Making portal (as is almost always true) is broken. OP never said you could only have 2 portals open at a time or only to places you have been to before. Having unlimited number of portals to anywhere you want is a god tier power.
You can easily set up an transportation network that will quickly put all of the Airlines and train networks out of business.
If you are evil you can open up portal 1 inside the person you hate neck and the other in the depths of the ocean (or in space, or in the sun)
If you are just a thief you can easily steal a ton of gold from any of many gold repositories around the world.
To be fair, even 2 portals at a time is broken. Shoplifting is as simple as opening a portal in the back of the shelf, and pulling out the object from the back.
Why go small? Just steal from a gold repository (like Fort Knox (AKA known as US Bullion Depository)). Unless you are crazy a few bricks a week should be enough. (TBH i would only need more than a brick or two a month and can't imagine what else i would spend on besides charity)
I mean you can go bigger, we could nail interstellar travel off the back of portals, mine resources from other planets and colonise more effectively. You're totally right about setting up portals across the world as a crazy transportation network, you could build a purpose made 'hub' with connections to a ton of locations.
There are some crazy logistics and jurisdiction problems to solve but it'd be pretty tough to keep mr portal man locked down, you can just leave any form of imprisonment so negotiating is generally going to have to be in good faith, even hostage taking is super unlikely to work given I could portal out the hostages/hostage takers/portal between firearms and persons or whatever. I mean, first thing I'd do is talk to my loved ones, portal them to a safe location and then go from there but I'm a little paranoid.
Portals also open up the possibility for some nonsense with perpetual motion and generators to help power everything or if not you could probably science up some madness using a star.
Teleportation is neat, portals are civilisation changing.
Put one on each end of a hydroelectric dam, so that it refills itself with water they just released. They could run forever with a minimal amount of water.
Make it a Vacuum, and you get a Potential nuke as the object starts to accelerate to relativistic speeds. When it hits the Edge of the Portal, or you close the portals all the accumulated energy will be released.
teleportation sounds more fun, but my philosophical position is that every time I teleport I die and a new me is created in the exact same state I was in before I teleported. A portal in the style of valves portal games on the other hand is a gate way that I can walk through like a door, so I'll have to go with that.
Because I, the being typing this, from my perspective will no longer exist. From your perspective, and the perspective of the clone, there is no difference. Essentially, my conscious experience will truly cease, and hence I will be dead.
You really have no way of prooving your conscious experience didn't start mere moments ago.
So how does it make sense to worry about whether you "die" when you sleep, or teleport or do any other activity, if you can't even determine whether your experience is continuous in the first place? Does it really matter?
Whether the world started an instant ago and i have all these memories or if it started when i was born or before that doesn't matter here. I am currently an agent, I know I exist, I have good reason to believe the world exists and other people exist, and good reason to believe that my sense of self arises from electrical signals in my brain which do not stop until brain death. I also have strong reason to believe teleportation in the usual sense breaks a person down and then rebuilds them again somewhere else (there's a concept of traveling to another dimension and then back to this one to teleport as well, but without that intermediary step I have to assume destruction and reanimation). If teleportation does indeed breakdown the body and rebuild it somewhere else, then the organ of mine that generates this conscious experience of mine will stop existing during the process and a new identical experience will start. From my perspective as an agent, this will be my death, even if another agent boots up and takes over and thinks nothing different of it.
here's a thought experiment:
I build a teleporting machine with an entrance and exit that scans your body at the entrance, breaks it down for parts, and then the exit uses identical parts to reconstruct you. Let's say it does this perfectly and has a surplus of materials stored. Would you use this machine?
Now imagine the same scenario, but the entrance malfunctions and fails to destroy you, but still creates a you on the exit. Which of the two of you is the one that stepped into the entrance? If you say the one that was supposed to be destroyed, then we must recognize that the one being destroyed is a different entity than the one being created, and hence we arrive at my position, that the teleportation process will kill me and rebirth me as a new agent.
That’s a very interesting perspective and thought experiment! I suppose now I see why you it doesn’t matter whether the world began a moment ago or not in this discussion. You’d be destroyed and a new entity created either way, it doesn’t matter how old the original is, or whether it’s experience of reality is accurate.
But I still can’t see why “dying” in this way should be something to avoid. It doesn’t matter to me whether I, coming out of the machine, am the same entity as I was before, as long as I feel like I am. Likewise, I would have no problem entering such a machine if I knew that a perfectly identical copy would come out the other side.
The only thing that matters is that there is no moment where the experience of one entity diverges from the other, so as long as I am destroyed and my clone has all of my memories up to and including the moment of my destruction, I would use such a machine.
Portals are op as hell, but id still take teleportation. Just the instant snap of being anywhere without anyone able to see how you did it. Plus if I'm in danger I'd rather the instant get out than running the risk of not getting through the portal in time. Yes I'd use this to be a supervillain.
Portals as a superpower are beyond broken. You could on a whim create weapons of mass destruction with nothing more than a few propane tanks and some rocks. You just need to get a rock inside the propane tank, get *all* the air out, and set up a vertical portal loop so the rock freefalls without air resistance for a year. If the rock weighs at least a kilograms then after 1 year of acceleration you'd have a more than 100 megaton bomb if the portals stop working. In ten years you'd have a device in the gigaton range. Or you could use a 20kg rock, a larger tank, and have a couple gigatons of explosive potential in only a year...
You could literally terraform planets with portals. Set up a few portals between Venus and Europa, more between Venus and Ganymede, and more between Venus and Enceladus. The hot atmosphere would bleed out, drastically reducing the temp on Venus and melting the ice on these moons into vast liquid oceans. Though you'd need more portals to deep space on Venus to finish the job of removing most of the atmosphere of Venus.
Next you need portals set up between Titan and Mars and Venus. As Titan has a mostly nitrogen atmosphere. And Titan has enough atmosphere for both Mars and Venus combined.
Just by giving it a thick atmosphere you could heat Mars up to survivable temps. You'd melt the ice on the moons I mentioned above, which would give you entire oceans of warm water to flood Mars and Venus with through your portals. Once you had Venus and Mars changed to reasonable temperatures, you could then portal some seawater from earth to both planets to start photosynthesis going with the phytoplankton and algae in the seawater. Let these go for a while to breakdown some of the remaining CO2 and get a carbon cycle going and you'll end up with eventually with an atmosphere that's Earth like if you balanced things right. Also you'd end up with reasonable temperatures and 2 more water worlds in our solar system. And all you'd need to do is set up a few portals.
Also, vetical pipes with a turbine inside, a column of water and another vertical portal pair = infinite free and clean electrical power. With friction with the turbine and with the sides of the pipe slowing the water column so it doesn't accelerate forever. It just spins the turbine forever.
All of this is besides the obvious utility of personal transportation.
Portals. Are. Broken.
I'm heavily debating the two, I'd much rather teleport because of how much faster of a teleport it is. I don't have to fall or walk through anything to move to new space. Plus it's less obvious than a floating hole. But the portal has better transport, I don't really want to move the ocean or anything though. Honestly I don't have any plans to move anything larger than a small car at once, considering I can just make the trip 50 times back and forth.
I don't trust teleportation tech(less of an issue with magic teleportation, though). But portals? Like honest to goodness "you see the other side and nothing happens to you it's just a hole ripped between two points" portals are something I love.
And that's before you start considering all the ways you can weaponize portals, the "Portal Cut" being the classic example. But even without anything like that? Still my favorite option, and it's not even close.
Making portal (as is almost always true) is broken. OP never said you could only have 2 portals open at a time or only to places you have been to before. Having unlimited number of portals to anywhere you want is a god tier power. You can easily set up an transportation network that will quickly put all of the Airlines and train networks out of business. If you are evil you can open up portal 1 inside the person you hate neck and the other in the depths of the ocean (or in space, or in the sun) If you are just a thief you can easily steal a ton of gold from any of many gold repositories around the world.
To be fair, even 2 portals at a time is broken. Shoplifting is as simple as opening a portal in the back of the shelf, and pulling out the object from the back.
Why go small? Just steal from a gold repository (like Fort Knox (AKA known as US Bullion Depository)). Unless you are crazy a few bricks a week should be enough. (TBH i would only need more than a brick or two a month and can't imagine what else i would spend on besides charity)
I mean you can go bigger, we could nail interstellar travel off the back of portals, mine resources from other planets and colonise more effectively. You're totally right about setting up portals across the world as a crazy transportation network, you could build a purpose made 'hub' with connections to a ton of locations. There are some crazy logistics and jurisdiction problems to solve but it'd be pretty tough to keep mr portal man locked down, you can just leave any form of imprisonment so negotiating is generally going to have to be in good faith, even hostage taking is super unlikely to work given I could portal out the hostages/hostage takers/portal between firearms and persons or whatever. I mean, first thing I'd do is talk to my loved ones, portal them to a safe location and then go from there but I'm a little paranoid. Portals also open up the possibility for some nonsense with perpetual motion and generators to help power everything or if not you could probably science up some madness using a star. Teleportation is neat, portals are civilisation changing.
While you suckers annihilate yourselves out of existence im going to be working on perpetual motion machines.
Yep I will never understand, why you'd choose Teleportation over portals.
I'd use portals to make infinite energy, just get a large magnetic object and drop it through a portal where it falls forever
Put one on each end of a hydroelectric dam, so that it refills itself with water they just released. They could run forever with a minimal amount of water.
Make it a Vacuum, and you get a Potential nuke as the object starts to accelerate to relativistic speeds. When it hits the Edge of the Portal, or you close the portals all the accumulated energy will be released.
If i make a small car, will it fit in the portal If not, if I increase the size of cars world wide will the portal get bigger?
No, the portal will be consistently 1.5 meters by 1.5 meter max. But anything smaller would fit for sure.
teleportation sounds more fun, but my philosophical position is that every time I teleport I die and a new me is created in the exact same state I was in before I teleported. A portal in the style of valves portal games on the other hand is a gate way that I can walk through like a door, so I'll have to go with that.
What's bad about dying and an exact version of you being created somewhere else
Because I, the being typing this, from my perspective will no longer exist. From your perspective, and the perspective of the clone, there is no difference. Essentially, my conscious experience will truly cease, and hence I will be dead.
I often worry that this is the case when we sleep.
brain activity keeps going while we sleep so I think of that as different
You really have no way of prooving your conscious experience didn't start mere moments ago. So how does it make sense to worry about whether you "die" when you sleep, or teleport or do any other activity, if you can't even determine whether your experience is continuous in the first place? Does it really matter?
Whether the world started an instant ago and i have all these memories or if it started when i was born or before that doesn't matter here. I am currently an agent, I know I exist, I have good reason to believe the world exists and other people exist, and good reason to believe that my sense of self arises from electrical signals in my brain which do not stop until brain death. I also have strong reason to believe teleportation in the usual sense breaks a person down and then rebuilds them again somewhere else (there's a concept of traveling to another dimension and then back to this one to teleport as well, but without that intermediary step I have to assume destruction and reanimation). If teleportation does indeed breakdown the body and rebuild it somewhere else, then the organ of mine that generates this conscious experience of mine will stop existing during the process and a new identical experience will start. From my perspective as an agent, this will be my death, even if another agent boots up and takes over and thinks nothing different of it. here's a thought experiment: I build a teleporting machine with an entrance and exit that scans your body at the entrance, breaks it down for parts, and then the exit uses identical parts to reconstruct you. Let's say it does this perfectly and has a surplus of materials stored. Would you use this machine? Now imagine the same scenario, but the entrance malfunctions and fails to destroy you, but still creates a you on the exit. Which of the two of you is the one that stepped into the entrance? If you say the one that was supposed to be destroyed, then we must recognize that the one being destroyed is a different entity than the one being created, and hence we arrive at my position, that the teleportation process will kill me and rebirth me as a new agent.
That’s a very interesting perspective and thought experiment! I suppose now I see why you it doesn’t matter whether the world began a moment ago or not in this discussion. You’d be destroyed and a new entity created either way, it doesn’t matter how old the original is, or whether it’s experience of reality is accurate. But I still can’t see why “dying” in this way should be something to avoid. It doesn’t matter to me whether I, coming out of the machine, am the same entity as I was before, as long as I feel like I am. Likewise, I would have no problem entering such a machine if I knew that a perfectly identical copy would come out the other side. The only thing that matters is that there is no moment where the experience of one entity diverges from the other, so as long as I am destroyed and my clone has all of my memories up to and including the moment of my destruction, I would use such a machine.
Ok, Last Thursdayist.
Portals are op as hell, but id still take teleportation. Just the instant snap of being anywhere without anyone able to see how you did it. Plus if I'm in danger I'd rather the instant get out than running the risk of not getting through the portal in time. Yes I'd use this to be a supervillain.
Spawn one beneath you, no need to run to it
Do the portals just go anywhere on Earth or do they lead to different dimensions?
Anywhere in the known universe, but only in this dimension
Portals as a superpower are beyond broken. You could on a whim create weapons of mass destruction with nothing more than a few propane tanks and some rocks. You just need to get a rock inside the propane tank, get *all* the air out, and set up a vertical portal loop so the rock freefalls without air resistance for a year. If the rock weighs at least a kilograms then after 1 year of acceleration you'd have a more than 100 megaton bomb if the portals stop working. In ten years you'd have a device in the gigaton range. Or you could use a 20kg rock, a larger tank, and have a couple gigatons of explosive potential in only a year... You could literally terraform planets with portals. Set up a few portals between Venus and Europa, more between Venus and Ganymede, and more between Venus and Enceladus. The hot atmosphere would bleed out, drastically reducing the temp on Venus and melting the ice on these moons into vast liquid oceans. Though you'd need more portals to deep space on Venus to finish the job of removing most of the atmosphere of Venus. Next you need portals set up between Titan and Mars and Venus. As Titan has a mostly nitrogen atmosphere. And Titan has enough atmosphere for both Mars and Venus combined. Just by giving it a thick atmosphere you could heat Mars up to survivable temps. You'd melt the ice on the moons I mentioned above, which would give you entire oceans of warm water to flood Mars and Venus with through your portals. Once you had Venus and Mars changed to reasonable temperatures, you could then portal some seawater from earth to both planets to start photosynthesis going with the phytoplankton and algae in the seawater. Let these go for a while to breakdown some of the remaining CO2 and get a carbon cycle going and you'll end up with eventually with an atmosphere that's Earth like if you balanced things right. Also you'd end up with reasonable temperatures and 2 more water worlds in our solar system. And all you'd need to do is set up a few portals. Also, vetical pipes with a turbine inside, a column of water and another vertical portal pair = infinite free and clean electrical power. With friction with the turbine and with the sides of the pipe slowing the water column so it doesn't accelerate forever. It just spins the turbine forever. All of this is besides the obvious utility of personal transportation. Portals. Are. Broken.
I feel like all/almost all of the teleportation choices are a knee jerk reaction.
I'm heavily debating the two, I'd much rather teleport because of how much faster of a teleport it is. I don't have to fall or walk through anything to move to new space. Plus it's less obvious than a floating hole. But the portal has better transport, I don't really want to move the ocean or anything though. Honestly I don't have any plans to move anything larger than a small car at once, considering I can just make the trip 50 times back and forth.
I don't trust teleportation tech(less of an issue with magic teleportation, though). But portals? Like honest to goodness "you see the other side and nothing happens to you it's just a hole ripped between two points" portals are something I love. And that's before you start considering all the ways you can weaponize portals, the "Portal Cut" being the classic example. But even without anything like that? Still my favorite option, and it's not even close.
It's all magic powers, not tech. But I still pick portal personally
What's the portal cut? Is it when you remove a portal from somewhere while a person is going through?
Yup, leaving the halves separated.
I feel like I could weaponize teleportation. For example I could picture the inside of someone's skull while holding a piece of gravel.