Edit: This only refers to costs (paid by the manufacturers), not fees (paid for by the buyers).
Unless the teleporters cost money to run?
Shipping costs may go, but shipping fees will remain.
Yeh, then it would be teleportation costs.
“If I make something up, I can make up whatever I want about it.”
Yup.
Not necessarily. Still takes energy to move it. Depending on the energy required, could still have a cost
The cost will be comparatively less, and negligible given that digital goods don’t have “energy” fees (and never had, btw)
Teleportation is a made up technology so the rules around it are made up. But if we set some basic rules for it that are at least somewhat ground in science fiction.
You will probably need a receiving pad for the teleported items to arrive to as the earth is constantly moving through space so you need to anchor the teleporting location, that will probably be expensive
In order to follow the first law of thermodynamics where energy has to be conserved at the minimum the energy required for moving the goods will have to be used by the transporter and probably with some amount of inefficiency so if we say it takes the same amount of energy as it currently cost but with less labor and less warehouses it can easily cost several dollars and would scale based on distance
So you would probably be responsible for paying those energy costs and the teleporter pad costs
Why?
We traded energy cost for time when we stopped walking, and replaced it with an animal and a cart, and again with cars, and airplanes. We save time, but the energy input is greater.
Who’s to say that teleportation wouldn’t be a trade off between 5x the energy to take a jet, but instantaneous?
Digital goods aren’t physical; teleportation is physical.
Considering that
Power = WorkDone / TimeTaken
and lets just say for this instance that WorkDone is same for the jet and for the teleporter[1], which is kinda wrong, but won’t matter anyway as you see further.Then,
Powerteleporter = Powerjet × TimeTakenjet / TimeTakenteleporterthen going with “instantaneous”
With limit(TimeTakenteleporter ⟶ 0)
Powerteleporter ⟶ ∞
Now, someone will ask, what if WorkDone in case of teleportation is actually close to 0.
But that won’t happen, simply because the minimum value for WorkDone in that case would be equivalent to the change in gravitational potential, making it a significant amount as compared to the other limits.
Oh and digital goods do have an energy cost, btw.
because calculating work done in such a scenario is kinda hard ↩︎
This really depends.
Teleportation consists of three main phases:
- scanning/deconstruction
- sending
- reconstruction
If the deconstruction and/or reconstruction phases cost a ton of energy, it doesn’t matter if the sending phase has a high energy bill.
But since you have transmit data on each atom, you will have huge amounts of data to send.
For example, 1kg of carbon has about 5*10^25 atoms. Humans aren’t made entirely of carbon, but the rough order of magnitude will be similar. Let’s go with a 70kg human and we end up with roughly 10^27 atoms.
Let’s say we have good compression techniques and a single byte is enough to store all data of one atom. That means, we need to send about 10^28 bits of data.
In September 2023 the total bandwith of the global internet was about 1.2 Pbps, or 10^15 bits per second.
So to transmit a single human being with the speed of the entire global internet combined it would take 10^13 seconds or about 300 000 years. I think that kind of data transmission could cost a little bit of money.
Compare that to the cost of shipping 70kg of human being anywhere on the planet. By plane, it will cost in the order of a few thousand Euros and it will take one day, two at most, not 300 000 years.
Who’s to say compression wouldn’t exist, e.g. this is a 1kg of carbon. All of their atoms are exactly the same. This doesn’t require so much energy.
Again, the 1kg of carbon was only used to come up with the rough amount of atoms for 1kg of weight.
Last I checked, humans, same as most other things, don’t just consist of pure carbon. Also, you need to include position data as well, so even in our 1kg of carbon no two atoms are exactly the same since no two atoms are at the same exact position and same exact rotation. And no two atoms are bonded to the same exact atoms.
If you send just the data of “dump 1kg of carbon atoms there”, you will turn a diamond into carbon dust when teleporting it. I don’t want to see the result of what happens if you teleport a human that way.
And you actually don’t only have to take the atomic properties into consideration but also the subatomic ones. The 1 byte per atom was already purpousely a ridiculously low guess. It’s much more likely you need data in the order of megabytes per atom.
Sci fi makes teleportation look easy. Press a button, disappear here, reappear there.
In reality, every single component of teleportation is so hard that we don’t even have a clue how this could theoretically be done with future tech. We don’t have a way to scan anything (let alone a human being) with nearly the level of detail that we’d need. We don’t have a way to deconstruct the item that is supposed to be sent. We have neither a way to store nor to send the enormous amounts of data required. And we have no concept of a clue how to do the reconstruction.
Just to visualize this a bit better: it will be much, much easier to clone objects than to teleport them, because teleporting is cloning plus deconstruction.
So if you understand that creating objects out of thin air is resource-intensive, then that necessarily means that teleportation will be even more difficult and expensive than just cloning objects.
The physical shipping costs will be much higher, the shipping market will become luxurious and you won’t be able to afford that.
That’s so far from true. It’ll be cost of electricity. Heat. Distance shipped. They’ll probably tack on some country border crossing fee. They’ll find ways to make it more expensive simply because it’s an earth shattering technology.
Trump won’t exist if teleportation is invented.
I see you are missing the the ever present influence of corporate greed.
Pay us $30 to get the package to your customer in 3 days, or $150 to get it there in the next hour. Why $150? because people will pay it.
With the greed of corporations you pay the premium tier for teleportation and low cost shipping to wait a few days.
Once teleportation exist, so do replicators and all costs apart from energy costs disappear.
Internet is technically teleportation (of data) and I am not seeing replicators anywhere.
Ah, yes. That’s why when you upload a photo to facebook, only one friend gets to download it before you have to re-upload it for the next person.
With the interpretation of the internet being teleportation of data, your Webbrowser becomes a replicator of data, as e.g. the video that you are streaming from YouTube is merely being copied from its servers, but not deleted from its source.
In general computers are just copying data, i.e. replicating data.
wait so if data is like dna, does that make computers like plants with their pollen being data packets like memes, articles, and videos… and we’re the pollinators?
