Forever a Foreigner

I’ve been doing some thinking lately about teleportation, and I have concluded that I am totally against it.

Doubtless you have seen those futuristic films where characters gleefully transport across great distances through a single, instantaneous, leap. Doesn’t it seem wonderful? Wouldn’t it be nice to do away with all that hassle of travel?

No, I say. I am sorry, but you thought wrong. But before you turn your eyes away from this article in disgust, allow me to explain. As a world traveler myself, I know all too well how terrible teleportation would be.

Teleportation could do away with travel, you say? Well, travel itself has already surpassed quaint, antiquated terms like “journey” and “distance”.   

Let us go back in time. In the old days, when journeying to the other side of the world, one had to actually go through that distance. One had one’s horse, or one’s cart, or even just one’s legs. Travel speed depended upon the animal, the wind, the current, or the muscle. No matter how rich or poor, one had to travel through the distance. One had to make stops along the way. One had to notice, whether one liked or not, the changing trees and plants, the geography of the land, and the people in it, with their funny languages and odd customs. The changes came gradually as one went along, and one grasped the distance and adjusted to the new sights and ways of life. One felt the enormity of such a tremendous journey.

Then came steam engines, along with ships and trains. Cars were invented. Travel shortened. Now one could enter an enclosed space and move very quickly across the miles. But even then, there was (and still is) a sense of distance. Stops still have to be made every now and again, and in traveling from one side of the earth to the other, one still has weeks to make the proper adjustments. Even though the journey is speeding by, one can at least still see it doing so.

But then came that diabolical invention that is only a few hours away from being the dreaded technology of teleportation itself—planes!

If one wishes to go to the exact opposite side of this sphere we call a world, it can take exactly 22 hours. That is not journeying. That is traveling.

Have you ever made this shocking trip?

First, one enters the “airport”. These terminals are designed to muddle one’s sense of time. They never sleep, running at all hours of day and night. They are full of windows and full of clocks, yet one is never quite sure of the time. It is full of people coming and going, yet no one ever is reaching their destination. A map will show that all airports are indeed located within countries, but a passing traveler’s passport only ever shows his point of origin and his final destination. Like a ghost, he may come and go from one land to another, never seeing what strange things lie outside those long glass windows, vanishing without a trace.

Then one boards the plane, the first in a series of planes, for they have not yet created a diabolical super-plane that can fly for a day straight. One finds a seat, and then the ground is left behind. Whole nations and peoples and cultures pass under your feet, 9,203 miles of them. One sees nothing of it but the clouds. Night and day grow muddled. One eats. One tries to sleep. And always, all around, the hum of the machine.

Then one reaches the ground. One steps out of the airport, and Time reasserts itself again. But wait! The air is strange. The sky has altered its appearance. The people are speaking oddly, and their ways are so alien one hardly knows what to do. What is this? Is this another planet? It might as well be, for how shocking a change it is.

To travel from one side of this earth to the other today is to enter a long dream, a dream without waking, where one sits and stands and feels the hum of engines, and somehow, in a day or less, arrives blinking in the sunlight of another world.

It seems wrong somehow that such a herculean leap should take, relatively speaking, no time at all, and now the new place, this foreign place, is racing along, expecting you to keep up, even though you just passed from one universe into another. Where is the fanfare? The feeling of achievement after a long journey?

It seems as though you cheated Distance itself, and in doing so arrived unprepared.

If this is already the current state of affairs, just imagine how much worse teleportation would be!