Interstellar teleporter

An interstellar teleporter is a hypothetical technology appearing in science fiction, typically in soft sci-fi, which teleports people and/or other objects over interstellar distances instantaneously. In some cases the matter of the physical person or object is scanned or disassembled at the point of departure and information is transmitted so that the person or object may be reassembled at the point of arrival. In other cases (such as "Springers" in John Barnes' Thousand Culture universe), the technology involves a "spatial coordinate remapping" whereby a distant location is remapped to a location adjacent to the point of departure on the device. This assumes existence of two coordinate systems in space: one "real" and one "relative". Another version makes use of wormhole theory, creating a fold in space to shorten travel time. All such forms of teleportation are purely hypothetical.

Examples

• The Door in Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s short story The Rule of the Door.
• In Think Like a Dinosaur [The Outer Limits]
• Gate in Ken Macleod's Newton's Wake: A Space Opera. Macleod's gates are entrances to the wormhole skein, a network of Visser-Kar wormholes, referred to as Carlyle's Drift.
• Ramsbotham Jump in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Tunnel in the Sky.
• Farcaster portals in the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.
• Runcible on Neal Asher's novel Gridlinked
• Springer technology in John Barnes' series of novels:
  • A Million Open Doors
  • Earth Made of Glass
  • The Merchants of Souls
  • The Armies of Memory
• Wargate in Bruce Balfour's The Forge of Mars.
• The Stargate featured in the movie Stargate and the follow-up series Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe.
• An intergalactic teleporter made a brief appearance in the John Carpenter horror movie They Live.
• Wormholes feature in Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga, connecting over 600 worlds.
• Land-based wormhole gates in Robert Charles Wilson's novel Spin.
• The Rowan series by Anne McCaffrey features psionic, rather than technological, means of interstellar teleportation.
• The USS Voyager in Star Trek: Voyager finds a species with subspace teleport technology able to cross thousands of lightyears.
• The star window (Sternenfenster) in cycle 32 of the Perry Rhodan series can teleport a fleet of starships across intergalactic distances.
• In Doctor Who serial The Daleks Master Plan, set in the year 4000, the First Doctor, Steven and Sara Kingdom accidentally get caught up in a transmat experiment that sends them to the Planet Mira, which is 'many light years' from Earth.
• In Mass Effect, Mass Relays are massive interestellar teleporters. The first one discovered by mankind is the Charon Relay, which humanity previously thought to be a moon of Pluto.

See also

• Teleportation
• Jumpgate
• Jump drive

References

• Roy Sorenson. 2003. A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-515903-9. pp. 144–145.

Further reading

• Scheffer, Louis K. (1994). "Machine Intelligence, the Cost of Interstellar Travel and Fermi's Paradox". Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society (PDF)|format= requires |url= (help) (Royal Astronomical Society) 35: 157–175. Bibcode:1994QJRAS..35..157S. 

External links

• "Teleportation breakthrough made". BBC News. 2004-06-16. Retrieved 2008-08-05.