Interstellar teleporter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An interstellar teleporter is a hypothetical technology appearing in science fiction, typically in hard sci-fi, which teleports people and/or other objects over interstellar distances instantaneously. In some cases the matter of the physical person or object is scanned or disassembled at the point of departure and information is transmitted so that the person or object may be reassembled at the point of arrival. In other cases (such as "Springers" in John Barnes' Thousand Culture universe), the technology involves a "spatial coordinate remapping" whereby a distant location is remapped to a location adjacent to the point of departure on the device. This assumes existence of two coordinate systems in space: one "real" and one "relative". Another version makes use of wormhole theory, creating a fold in space to shorten travel time. All such forms of teleportation are purely hypothetical.
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[edit] Examples
- the Door in Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s short story The Rule of the Door.
- Gate in Ken Macleod's Newton's Wake: A Space Opera. Macleod's gates are entrances to the wormhole skein, a network of Visser-Kar wormholes, referred to as Carlyle's Drift.
- Ramsbotham Jump in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Tunnel in the Sky.
- Farcaster portals in the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.
- Runcible on Neal Asher's novel Gridlinked
- Springer technology in John Barnes' series of novels:
- A Million Open Doors
- Earth Made of Glass
- Merchant of Souls
- Wargate in Bruce Balfour's The Forge of Mars.
- The Stargate featured in the movie Stargate and the follow up series' Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis.
- An intergalactic teleporter made a brief appearance in the John Carpenter horror movie They Live.
- Wormholes feature in Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga, connecting over 600 worlds.
- The Rowan series by Anne McCaffrey features psionic, rather than technological, means of interstellar teleportation.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
Roy Sorenson. 2003. A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-515903-9. Pp. 144-145.
