Shouldn’t We Be Teleporting By Now?

It took me one hour and forty-three minutes to drive a total of eight miles this evening. That’s an average speed of 4.66 miles per hour. I know this because I did the math, in the car, while driving 4.66 miles per hour. During that long, lonely car ride in between exercising my high school Algebra skills and listening to that one Gotye song five times on four stations, I had a quite a few thoughts bouncing around my head. The one that kept resurfacing, pushing its way past my ideal casting choices for Catching Fire and daydreams of Ben Wyatt, was “Shouldn’t we be teleporting by now?”

Now, despite my impressive cross-multiplication skills, I’m no physicist. I can’t even begin to grasp how the technology to teleport would work, but I’ve seen enough episodes of The Big Bang Theory to know that there are people out there much, much smarter than I. If these people can create the technology to video chat from a cell phone and bring back deceased rap legends in hologram form, they should definitely be able to crack this whole teleportation business. So the question is, why am I still sitting in traffic?

While trapped in traffic hell, I came up with two theories. The first is that these smarty-pants are spending too much time advancing current technologies and not nearly enough inventing new ones. The late 19th and early 20th centuries brought us planes, trains and automobiles. Our ability to travel both long and short distances became more convenient and accessible very quickly. It was all new and exciting. Then we just sort of stopped. We threw in the towel. Said, “This is the best we can do,” and settled on just improving on what we already had. We now have cars that parallel park themselves, planes that run on autopilot and cruise ships with water slides. This is all fine and dandy, but it’s been a hundred years since the Wright brothers took their first flight, shouldn’t we have come up with something new by now?

My second theory is that someone, somewhere in a dark science lab has actually successfully come up with the technology to teleport, but the government is hiding it from us. Think about it, it makes perfect sense. We’re not too dumb to create teleportation devices, we’re just afraid of what will happen if we make them universally available. It would wreak havoc on the global economy overnight. All transportation related businesses would go under. I’m talking airlines, auto-manufacturers, gas companies, public transportation, not to mention the inevitable deficit city governments would encounter once parking tickets became extinct. The world as we know it would change forever. I’m sure there would be quite a few negative repercussions, but it would probably help out that whole global warming mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. There are pros and cons to everything new technology.

So my plea is this: You smart, brilliant people of science and politics, please get the ball rolling on this teleportation thing. It’s time. You can create new jobs and ways to take our money. I imagine there will be an extensive amount of manufacturing, infrastructure and safety monitoring involved. We’re sick of sitting in traffic and being patted down by airport security. We’re ready to say goodbye to our bus passes and hello to our teleportation visas. We need this, if only to stop ourselves from having to be alone with our deep dark thoughts for an hour and forty-three minutes in a Ford Focus. This piece alone should give you a pretty good sense of what happens when I am left alone with my thoughts. It’s dangerous and the world would be a much better place if we could travel at the speed of light and not at 4.66 miles per hour.