Teleporters and Transporters/Analysis

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Required Secondary Powers

Teleportation-users would need to have some way of extending their teleportation to their clothes and items if they do not wish to reach their destination naked. Clothes are one thing but dental fillings, bone pins, pacemakers, etc would be unpleasant to suddenly be without. Ignoring the ludicrousness of trying to extend quantum-scale barrier tunneling to the classical scale (assuming that's how matter teleportation works in your particular 'Verse, or that the Real Life rules of quantum physics even apply at all), such motion usually needs large amounts of energy as well.

Long-distance teleporters would also need to compensate for the curvature of the Earth and relative motion of different points on the Earth's surface; someone teleporting from Europe to China would otherwise arrive traveling very, very fast while upside-down. Furthermore they need to be really accurate to avoid falling hundreds of feet on arrival or appearing inside the Earth itself, or something else - and even if they manage to appear in relatively empty space, they need to somehow ensure (1) that the air at the destination does not end up inside their body, causing decompression sickness and a potentially-fatal air embolism, and (2) that some matter replaces them at the departure location, to avoid an implosion which would damage things in the area. Best variants so far boil down to cutting an area out of reality and pasting it in at the destination in a speed-synchronized way (of course, the destination area must be instantaneously exchanged with the source). Or a Wormhole, which is basically a spatial shortcut—the real-world physics term for such a hypothetical form of transport is "topological displacement".

  • Motion could theoretically not take any energy at all as long as the gravity is the same in both places. The energy you spend walking, for example, ends up being absorbed by friction, but teleportation doesn't involve friction.
  • The makers of Jumper actually subverted this by doing something similar to a wormhole(the "jumpscar"), which also causes a spherical explosion upon arrival the lead is jumping into a hospital, and the entire room is flattened, a circular pit with the lead in the center. Presumably there is also an implosion upon leaving, as seen in the bank robbery scene, and the money in the room starts flying after he goes back for seconds. there's also the scene in the end where he jumps with an entire apartment, causing a veritable tornado upon departure(should have probably flattened the entire block, considering an implosion of that size would be enough to heat the air to several thousand degrees and explode, violently, tactical nuke style. For comparison, just look at the effect a pistol shrimp has when it snaps its claw at ~60MPH underwater. To quote K. Montagne of Cracked.com: "That's like getting punched by Mike Tyson in his prime if his outstretched arm was attached to a meteor as it entered the atmosphere.")