What are modes of instantaneous travel as alternatives to matter-to-energy transport?

Question

In Star Trek they have the transporters. It's an effectively instantaneous travel method that converts matter to energy, then back to matter in a different location. They give the machine a limited range and it takes about two seconds.

I want such a travel method, but I don't want the implications of matter-to-energy conversion technology. The only one I can think of is the space-bending method from Dune. I'm not too picky if it has no theoretical range limit. I am picky if it requires fixed start and end points, so no wormholes. I'm just looking for some method of instantaneous travel with open-ended start and end points. A good answer will note the relative safety of the method.

Answer 1

1) Do not do the extra step. No Mass - Energy - Mass transfer. Send the "fermions" of the people directly (people would not survive the acceleration, but electrons would). You need two devices of course, one that atomizes people and one that deatomizes people. How can this be accomplished? No idea, otherwise I'd be a billionaire. But the same can be said about any other answer. How save would it be? It depends on where you are "teleporting". If there is stuff in the path, this would be problematic. If you are doing this in vacuum - this isn't much of a problem. I also do not think this is any more of a stretch than Mass-Energy stuff.

2) Instead of transporting people as energy, only transport the information needed to reconstruct them. If you want to go into Science Fantasy, you can combine that with the idea of a conscience that can be transfered into a computer and downloaded again. You would not transport anyone directly via energy but just what is needed to reconstruct that person. So in principal you destroy one body (or keep it for later use) at one location and recreate (or reactivate) that body in another location. This would most likely be safer than normal travel.

3) We are dealing with non-hard science here anyways, you can have your wormholes and portals behave any way you want. The idea generally used in Sci fi behind such travel devices is that they are a shortcut through space. Why they would be fixed to one location and why you couldn't make the appear anywhere you want is beyond me - since they are fictional anyways. Most people do that for story reasons, if you can just open portals anywhere you create problems. This is literally as safe as walking - or - alternatively as safe as you want it to be since you make up the rules.

4) I already stated this in the comments (sort of): "FTL drive". Have some kind of machine, maybe a space ship, that can travel as fast as you wish. Maybe inside a warp bubble. Maybe in hyperspace. Maybe in whatever since this is all made up make-believe. You decide how fast they can accelerate with that thing. You can decide how fast you can go with that. You can make up a train that goes from Earth to Mars in a second because "hyperspace".

Answer 2

Since we are using Star Trek as a reference here, lets add a little canon from the first season of Next Generation.

In "Where No Man Has Gone Before", Wesley Crusher and the Traveler have a conversation in which Wesley suggests that Space, Time and Thought are not the separate entities which we currently believe they are, but are instead part of a larger singular whole. The Traveler, who is from a much more advanced race implies that Wesley is right about the proposal. Later in the episode, the link between thought and location is actually demonstrated.

If that is they case, then perhaps the mode of transportation that you are looking for involves inducing a very strong-willed delusion about where you are.

Cogito, Ergo, Sum.

Answer 3

The question as written is difficult to answer in any specific manner since what is considered a 'good' answer will be based on one's personal sense of balance between imagination and rationality.

With this in mind, it seems a couple of specific examples may prove most useful.

1. Travel utilizing "Dimensional" structure: I once created a starship for a short story which was able to 'slide' along 2-dimensional space, thereby somehow avoiding some of the pitfalls of 3 (or 4) dimensional curved space-time, and thereby enabling cross-galactic travel. The ship (I believe I referenced as a 'slip-streamer'...) was introduced as alien technology of an unknown source (of course), but its construction included a pair of 'manifolds' of which a portion existed only in 2-dimensional space. These manifolds acted like ice skates as one skates across an ice rink, with only a two dimensional portion (the portion of the blade which actually touches the ice) subject to inertia, etc. Could be as safe as you like. Note however, in my story the craft was no less difficult to master than skating.

2. Travel utilizing the background energy matrix of zero point energy: This could be a 'transporter', a bridge, a craft, etc. which directly interfaces (is attached to?) the zero point energy field of modern physics theory, allowing one to 'break the rules of nature' by traveling outside normal space. Sounds safe to me.

Answer 4

Space/time warp comes to mind.

In fiction, it hasn't been used for very short distances, but if you can bend space time to move between two solar systems, then you should also be able to bend space/time to get between a ship and a planet's surface.

It may be that a great deal of power is needed to warp space/time, so that might get you from the ship to the surface, but it won't get you back without a dedicated warping device.

Or, maybe your civilization has figured out how to warp space time with a very small device, maybe worn on a belt. If you're going to create a civilization, they may as well be brilliant.

Answer 5

If your "universe" is actually a simulation, then pretend your inhabitants are sentient NPCs who have figured out how to hack the code from within the simulation. This allows them to totally bypass all known physical laws of their "universe." They can instantly move their location with the right hack, even though such movement ought to be impossible. Perhaps over time they figure out other hacks. As a twist, you can pretend the NPCs don't realize what they've done, only that they've achieved the impossible. Then they try to come up with a coherent in-universe theory to justify how that was possible. Perhaps it will be a new science of magic, or hyperdimensionality, or psionic power. Or perhaps a new religion, even.

Answer 6

Kamikaze Transport Pods

These are computer piloted surface to orbit one-man shuttle craft which provide apparently instantaneous transportation. It is only apparently instantaneous because it does actually take time, sometimes even a few minutes, to complete the journey, but it holds its occupant in a state of suspended consciousness during that time. A person can literally step into a pod in mid-sentence and step out onto the planet without missing a syllable. The time consumed by the journey simply doesn't exist from the passenger's point of view.

The reason that the pods suspend their passenger's consciousness has to do with their autopilot's driving habits. Where most AI piloted craft spend the greater half of their processing power and fuel supply in making their passengers comfortable, Kamikaze pods just get the job done; in the absolute minimum amount of time survivable by their human occupant. They make meteors look slow.

Not that the pods can't land slowly. Sometimes they have to. During their entire journey, they carefully monitor their unconscious passenger's health and make allowances for any detected frailty. But when the passenger is up to the rigors of a full speed descent, nothing can get them there faster than a Kamikaze Pod.

Answer 7

Quantum teleportation. We know quantum particles can and do "tunnel" through barriers, and we can induce them to teleport short distances under some circumstances. Through the magic of handwavium [insert technobabble here], our teleporters do that on a macroscopic scale.

Answer 8

At the earth site I would choose to map the brain of the traveller, send the brain map to the destination via traditional data transfer technology like a satallite (there is ongoing work in this field like Blue Brain).

At the destination there will be a body with a template brain waiting mapping. Like an avatar sort of thing, but the traveller original "copy" cryogenically hybernated to wait for the travelled brain map to return.

So you need to work on creating avatars resembling the traveller's body waiting at the destination site.

When the traveller is going back home, the new brain map should be uploaded to the earth site to overwrite the original traveller brain.

Transportation should be then very cheap and super safe.

The avatars by design should have a self destruction timer or aging mechanism so travellers won't travel for the sake of immortality. Unless you want them to.

Answer 9

There seem to be no "implications of matter-to-energy conversion technology" used in Star Trek. Beaming often fails due to some "frequency interference" or jamming of some sort, but it is not related to technology in any way, just a plot device to limit too convenient technology.

There is no known physical mechanism that would allow for teleportation. Any such method is a pure magic, the only difference is the handwaving method. There are no other "modes of instantaneous travel as alternatives to matter-to-energy transport", they are all exactly the same.

Any techno-babble would do. [Particle name] teleportation or something.

I would go with alien device. Humans intercepted a badly damaged derelict alien fighter craft which drifted into Solar system. It is almost completely dysfunctional, but one strange gadget makes researchers disappear. Eventually missing people were found floating in space half a way to the Sun.

So, researchers tinkered with the device and found how to control it. It works with very high precision and completely reliable. The operation exchanges matter between origin and destination, so if you send a man into a block of iron you get yourself an iron statue of a dead guy. Beam him into the Sun, get a nasty explosion.

After spending trillions, corporation K managed to duplicate the device even though the mechanism is still a complete mystery.

Too perfect technology can be harmful to the story. So, it should have some limitations. Copied device may be imperfect. Distance, mass, volume, precision, energy requirements, price of duplication. Some workarounds may be necessary, e.g. if you send an object 100 light years away expect it to end up in one light year vicinity of destination and be ready for additional jumps.

Answer 10

OPTION 1: Move the universe around you

In Futurama, this is how the Planet Express Ship's dark matter engine circumvents the speed of light. Fandom wiki

OPTION 2: Simulate it

Why go across the universe to explore an unknown planet, when you can use a supercomputer to simulate the entire evolution of the universe from your own holosphere? This will not help with obtaining resources or avoiding planetary catastrophe though.

Answer 11

What you can achieve in your story is not going to be based on known physics.

Star Trek teleporters are a perfect example of hand-waving for achieving the desired outcome of teleportation.

So, consider using this for you plausible-sounding teleportation mechanism. Using an exotic super-cooled fluid (or ultra-hot plasma, or whatever else you prefer), assume that quantum fluctuations within the fluid are found to make a generous quantity of sub-microscopic worm-holes. You discovered a way to manipulate these wormholes, and grow them into stable macroscopic wormholes that will be traversable without killing the humans using the wormholes.

The other end of the wormhole will be one of the one billions and billions of microscopic wormholes leftover from the big bang that we never detected before your new breakthrough technology.

Dress it up with some fancy sounding pseudo-physics and tell your story.

You can choose whether you need a remote chamber (or whatever form of jump booster is needed) to detect and manipulate the remote holes, or do you need a remote chamber to create a batch of wormwhole-laden substrate for the target of your teleport. Or maybe the remote chamber just is needed for longer-jumps with the limitation of fixed jumppoints, it's all up to you.

Safety - it's as safe as you want it to be. Maybe high power and high precision equipment improves the reliability of the jump. Minimal power being cheap but flakey, suitable for transport of bulk goods or desperate people without access to the high-precision, high power equipment needed for near 100% success.

Maybe jammers could interfere with the sensing equipment needed to control the remote jump-points.

Pretend your technology has figured out a way to create entangled wormholes without having to have them local to each other initially and you have a nice-hand-wavium way to link a pair of holes that suits your purposes - I suggest using a tachyon carrier wave to link the pair so that pesky lightspeed does not interfere with your sweet ride.

If you don't like remote control of jump points, just drop a miniaturized and hardened jump receiver into your ships EM canon, and shoot the receiver to the planets surface in preparation for jumping.

Like Star Trek, you can change the rules when it suits you to make the solution more or less powerful. Just don't annoy your audience by making the changes interfere with telling a entertaining and plausible story. Your audience is willing to suspend disbelief, that's the way most SF works.