To teleport or not to teleport ...

Just recalled a conversation I overheard when H and I were having lunch in between trying on dresses. (Me trying them on, not him, obviously...)

A man and his nephew (I presume - they looked fairly alike, and the teenager spoke about his mum and dad, so it was not his father) were discussing whether or not people would want to use a teleporter.

Now, the reason my ears pricked up at this (other than the fact that we were right next to each other, barely a gap between tables; you can't have a private conversation in London, I think!) was that I have recently started reading another Man Booker nominee, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (I'll put the review on my other blog when I've finished it), and in that book, the narrator is asked to value a company that specialises in travel - using a teleporter. He works out how much people are prepared to travel by Concorde, thinks of the amount of time saved by being able to go from New York to London instantaneously, and values the company at a couple of billion dollars or so. The interviewer then points out that he has greatly overvalued the company because there is one factor he has not taken into account: whether or not people will actually feel confident in using this means of transport, which would somehow require their atoms to be dispersed and somehow reformed elsewhere.

And this was the topic that the man and teenager were discussing. What were the odds of someone dying using this machine, and what did the odds have to be before people would actually want to use it. The boy suggested if the machine was 99.9% safe, then that was quite good. The man then worked out (and forgive my shoddy maths, the following figures might all be completely wrong, if so then it's because I can't remember what he said so I'm making it up - his figures sounded quite accurate) that if someone was using the transporter roughly three times a day, then they would use it about 1000 times a year; at 99.9% this would mean that ... Sorry, I can't even begin to make those calculations just now!, but let's just say that he worked out that you would be at quite a high risk of dying ... The two recalibrated the figures until they got a percentage they were happy with, where you might by likely to die once in fifty years or so ...

Then there was a philosophical discussion of how someone might die. If it was known how you would die, ie if when you used this machine, the manner of death (on those rare occasions when it malfunctioned) was always the same (eg the box you were sitting in would fill with smoke, the walls would begin to collapse, you would ... ), would that make you more or less likely to want to use this form of transport? The man proposed that people don't mind travelling in cars because they wouldn't necessarily know how they might die if they were in an accident, there are so many different ways.

Finally, there was a discussion on whether or not people would choose to use a manner of transport that they didn't understand. The boy thought that it could be frightening if they didn't understand how the machine worked. The uncle pointed out that by the time such a machine was invented, we would understand how it worked - no one understands anything that hasn't been invented yet. Other than me curiously wondering how that statement would apply to Jules Verne or Leonardo Da Vinci, the boy contemplated the thought that people wouldn't have understood that rubbing two sticks together would make light (and heat) until they did it.

By now the time was passing on, the ice cream sundae had been devoured, and off the two philosophers went.