Teleportation would be the end the world
I’ve been thinking about this in no particular context really. My mind just wanders onto these topics on its own sometimes…
“Hey, I think you just got a text!”
When travelling to and from places, many people only really care about where they start and end up – hence cars and coaches blindly following Sat-Navs into streams and ditches. Even the passengers stare at their mobiles and tablets rather than look out the window. The journey is that “tedious bit we can’t avoid whilst getting to where we want to be”.
It’s ubiquitous now – the guy or girl walking down the street with their smartphone on, flicking through their latest messages whilst listening to their personal soundtrack. As soon as they leave their destination on it comes, in go the earbuds or on go the overly expensive branded headphones. Only when they arrive is the phone is turned off. In between, their whole world is their own sounds, their own dialogues. The journey is an irrelevant, inevitable task, something to be distracted from at all costs.
Yes, I get pleasure myself from following social media on my mobile, but now and again I remember to put the phone away, look around, and within minutes I start noticing the world again. Birds and their behaviours (different for each bird, the longer you look). Squirrels scurrying around looking for food, spiralling up tree trunks. Cats chasing each other, little rivalries you wouldn’t otherwise notice. Heck, other people even! Body language, relationships discerned from a handful of words, the movement of a head. And all of this is laid on for free, you just have to divorce yourself from your internal monologue long enough to engage with it.
So what the hell does that title mean? Well, other than it being amazingly cool if we could teleport*, there would be no journey, we would simply go from start to destination immediately. No journey means no noticing animal and human behaviour, that the plants and trees have changed. The natural world becomes as relevant and as interesting as that Windows desktop background you stopped noticing after the first week.
It’s hard enough as it is to get people to care about the environment, unless it directly affects their daily lives. Imagine the difficulty when they have the ability to bypass the outside world completely, to remain in a constant state of internal self-engagement, with no chance at all to allow themselves to be distracted by nature.
It would be the end of the world.
* Cool that is as long as you don’t subscribe to the “instant death” theory of teleportation, where the process kills you and recreates an exact copy elsewhere that thinks it has continuation of existence, but doesn’t really.
