Ask HN: Would mastering teleportation make us gods? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would mastering teleportation make us gods?

I had an interesting conversation with my spouse this morning where we speculated about the possibility of teleportation.

I explained that one of the proposed ways to perform teleportation is to take the transferred object/subject into apart on the one side and transfer the information about the composition and then compose it on the other side.

Then I continued that possibly the most plausible variant of this is not only using ready made atoms for the composition but creating the needed atoms during the process.

Implications of this would be the that we would be able to create any material item just from energy based on its model.

My spouse then followed with the question, would this make us gods?

I suppose, I answered, at least semi-gods.

What do you think?

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Most of the things we have today would make us gods to people 1000 years ago. We can kill people with just a finger on a magic wand (aka a firearm). We can move to any place around the world and know where every city is, within 48 hours. We have flying things that can kill millions of people and ships that carry flying things. Heck, we have medical knowledge and don't rely on the four humours to heal people anymore.

If we could create any material item just from energy, we'd end up with developers. Most of the creation will still be use case analysis, product design and development, iteration, "clean code", "debugging".

Something like CRISPR has a lot of potential, but we're still a long way from creating all kinds of crazy things.

There's a bunch of science fiction stories about teleportation and duplicates. Usually most don't go into the theological aspect, more about the ethical. As in you should destroy the source once you verified a safe creation of the destination to "balance the equation".

But yeah, like the Star Trek Replicators they can create virtually anything... though there's always some bit about some elements unable to be re-imaged. Though you raise another quandary of being able to play-back creation of objects including organic living elements (food, tea, etc.)... Mad science playing with the subject data and creating instant mutants...

I'm not sure I'd opt to be teleported. Since you are copied then killed at the transmitting end. However, that's probably just my irrational brain, fixated on the idea that my specific atoms, rather than their structure, is what makes me me.

Being able to materialize anything we want would definitely make us god-like. Bending reality to our will. The question might then become how do we get enough energy to make the things we want.

Reading this instantly reminded me of The Prestige (2006).

It sounds to me more as if we’d already need to be gods in order to master teleportation.

As the apparatus you describe is entirely fictional, I see no reason why you can't invest yourself with any fictional attributes you want whilst you imagine using the device.

So, if your spouse wants to imagine being a god, I can't see any logical objection.

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