so this image gave me time to think about teleportation machines.
I do think that travelling arbitrarily close to the speed of light (i.e. practically instant) might be doable, and probably actually is, but it would be so expensive that nobody would use it anyways.
i mean, you can just build a rocket and accelerate it arbitrarily close to the speed of light, using enough fuel. but the cost of doing so is prohibitively expensive, so there’s no practical way to actually ever do that in practice.
slow travel is just much more economical, that’s why teleportation is out of the question. but that’s economical reasons, not a fundamentally physical one.
this comic argues that through teleportation machines, travel would become instant and cheap. and i think it’s the opposite: the faster, the more expensive.
teleportation machines probably work by accelerating every part of you to the speed of light and slowing them down again on the other side. so it really is like a rocket acceleration.
and no, they wouldn’t kill you any more than stepping on an airplane does.
there’s also this existential comics about it that argues:
but that’s already the case on an airplane. if you drink a cup of water on the airplane, the atoms inside your body get swapped out for new ones; that literally happens all the time. so it partially kills you? but nobody thinks that way. (ship of theseus)
You have no idea what is actually true. All of what you said could later turn out to be false, once we learn more about the universe. So while this is a fun speculation based on current knowledge, it may effectively be completely useless in the future. And right now, it doesn’t even give any actionable arguments for anything.
oh i would say, a better understanding of the world is not “actionable” but it gives a better understanding of things, which gives me peace of mind, so it’s worth something.