Can Everybody Reach Nirvana? Let's Hope (they) Can

Does anybody remember the hype about CERN¹ and the LHC² last year? The whole world watched with bated breath, and the closer the date of the start, the louder the doom and gloom prophets, telling us that the world was going to end because they'd create a large black hole in Geneva, which would swallow the earth. I thought this was funny, because the LHC was supposed to be started on 1 September, 2008, and we all know that the world is going to end on 30 May³any year. Now, the meaning of the acronyms CERN and LHC haven't got anything to do with Nirvana, but this is where my wish comes in. I've always imagined Nirvana not so much as a state of mind, but more as a place where I'd be happy. For me, this place is England. If you think I'm weird, go and read up on Anglophilia, which is by no means just an American concept.

So, how does this link to CERN and the LHC? From what I understood, they're trying to accelerate up particles to then make them collide, re-creating the Big Bang with the aim of getting to understand nature and its laws of physics better. In many other parts of the world, physicists are experimenting with transporter beams not unlike the ones we all know from Star Trek. If I recall it correctly, beaming is all about particles being transported, at extremely high speed, from location A to location B, over very long distances.
Now if CERN is successful, then it may help to understand what it needs to 'beam' people from one place to another, and if they joined the researches for beaming, which relies on a very similar principle to that of the LHC, I might live to see the first transporters go live.

Just think what it could mean were they to be successful: I wouldn't need to move to my Nirvana, leaving friends and family behind. I could visit my parents and siblings frequently, and vice versa. I could stay where I am, keep my job, and yet spend my free time in the country I love, with the friends I love. I could pop over on a Sunday morning for an Ulster Fry with a friend in Belfast. I could attend the Hull meet, and I could go and see all the places I've been wanting to see for years now – all this in a matter of seconds, or maybe a few minutes. I wouldn't sit here, biting my nails because my sons have gone on a holiday in a rented car, with a couple of mates, one of whom has only had his driving licence for a few weeks. I'd just see them to the nearest transporter. Just imagine we'd live to see this come true. It would open up the world to us. As it is, it takes months of planning and booking ahead, and although I usually get cheap flights, a whole weekend abroad costs a considerable amount of money, so I can only afford it once, maybe twice a year if I'm lucky. I'm not asking for everything at once, though. For a start, being able to go over a distance of, say, a 1,000km (621 miles) radius from where you start would do. My personal dream really is to go to the UK and back in a jiffy.

So OK, they'd have to make sure that a scenario like in the film The Fly couldn't happen, and there'd probably be transporter accidents, but let's be honest: there are car accidents, planes crash frequently, trains and tubes derail...Wo gehobelt wird, fallen Späne (You have to break an egg to make an omelet). I'd happily take a little risk if it meant that I could go where and when I wanted to, for a nominal fee. Transporters could be erected at bus stops, stations, airports and central places. They could be powered with renewable energy like solar or wind power, if possible. Just imagine the benefits for the environment if we wouldn't have to rely on fossil powered transport any more; all the parking space that could be transformed into lawns or playgrounds or similar. The possibilities for mankind and environment would be endless.

Now I know that this will need a lot of research and experiments, so why not start with a small invention: develop an intelligent SatNav. We'd need a reliable device to program the coordinates of the places we want to go. What we would not need, is a SatNav like the one my sister fought with last weekend. After fiddling endlessly with the buttons just to tell the thing which country and town we wanted to go, she eventually got to the point where she could enter the exact place we wanted to go, the Bahnhof (station). To our surprise, the SatNav didn't offer 'Bahnhof but suggested Zum Bahnhof (To the Station), and we said: hey, a SatNav that's grammatically correct, wow. My sister confirmed Zum Bahnhof in Gießen, Hesse, Germany, and off we went. Imagine our dismay when, after having driven several kilometres, we found ourselves in a tiny village, far away from Gießen, in an even tinier road, named – wait for it: Zum Bahnhof. The commune belongs to Gießen, so to the StaNav's understanding, it had shown us the correct way to the destination requested. More fiddling with the SatNav, which wasn't helped by the fact that we were unnerved and tired. You'll certainly agree that something like this shouldn't happen with such a sophisticated device like the transporter I imagine. Every journey starts with a first step. Let the intelligent SatNav be this first step.