Season 11-  Teleportation

Episode 4 - Will humans teleport before the world ends?

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SPOILER ALERT: you will never be teleported. You will never go to Stockholm in the blink of an eye to have coffee with an old Erasmus friend. Any more than you will go to Tokyo for ramen on a whim, or to Buenos Aires for empanadas. Bad news for your food cravings. But let's be clear, neither your children, nor your children's children will have this chance. Unless of course aliens arrive with technology today, or we become immortal within a few decades. So yes, there’s something a little sad about this observation. Just as The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper believes that he will die before the technological possibility of transferring his mind into a computer, we must live with the certainty that we will always travel over land and sea in one piece. Unless you are (or have) a quantum state requiring a movement of “7.1 qubits per second over several tens of kilometres, within a metropolitan network.” In this case, you can hope to teleport in around thirty or forty years. Let's say 2060, when quantum teleportation could potentially leave labs to become accessible to those who can use it. This will be the first deadline we work with.

As discussed in previous episodes, teleportation is far from becoming a reality. Because even if it becomes technologically available, it would struggle to succeed in regulatory, economic and, above all, usage terms. Finally, and above all, it would likely generate immeasurable energy consumption, after having swallowed up titanic resources to reach maturity. Two scenarios open up to us. In the first, humans have decided to mobilise their production capacities to generate green energy and distribute it to essential needs, and not teleportation. Ultimately, the idea is even abandoned, in favour of a return to slowness, to a world where no one is in a hurry and where teleporting would be nonsense.

In the second scenario, humans continue to encourage a model based on the permanent acceleration of consumption behaviours and, by extension, means of travel. So they spend a fortune so brilliant minds can dedicate themselves to advancing useless and potentially destructive technology, rather than working for the greater good. In their own way, they’re accelerating the race towards the collapse of civilization. Except that, even so, the teleport is not ready in time. Or so late that the rest of the world is already in the process of regressing when the first billionaires teleport to escape water wars and there are wars over the control of the last arable land. Yes, you're right, it's terrifying. Fortunately, this is a bit of a sluggish outlook, tinged with bad faith. Thanks to that, we have our second deadline: just before the end of the world.

In 2060, when you’ve become a teleportable quantum state:

• You won't care about teleporting since, as in all quantum states, you will have much more infinitesimal concerns.

• In mainland France, several million of your former fellow humans will have had to flee from the coast because of rising water levels.

• They will be rehoused in large barges stationed along the new coastal cities of France: Rennes, Nantes, Poitiers, Angoulême, Pau…

• The inhabitants of the FNI – non-flooded France as it will be called – will debate the reception (or not) of all these people, who have been deprived of their land.

Just before the end of the world:

• The only humans who can afford teleportation will use it to take refuge on mountain peaks.

• In addition to being sheltered from rising waters, these mountains will have become self-sufficient fortresses for billionaires, equipped with suspended agricultural platforms.

• Other humans will have left the cities to reorganise themselves into agrarian communities. Old gardening books will have become bibles sold at the price of gold.

• In their eyes, teleportation will only be a concept of magic or science fiction. As for us…