h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...Or rather, the next best thing. In Larry Niven's Known Space and Ringwolrd series, planetwide teleportation is easily availiable; just step off the slidewalk (a moving pavement or sidewalk) into a nearby "transfer booth", dial up wherever you wish to go, and in an instant, you're there. The interesting thing though, is the social effects Niven dreams up, though I confess I haven't read his essay on "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation". Essencially though, cities and cultures would merge and intermingle, making the world into essencially one big city, something the protagonist of Ringworld sees almost as a tragedy; making the world a flat, boring place.

But teleportation doesn't seem feasible in the near future, why am I going on about it? Well, in my opinion, the internet might have a similar effect. The biggest industries in developed countries like EU, US, Japan et all, are tertiary; that is, they provide services or sell goods. The production of goods, or the mining of raw material, are areas that are much smaller than they were several decades ago. In short, the majority of business in the future will be able to be done over the internet; R&D, software development, selling of goods, insurance, whatever.

So whilst people can't instantly travel from say, Canada to India, they would be able to work as a single team. It's already not unusual for netizens to have friends in other countries, so social interaction might become global as well. And whilst people will probably still holiday in exotic places, might it not be best to hire a net-controlled robot for a day to explore about your holiday destination? Or to visit family in another country when you can't afford to visit them in person? It's not teleportation, but it's close.

Unfortunately people will probably continue get fatter and more lazy.

Anyway, that's my take on how the internet might change attitudes and society in the future: making the world considerably more global.

The dream of instantaneous transportation is one step closer now though:

Scientists in Canberra have successfully teleported a laser beam for the first time in Australia.

Teleportation is usually found in science fiction programs like Star Trek, but a team of researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) has carried out a successful teleportation experiment in a gravitational wave lab.

Team leader Dr Ping Koy Lam says it involved creating a laser beam, its disembodiment and the recreation of the original beam in a different location.

Dr Lam says the experiment involved laser light which is made up of photons which are quite different from any solid material.

"At the moment physicists are still puzzling over how to actually do it with a solid material, so we have to start with an atom," he said.

The discovery has applications for the development of quantum computers and telecommunications.
From www.abc.net.au/news/scitech/2002/ 06/item20020617070959_1.htm

Teleportation works as fiction because having every away team do a planet fall and then shuttle back up to the ship would take a lot of time and it's only five minutes to the next commercial.

Ideally speaking, having a touchy-feely simulacrum of yourself at the place you wanted to go would make more sense.

Of course, this would mean there would have to be one for every visitor and that also means the place would have to be set up for you.

Exploring uncharted territory still requires shoe leather.

Outside of the fact that teleporting might zip your butt inside the moelcules of a poorly positioned tree, it's dissassembling method might allow viral and bacterial adjustment for each locale, so you don't take or bring back malaria or dysentery. Thus, a whole new method for medicine.

You sit on this table, they figure out what you should have in your body and then they zap you to that table over there, sans malignancy.
Unfortunately, given the chauvinism of medicine against anything it truly doesn't understand and doesn't want to admit it, you might also lose something necessary that they don't know about yet, and you might wake up with an implanted suggestion to pay your bill before you buy food or make a car payment.

Once, in a little story, I stole a bunch of ideas from forty separate places and slapped them together in a concept where soldiers of the future didn't have to carry any spare ammo with them because they had a little teleportation device on their weapon that supplied them from a source.
It also applied to rations. The characters in the story were hoping the ammo didn't end up in their mouths, but they sometimes wished the rations could be jettisoned explosively!

Sleeping With The TV On!