation, though, as in terms about the time getting shorter and shorter over the years. I'm sure in relative terms, the cost is relatively, but nonetheless. We still use ships, right? We use ships, even though they're slow, because they're cheap. The base, in general, and I guess this is intuitive, the faster you want to go, the more expensive it is. And if you look at the cost per trip, in terms of just fuel, look at the fuel costs for a 500-mile trip, it's about $7,000 in a plane and $20 on an electric scooter. So for a 500-mile trip, the fuel cost is staggering. The difference is a factor of hundreds. And I can only assume that this teleportation wheeze, bear in mind, by the way, that we, as we said, we still want to get to the teleportation hub, let's assume that's at least a tube journey away, or you've got to drive there and park. So you're still looking at an hour or two to get to Australia. And it's going to cost you thousands and thousands of pounds, by analogy, but I'm guessing.

Speaker B: 00:21:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm just saying the thing I hadn't really considered, when you look at all of the science fiction based on interstellar travel and the idea of warp drive or whatever it is, but this model of actually you need a dissembler and an assembler at either end, it's like, oh, so actually you'd have had to get out there. In the first place to build the thing with all the stuff. And that kind of puts paid to the idea, because I was saying, well, the obvious implication of teleportation is we can access loads more resources all around our galaxy and potentially beyond, right? But actually, not really, if your model is you need a teleporter at the other end, unless there's some, you know, kindly aliens over there that want to build one. Have got the same protocols. And Jodie Foster can send in the plans for how to build a teleporter.

Speaker A: 00:22:21

Well, isn't that the plot of Contact or something? Yeah, that's quite right. But I mean, I mean, yeah. And I think there is no getting around, I can't think of or my understanding of physics is such that I can't, I would imagine there is just no way around the fact that if you're converting matter into information and back, you need a machine to do that. You know, it's just there is not a physical process you can exploit where you kind of beam the information somehow a certain distance and then somehow get it to know it needs to stop now and turn back into a human being. I just don't think there's any getting around that. Okay, so turns out the teleportation, it's quite tricky, right? And we've been talking about some of the practical considerations. That was the first thing we talked about. And then we've had to think about saying, well, actually, in some ways, you could consider us already teleporting. So far, what we've been talking about is very much the practical considerations. We can stay on that track or we can shift gear or direction slightly and teleport, if you like, into a more conceptual side of it. Because I think that could be quite interesting. What's the implications? And if we just go full sort of, let's say you could teleport from one point to another. And let's say everyone had the ability to do that. I'd like to explore that if you think that's interesting.

Speaker C: 00:23:44

Well, I think we should also explore whether actually we want to do it. Right, exactly. There are certain ethical implications. Okay, well, you go off with that, Peter. So our model of having machinery that deconstructs you and a machine that reconstructs you only really works or is only really palatable, I think, if you take a purely materialist standpoint where you assume that you are essentially a product of all of the physical things you are made out of. Sounds.

Speaker A: 00:24:23

Okay, I see what you mean. Yeah, keep going.

Speaker B: 00:24:25

Does your soul get teleported?

Speaker C: 00:24:27

So what's the role of the soul in this and et cetera? Because Derek Parfit has a...

Speaker A: 00:24:36

The patron philosopher of the Cognition Actually podcast.

Speaker C: 00:24:39

Wrote about the teleportation paradox. So are you the same person if you have been pulled apart atom by atom and then put together again atom by atom? Are you the same person or not? Or have you just created a copy and destroyed the original? In which case, is there some sort of problem of continuity of you that it would be unpalatable? And if you are a copy, does it matter? Yeah. And so the thought experiment here is what happens if the machine goes wrong or is reprogrammed so that the original doesn't get destroyed? You essentially then have two people who have all the same memories as you, but they are essentially two different people.

Speaker A: 00:25:21

As a warning to us, we need to be careful not to tread over similar ground to well-known philosophical debates and thought experiments when things like Family Guy and Calvin and Hobbes. It's like the Ship of Theseus, isn't it?

Speaker C: 00:25:42

The Theseus paradox is interesting. I don't know about this. What's that? It's Trigger's Broom. Trigger's Broom? What? Trigger's Broom is the sort of...

Speaker B: 00:25:54

The gag in Only Fools and Horses where Trigger says, I've had this broom for 30 years or whatever. Yes, yes, yes. And then he says, but I've replaced the handle seven times.

Speaker A: 00:26:07

I've only had to replace the handle three times and the head seven times.

Speaker C: 00:26:09

Is it the same broom then? Because your body and to a large extent your mind are very different. They're different physical materials, different physical atoms than they were when you were a child. I mean, your body refreshes maybe every decade or so completely. So you're not physically the same person. So does it make it OK if we just accelerate that?

Speaker A: 00:26:35

The thing is, OK, forget about teleportation. If someone just somehow disassembled Peter and then recreated an exact copy in his place right now, no one would know. Not even Peter would know because an exact copy would be there whose last memory was just sitting on the sofa. It feels like it doesn't matter unless we know what happened with the other Peter. Well, I mean, that's where I'm going, really. So it's hard to say the fact that if we're saying it's actually literally indistinguishable and no one would notice and there's not really any conceivable way of noticing and there's no test we can do, then what's the difference in him just sitting there being Peter the whole time? And if you sort of accept, well, actually, there isn't really a difference. Like it's almost like every instance there's a whole new Peter. Then what does it matter if suddenly that whole new Peter is on Mars rather than here? Like who are you to say? And if an exact copy appeared, I think you'd have to be forced to conclude that they were both Peter. But now they diverge because they've got different experiences. But up until it's fair to say that each of them is identical with the original Peter. Very Aleph and just how close we are getting. But it's just that that doesn't happen in real life. So we haven't. So it seems weird to us. But I don't think I mean, I think that's the only reasonable conclusion to come to is, well, they're both Peter. So if we're destroying the original, which I think is a good idea because we don't want two of them running around, then that's fine. Nobody's complaining. It's just this problem of when it goes wrong and they forget to destroy the original Peter.

Speaker B: 00:28:13

Or recreated Peter is slightly different in some way.

Speaker A: 00:28:16

It becomes evil Peter. Well, I think but or it gets stuck. Someone leans on the button and you get a hundred or a thousand.

Speaker B: 00:28:24

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:28:25

Imagine a whole planet of Peter. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Be like the stormtrooper.

Speaker C: 00:28:31

A planet without beauty. But all the trains would work. Yeah. Planet Peter. Yeah. Ironically, all the trains would work.

Speaker B: 00:28:36

Yeah. Chris? Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, another implication, consequence of this is going to be cultural, obviously. I mean, one of the reasons cultures exist is because of geographical separation. And, you know, one of the reasons we still, yes, we're globalizing because we share information. But there are still cultural distinctions that are based on geography. What happens if you eradicate the meaningfulness of geographical separation? There's a really interesting.

Speaker A: 00:29:12

Everything is next to you.

Speaker B: 00:29:14

Everything is next to you, effectively. Yeah. And every person is next to you, more or less. There's a really good book called Children of Time by science fiction author Adrian Tchaikovsky. And it is about interstellar travel, but not by not by teleportation, but by basically people being frozen in cryogenic suspension and traveling sort of, you know, through possible measures. And but on it, they they awaken different people at different stages in the journey. And some people are awakened and, you know, procreate and create, you know, people who were born in space and others. It's simply the matter of a passing of a few seconds, you know, 500 years. And so you get all this sort of mix up. But one of the things that emerges is the culture of travel. Right. You know, there are these people, the whole sort of Canterbury Tales idea of actually travel is part of what forms us going from one place to another, as well as separating cultures. That journey between them is is part of where culture is formed in some way.

Speaker C: 00:30:26

That's what I tell myself every time I go through passport control.

Speaker B: 00:30:28

Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker C: 00:30:29

The admin and the pain in the arse of travel is what is making me a better person.

Speaker A: 00:30:34

I'm pleased because this confirms a little motto that I came up with, which in travel, it's not the destination. You know, it's the friends we make along the way. So profound. It is, isn't it? So about this, this is a really interesting question. If you look at, you know, what the effect of reducing travel costs and increasing speed and so on has been, as Chris says, it tends to promote this kind of economic concentration. So you get, you know, you get you no longer need to produce things near where the markets are. You can produce them where it's cheap to produce them. Hence, outsourcing to China. That certainly would have been possible, you know, 200 years ago. You had to make stuff near where the people were who were going to buy it, you know, whereas now travel costs is a tiny percentage of the cost of producing stuff. You know, so it just it means that, you know, geography ceases to become a thing. And now the question is, is that that effect of homogenization, of sort of removing geography, is that actually going to, let's say, worsen homogenization, accelerate homogenization? Or if we could teleport around, does it actually mean that we can preserve different things how they are? So where I'm going, I suppose, is, you know, partly the reason that, you know, say London is so is has a sort of, you know, cosmopolitan international feel where, you know, there's lots of different cultures there. You could say it's sort of, you know, fairly rootless and fairly geography free. But partly that's because in order to, you know, to have food from Japan and China and India, we've had to bring those things to the UK. We now are experiencing bits of foreign culture because those bits have had to come here. But if we could just go to India to have our, you know, Indian meal, maybe it could stay in India. That's probably the best. Probably the best Indian restaurant in the world is in India somewhere. So, you know, actually, we stop needing Indian restaurants in the UK and we go back to just having ploughman's lunches and a pickled egg. And, you know, then it sort of feels like, well, actually, maybe this would promote specialization in the same way that it promotes specialization in production. Sorry, and also just jotting down some random stuff here. I don't want to get too much back into the practicalities. But some other sort of problems, potentially disease. Right. You start spreading diseases around a lot, even more rapidly. Security. Now, I'm not I'm not even talking about big stuff like people going, oh, let's go to that nuclear power station and blow it up and stuff like that. I'm thinking even like there you are at home, like you don't want someone teleporting into your home. You don't know when, you know, but you teleport a nuclear bomb right into the middle of, you know, into the middle of the enemy. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe. Yeah. But also things like, you know, transport can be a lovely or failure of transport can be a lovely excuse. Like Nick rings me up again saying Fraser, do you want to come out for a drink tonight? You know, and I go, oh, well, you know, it's a bit far away and the tubes, you know, but if I've got this teleportation thing, then I haven't really got an excuse anymore. Right. Yeah. And that's just a start. It's quite nice having the glue of, you know, physical distance to keep you in your place sometimes. Yes. Yes. What is to stop you? So we're losing the joy of travel to begin with, which, you know, admittedly, modern plane travel is not very joyful. But train travel is nice. You know, it's still nice to sit there for a few hours and be on, you know, you can't be distracted by stuff you sit there and read. So we're losing that. And yeah, we're also losing we're losing that kind of we're losing the safety of distance. That's right. The sense that, you know, I'm a long way away from, you know, from humanity. You go on holiday to the middle of nowhere and you're like, well, I'm a long way away from everyone. Oh, I forgot to pick up my, you know, pick up that book. I'm just going to I'll just beam home and get my book, have a cup of tea while I'm there and I'll beam back on holiday. Well, where's the fun in that? And also, it would be so mentally discombobulating. Right. If you just, you know, knit back, you know, for five minutes to do whatever. And then suddenly with some other people, it would just be too much.

Speaker B: 00:35:08

And that's why that's why I'm I'm inclined to think it would it would promote sameness because people would would want would want the things they they would want everything to be from it. They would be going to these places all the time. It would be inevitable that they would become familiar. But then then then then on the other hand, I sort of think, right, why why do people go to Hollywood? Right. It's you know, why did actors go to Hollywood is because that's where the film industry is. And but also so that they can be with like minded people. So so, you know, I think there is an element of constantly being in the in the in the vicinity of people who are like minded that you would still get you would still get geographic hubs. They essentially are. They are still in the vicinity. They're not physically in the vicinity. Yeah. Vicinity no longer means anything. Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:36:10

I was thinking, you know, it doesn't matter. Again, if you're a religious person, great makes pilgrimages all the easier. And yet we get back to that. You know, the point of a pilgrimage is a sacrifice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm starting to have my doubts about this whole teleportation thing. Yeah. Particularly if we go down, if we if we do end up with something, as you describe, I feel like it's, you know, which we just beam anywhere at any time for zero sort of almost zero cost. I think it's one of those things. It seems like something we really want. And as soon as we as soon as we have it, we because it's so unnatural, we massively over consume it to a level where we shouldn't. You know, we've wanted our entire life to be able to travel more quickly. And so when we finally get that, we just do it.

Speaker B: 00:36:53

Well, it's a little like the analogue is like the idea of streaming on demand services where you go, well, I like this thing. I want more of it. It turns out, actually, it was sort of better when it was scarce and limited, you know, to certain chunks of time. Yeah. Diet, same thing. You know, how easy it is to get calories now. So we do it.

Speaker A: 00:37:21

Maybe it could still work. I mean, we need to draw this to a conclusion, but maybe it could still work if we just limited it to just a handful of people, for example, us. And we had a limited number of, you know, like the genie in three wishes, you know, maybe maybe that's the answer. But it feels like it's just sort of kicking the can down the road a bit. And in itself presents problems. Look, where I feel quite downcast now, but I mean, we need to wrap up. Is there anything we want to say? Anything you've got before we do? I'm sure I've got a question on this, but yeah, anything where we want to finish this off? No, just to pick up something that Chris said, it's just I think there is a sense in which this would exacerbate the kind of winner takes all elements of the sort of the modern economy. You know how everything is like everything is now Spotify. Everything is Amazon. Everything's Taylor Swift because, you know, you can just consume everything anywhere. You couldn't be Taylor Swift 500 years ago. There's no way of someone on the other side of the world hearing what you're doing. Every town had to have its own Taylor Swift. Now we only need one, right? I'm just concerned that, okay, well, you know, the best Indian restaurant in the world. Well, everyone goes there. 100,000 people go there every night now because you just can.

Speaker B: 00:38:43

Like a moony wedding.

Speaker A: 00:38:44

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, so I just I think what we've concluded is no, we should stop this teleportation at once. Yes, no, I quite agree. We need to outlaw this. Yeah. And basically just travel just needs to be needs to have some cost. However low it cannot be zero. If the cost is zero chaos, chaos. I quite agree. Yeah. Okay. I like that. We sort of concluded that. I think we're quite firm in our conclusion and we all agree with one another. Question. What's the most opposite of teleportation that you've ever had? I guess I'm asking what was your most awful journey?

Speaker C: 00:39:29

I think I'm going to get that tomorrow. I'm supposed to be coming back into London for a stag do and there are no trains. So getting out is going to be okay. You need a teleporter. Getting back is going to be difficult. How are you going to do it? What are you going to do? Well, there's there's trains running to a certain time to a certain place and I can get a taxi somewhere else and then I'll take my bikes off Brompton here, there and everywhere. Combination of taxis, bikes and trains.

Speaker A: 00:39:54

I like the jeopardy involved here. Yeah.

Speaker C: 00:39:57

And I'll be half cut as well. So it's going to be even more.

Speaker A: 00:40:00

You'll manage it. Could be worse. If you get totally blackout drunk, then you won't remember how you got home. It'll be like having been teleported.

Speaker B: 00:40:08

You will also be on a bike, though, so that might not be the best strategy.

Speaker A: 00:40:13

I was just thinking if a teleporter went wrong, you would literally be half cut. So it's going to be better than that. Yeah, if only the top half got teleported. So I think the actual answer would be standing still for an infinite amount of time. That would be the exact one divided by teleportation is standing still. But I think the so to go back to some of the things we were talking about before I had kids, me and my girlfriend used to go on long distance walks where we'd spend, you know, a week walking a walking, you know, along an interesting place, e.g. the Grand Union Canal or Hadrian's Wall or the Cumbria Way. I think, you know, we and they're very memorable, enjoyable experiences. You know, the Grand Union Canal, we walked from London to Birmingham and over the course of about a week. And then when we went back to London, we got the train almost along the same route. And, you know, it took an hour and a half and it was really strange experience to see, you know, you were like, oh, that was where we were on, you know, on Thursday. And that's where we were on Wednesday. And, you know, every 10 minutes you'd be going past something which was a whole, you know, a whole day's walk. So, yeah, that's that. That I think it's sort of deliberately going as slowly as possible and really enjoying it. I certainly remember the walk more than I remember the train journey. And then, you know, by when coming back the other way, might as well have been teleporting. I've had a very similar experience. Yeah. Chris?

Speaker B: 00:41:48

I think for me, something like going on one of those tourist boats on the Grand Canal in Venice. There's something, you know, very, very visceral about that kind. You can smell the fuel, you know, rising, the boats rocking from side to side. There's loads of people. It's hot. You've got Venice passing you by slowly on, you know, either side. And where you are just so sensually in the journey and the moment of the travel that teleportation would would rob you of. And it puts you in that place much more in some in some way because of that sensory element.

Speaker A: 00:42:37

I think for me, it's probably my first job after university was when I went and taught English in Poland and this was in the early 90s and I was in the middle of nowhere in Poland and it took a long time to get there. And once you were there, that was kind of it. And it was pre-internet. So very little way of communicating, really. And I remember it was scary and psychologically quite challenging. And it's such an alien place or it was at the time or an alien culture to me. And it was bloody cold as well. And so, yeah, I found it sort of emotionally, psychologically, really difficult. And so I'm sure I nearly fell apart at various stages. However, that's what getting through that challenge and those obstacles has made me the person that I am today that sits here before you. It must have been dreadfully traumatic. There's the best argument for teleportation I've heard all day. And made me the psychologically, emotionally stable person that I am today. Yes, there we go. All right. Nice. OK, let's stop there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Chris Wragg of Aleph. Until next time. Goodbye.