Teleportation is invented but it has nasty side-effects % of the time, how will that affect usage of the technology?

Question

A few decades ago, a new glorious invention in our huge FTL interstellar empire was created - teleportation tech. A 2 meter cube is technologically put in a "Warp" field at one location and deployed 1 minute later at the destination (if there is a transporter there. If there isn't, it takes 5 minutes). You can teleport anything but heavily radioactive elements like uranium, up to the moon and back. You can also teleport humans and animals. The tech is mostly used in military and spaceships.

Except, there's a nasty side effect. In 0.1% of cases ( the actual percentage is a closely guarded secret that only a few people know. Not even all teleport technicians know how high the "number of malfunctions" is) , whatever you teleported doesn't show up. In fact, it gets replaced by a nasty warp creature made of material you teleported (let's call it a "demon") which is actively hostile to human and alien life. If you teleport a human being, it can be replaced with such a creature (which might even look human, at first glance, but is not, with the original human dead) but which has an innate connection to its home dimension, can summon more creatures by fiddling with the teleport and wants to violently kill all humans, because killing humans and aliens gives them an unprecedented high. Once the ship blows up/loses power, the "demons" die too but they are too drugged up to notice by that point.

If you teleport 100 kg of pudding, it is replaced with a surprisingly tough shape-shifting demon-possessed pudding golem which tries to do the same. Demons are quite hard to kill and it usually takes explosions and incineration by a fire of at least 300 degrees Celsius to kill one. Or 10 days without nitrogen in the coldness of space, but are otherwise pretty much immortal (they eat and breathe nitrogen and don't die from old age).

What would the use of the technology be (how to use it safely) and why would anybody use it? Would you make armored bunker "demon resistant rooms" and put the teleporter in there? Why would anybody use technology which can potentially kill everybody involved, if only in a small % of cases?

(somewhat related xkcd: https://xkcd.com/325/

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My idea was that teleporters were used on space navy ships and that 20 or 30 years ago the space navy might lose a whole ship to a runaway "demon" from teleport incident. That problem is solved today and teleports see somewhat regular use. How was it solved? How often is it used today, 50 years after introduction?

Answer 1

The teleport "conversion" was solved for military ships by the simple expedient of putting the teleport receiver inside an armored compartment with a large, fast-opening door -- to vacuum. Any received transmission is interrogated in a manner that has been developed to provoke "demons" -- but is reasonably harmless to humans or other legitimate payload -- and if the load is found to have converted, a "panic button" opens the vacuum door and flushes the demon out into space, where it will either (eventually) suffocate or collide with something (a moon, an atmosphere, etc.) at an orbital or higher velocity, vaporizing it.

A bigger problem was the loss of teleported personnel; this has made teleportation of living things (especially humans) an emergency-only procedure. I might step into a teleporter if the alternative was, say, dying as my ship's power converter overloads (and too little time for escape pods to get to safe distance) -- but I would resign a multi-year commission if there was as much as .01% chance that getting home for a furlough would result in my instantaneous death (or transport to the "demon dimension" which is the same only it hurts more) and that was the only method offered.

Answer 2

It was weaponized. The military now have the ability to teleport sufficiently large numbers of items to an enemy city (or key military facility, spaceship etc.) to trigger a demon invasion. No need for tricky-to-handle plutonium to destroy the enemy, just teleport them a few thousand packs of, say, Stay-Puft marshmallows.

Answer 3

In a real emergency, maybe you can convince somebody to hop in, but it should be noted that for all we know getting dumped into the hell dimension is a fate much worse than death.

Instead, I suggest we just keep using regular 'ole chemical rockets. But, the teleporter is still really useful here. Assuming the energy cost is paid at the sending end (you indicate that you can send to non-teleporter areas in 5 minutes), instead we make our fuel tanks just big enough to get into orbit. From there, we teleport fuel directly into the combustion chamber (or sufficiently securely designed fuel tanks). This gets us around the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, and who cares if your rocket fuel is demonic? That stuff is already as nasty as it can get, and is about to be exploded.

Answer 4

Seems like infinity energy, just teleport some stuff and there are chances you get something that would never die and doesn't need much to survive.

Stick that demon into a large hamster wheel facing some people and BAM, unstopping energy generator.

Just hope the demons doesn't break out.

Answer 5

All teleported goods and passengers are kept in nitrogen free quarantine for 11 days and observed for signs of extradimensional naughtiness. Either in vacuum, or in a low pressure pure oxygen atmosphere, depending on which is least damaging to the thing you're sending.

People can't breathe pure oxygen at Earth sea level pressure, but we can breathe pure oxygen at lower pressure.

It's inconvenient, but still more convenient than going further than low Earth orbit in a rocket.

Note that many things that are barely flammable in normal air become very flammable in pure oxygen. So on the one hand you may need some extra safety precautions, but on the other hand it will be easier to incinerate that shipment of pudding that got too rowdy.

Answer 6

Passengers:

Its usage will be affected by not doing living things unless absolutely necessary.

General anti-demon rules:

Teleportation to friendlies is as a rule done towards a receivingpad without the controls to teleport. In case a demon takes posession of the material (say a crate of plasma weapons or something similarily harmless if it came alive) the demon will not have access to a working telepad to call in more. Camera's at the receiving end will alert any technician at a working teleporter and they will go into lockdown and power down all teleporters, also in the event of camera shutdown just to be safe. This limits the potential for demons to call in more and makes it easier to get control of the situation.

Further safety measures are that the receiving end can be build to contain any threat. Since the demon likely inherits most of the material properties of the beamed over material you can prepare canisters with a gas, liquid or even put plates of material on the ground that would react violently with the beamed over material when released. If the teleport receiver might get damaged in the process alternatives are in place. A few flamethrowers in the surrounding area for example. Or the teleport receiver is in a room with a room around it where lots of remote/espatier wielded guns, acids and such can be made ready. The teleport receiver could be retracted into the ground and the chamber violently spun while some heavy balls are released to crush whatever luckless thing was inside. A dedicated heavy weapons team with a deployed gun could watch the pad and blow anything remotely not looking like what they were supposed to receive out of the way. The options are pretty much all over the place.

Matter creation:

In the case that the demon accessing a teleporter does not need to teleport materials to create a demon army you can use this to create matter. Just have a controlled environment where the demons are called into being (say an empty ship without any weapons or engines) and when enough demons are called into being you blow it to pieces and collect the matter.

In the case the demon does need matter to create new demons you can limit the amount of loose materials and superfluous things that can be ripped loose and teleported for demon creation.

Answer 7

The usage would be varied, but I think the primary uses would be for material movement and for special forces.

Teleporters would be a fantastic supply chain tool. A way to get a big box of rations or bullets across great distances that cannot be interfered with by opposing forces is a fantastic advantage to the Empire. Create your box of goodies as a small atmospheric re-entry vehicle and pop it into a geosynchronous orbit above where you need it, kind of like the "biscuit bombs" used for re-supply in the south pacific in WWII. If you get a demon instead, it will be in hard vacuum for a while and die. Evil demon problem solved. It could work because there is a very small window for the enemy to destroy the interstellar care package.

The next use would be to deploy special forces deep into enemy territory. This works well for a number of reasons. Your special forces will have the primary purpose of popping in, destroying as much as they can and then going to some sort of extraction point to be picked up by manned ship, or another teleporter that was sent as a separate package. If things go off without a problem, nasty things happen to the enemy. If you get demons, nasty things happen to your enemy. Win-Win for the Empire. The problems of people being afraid of the risk of demons is almost not a problem because special forces troops already know they might not make it at the best of times. And if they go to demon territory, they will claim to be ready to give the Devil himself Hell.

Answer 8

It will not affect development of the technology at all... not until the problem is discovered.

This wonderful technology was adopted extremely quickly, and it was only some years later when the first demon came out that people suddenly had to backpedal, scale down use, and retrofit protection devices on existing devices. Total abandonment is not possible because a large segment of the economy already depends on the technology (humans on other planets cannot return, some industries depend heavily on imported ore, food farms have been set up in orbit following ecological disasters and depend on the teleportation to feed Earth).

Why this problem was discovered only after so long is the object of intense speculation: did the demons simply discover teleportation later? Maybe the first replacement was a random fluke, and the demons quickly put effort into intercepting as many transmissions as possible once they realized that another civilization was intruding on their domain. This would explain large fluctuations in the percentage of impacted transmissions.

Answer 9

If you're wanting the teleportation technology to be widely used, then you're going to need to keep some secrets. I'd probably say that the cover is that teleportation causes a low-level of radiation:

1. The schematics of the teleporters are closely-guarded industrial secrets. The utility of the process would generate revenue, giving you a "teleportation lobby" to protect these secrets.

2. The surroundings of the teleporters ave thickly coated "shielding to protect the surroundings from the radiation". In reality, these contain the disposal mechanisms for the teleportation contents. If demon appears, the contents are neatly incinerated and re-skinned.

3. Teleportation operatives are highly vetted and trained (read: brainwashed). No one knows about the contingencies, no one knows about the reality of the "industrial accidents".

4. Teleporters are large. If it's done in bulk, then loss quantities stay the same, but it becomes much more difficult to nail down the specific probability. Sufficiently large teleporters also need much more efficient disposal mechanisms, though.

The object of all of this is to keep the public unaware of the downside. You could also have some large-scale "radiation leaks" where the demons were able to escape, and the entire area needed to be cleansed, but these were used to re-enforce the containment measures, and the propaganda about radiation and "reducing exposure".

If you wanted, you could also go through what would happen when the secret gets out. The sudden collapse of the industry, aswell as all related containment protocols that they enforced. The section of the population intent on reasoning with the demons, and attempting to exploit them (as some of these posts have been through).

Answer 10

Put it on jupiter orbit or further and you can travel back in time. Why?

Well "instant" travel from physics perspective is the speed of causality (=speed of light). You probably know about time dilation - the faster you travel, the slower your time relative to observers in destination. If you traveled somehow at the speed of light, the route would be instant from your point of view, even if you traveled hundreds of light years.

Now your teleport takes things to destination in 1 minute, if there's a port. But it will never take less than 30 minutes to get to Jupiter by light speed. So your one minute is shorten them lightspeed "instant" travel. You experience even less time than light, which experiences zero time.

What exactly happens is speculative, but almost all logical thought routes you can take based on known physics mean that you will travel back in time. (there are other ways than the one I outlined to reach the same conclusions, see the article below)

Your teleport does not need to send humans. It may just transfer a very tiny computer or SD card or USB drive and you'll be sending information back in time. If you use micro SD, the resulting random demons should be easy to burn with some laser automatically if they appear on either side of this time-internet.

You can use this to know movements of enemy forces before they happen, or to know when the world will end.

Everything already happened if you can send information back in time.

Also worth reading: https://www.askamathematician.com/2011/09/q-hyperspace-warp-drives-and-faster-than-light-travel-why-not/

Answer 11

Nested teleporters. If your teleport goes awry, just teleport the whole room into space. Then go retrieve your teleporter in 12 days.

Answer 12

In an effort to solve a completely unrelated problem, I put a little something on an Excel sheet. It should be transcribed correctly here (unless it's not).

With

• $p$, the probability it backfires
• $n$, the number of uses
• $q$, the probability it backfires at least once within $n$ uses

It gives

• $q=1-(1-p)^n$ , as I said the probability it backfires at least once within $n$ uses
• $n=ln(1-q)/ln(1-p)$ , the number of uses at which there is a probability $q$ that it backfires at least once

Assuming $p=0.1\%$, after 100 uses, you have a 10% probability to end with at least one pudding monster. After 1000 uses, you're at 66%. After 3000 uses, you're at 95%.

Needless to say, you will need a pudding monster defence budget, if you are going to use this device with any sort of regularity.

For transporting goods, it would be fairly easy to just isolate the device by putting it in a big oven-like room/building, check arrivals for ravenous monsters and activate the defence system when necessary. This may damage the device, and your insurance premium will be quite high. But it might be cheaper than the cost of exploding rockets or refining unobtainium fuel for spaceships. Decisions, decisions.

For transporting humans, a typical Boeing 747-8 seats 467 people according to Wikipedia. So, assuming you transport people one by one (or that the probability to be affected is per person rather than per trip), you have a 37% chance that at least one of your passengers turns into a bloodthirsty creature from hell that may or may not kill the 466 other. You decide if you want to buy that ticket.

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For comparison, this study on "worldwide fatal accidents to jet and turboprop aeroplanes above 5,700kg engaged in passenger, cargo and ferry/positioning flights for the ten-year period 2002 to 2011" (essentially big planes), page 30, gives a fatal accident rate of 0.6 per billion flight, or $0.00006\%$ which can be compared with the device's probability of failing. Taking $p = 0.1\%$ again, that's a difference of 4 orders of magnitude.

I chose air travel because it's probably the closest analogue to taking a spaceship to the Moon we have. Also I couldn't find data on fatal accident rate per trip for road transport.

Answer 13

There is no real side-effect., except for occasional hangover-like symptoms and few broken fragile items.

The whole thing is a scam, used to remove unwanted people and steal valuable parcels.

Answer 14

The Johnson Rectifier.

Scientist Maria Johnson pulled logs from teleporter machines that caused demon events (many brave people died to gather these logs) and discovered a fluctuation in the quark pump, every time.

She invented a quark pump filter and since then, no teleporter equipped with one has had a demon encounter--unless the filter was damaged.

Answer 15

The answer depends on many details. First, assuming the technology has just been invented, is the percentage of demonization even an accurate number?

It is one thing to say "we have to maintain the quux field within a range of 15 angstroms (and we can do it reliably 98% of time), else bad guys are coming out of woodwork on the receiving end" vs "we teleported sandbags 100 times and twice we got monsters".

If it is the first case, we could limit the transportation of humans to emergencies and have protocols for demon liquidation on both sides, as described in other answers. As a side note, if possible, there should be 2 one way teleporters instead of a single both ways one, to limit extra summonings.

If the percentage of demonic possession is only calculated from empiric evidence though, you have no case to even build anything like that with one end on Earth. It is far too dangerous, because the is no telling what might happen next.

Answer 16

Why risk human teleportation at all?

Robots have been an effective means of exploring the universe for decades, and still make up the majority of our exploration team - and if a demon does manifest from one of these robots, well-armed robots are more than capable of dispatching such a creature, with only the loss of some equipment.

Teleportation would then become a frequently used pre-cursor to colonization, with protocols in place to swiftly deal with any demon incursions on the receiving end of the teleport.

Answer 17

This is not an answer to what the OP asked, but it's something about teletransportation that always bothered me. It may be useful in OP's plot.

Teleportation means death. Even when no demons are generated, all your matter is disassembled into particles and then vanishes. You die on departure. What is reassembled on the other terminal is a copy of you, that has all your memories and thinks it's you, but it's not - you're dead, that's a clone!

Star Trek has even scratched the issue a bit on the TNG episode Second Chances (6x24) where William Riker was copied on a transporter incident. A second Riker was created, who thinks he is the original. But the original failed to be killed, so we ended up with both.

This might be used as another "well kept secret" in OP's story.

Answer 18

Usage: Only if ABSOLUTELY necessary.

However, if it is necessary to use it, here are a few general safety precautions:

• Quarantine in a low-oxygen, nitrogen-free atmosphere.

• Seperate quarantine chambers for every living thing. This is because, believe it or not, we actually produce a small amount of nitrogen when we exhale. As a result, the quarantine is pointless if you have >1 living creatures (plants included) in the room.

• A "big red button" which throws everything in the quarantine chambers out of the airlock, should demons be detected.

• "Site-to-Site" transporting ONLY if it is a "life or death" situation.

I hope these answers solve your problem.

Post Scriptum: Oh, by the way, I would suggest that you NOT use term "demon" to refer to the aliens, as doing so is guaranteed to tick off any Christian / Jewish / Muslim / Hindu readers.

Answer 19

Every passanger will carry a camera with him. He/she reaches a secured place, hands out the camera through a special compartment to the security team. The team analyzes the recording of the entire teleportation process and searches suspicious activities.

The camera is embedded into the passenger's wear, so that it will not draw the demon's attention and appear as an integral part of the process.

Answer 20

In the comments, I pointed out that teleportation breaks the universe by allowing infinite energy.

Infinite energy (which breaks a WHOLE lot of universes): Build very tall tower, line a shaft with copper coils. Teleport huge magnets into the top of the tower, then let them drop down the shaft.

The relevant parts of the response (in chat, so few people will be bothered to look) are:

The teleport works by putting something into warp field.

It takes quite a bit of energy to put things into warp. There is no magnet big enough and no copper shaft long enough to repay that cost.

Doing the math: 2 cubic meters of matter means one can teleport a magnetic cylinder of iron 1.25m tall and 1.25m in diameter. (Cubes might be more efficient, but the cylinder is easier to handle) The volume of that cylinder will be 1.52 cubic meters. That will weigh 12,045kg.

The tallest building in the world is the Burj Khalifi at 829.8m. (Lets ignore its basement, despite it being useful space for our linear induction generator.)

We can ignore terminal velocity; the mass will be falling so slow that the atmospheric drag won't matter, due to Lenz's Law. Also due to Lenz's Law, (very nearly) the entire amount of kinetic energy will be turned into electricity.

Restating to make the point crystal clear: The amount of electricity generated is the same as if the mass had been dropped down a vacuum chamber and we somehow harvest all of the energy of impact.

At 829.8m, it will have the same potential energy as if it was impacting at 127.3 m/s (459.11 km/h). Weighing 12,045kg, it will deliver 97,950,421 joules or, to put into more familiar terms, about 27 kilowatt hours.

In reality, the mass would be traveling about 5cm/s, so would take about 16,596 seconds, or 4.6 hours to deliver its 98 megajoules, giving it a wattage of 5.6 kilowatts.

This, of course, ignores the fact that you have an FTL society. FTL societies are used to making megaprojects, like Dyson swarms. FTL societies understand very well the implications of relativity, especially the most basic premise: every speed is relative.

So, why start our magnet at zero velocity relative to the surface of a planet? Why not teleport our magnet to a spot near a grand funnel of copper tubing a couple AU long? Since velocity only matters locally, we can have a zero local velocity of the magnet be equal to 1c relative to our funnel (or vice-versa; our funnel with a zero local velocity will see the magnet traveling at 1c).

12,000 kg of mass traveling at 2,997,925,458 m/s is going to deliver far more joules than traveling at 127 m/s. About 2360000 times more energy, for a total of about 2.3 exajoules.

If the teleporters run on anything around 2.3 exajoules, your civilization is completely alien to anything a modern human could understand, just as stone-age humans would be absolutely perplexed by humans using computers, driving cars, and having flushing toilets. Sure, a stone-aged person could adapt (humans have been smart for a very long time), but a person then could never have foreseen the most mundane aspects of our daily lives now.

We can not draw any conclusions about the weapons and demon mitigation tactics of a civilization that far advanced, just as 2,000 years ago, we didn't know about firearms, tanks, bombers, battleships, and aircraft carriers.