(shamelessly stolen from an imgur dump)

  • zeppo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m going to take the free gravel and 7 inch teleportation. The gravel is a valuable commodity which can be sold. 7 inches is enough to get through any doorway.

    • I_Has_A_Hat@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      7 inches is enough to get through any doorway.

      But not necessarily your whole body. Unless you are a beanpole and your entire body is less than 7" thick, part of your body is going to be stuck in the door.

    • The Dark Lord ☑️@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      7 inches is enough to get you mostly through a doorway.

      Doors are about 1.5 inches thick. The average chest depth of an American male is 11.5 inches.

      Teleporting yourself 7 inches forward would put a door 7 inches from your front and 3 inches from your back. You would have to only be 5.5 inches deep in order to make it entirely through the doorway without merging with the door.

      • zeppo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It depends how exactly it works. If it’s the very front of my body moves forward 7 inches, yeah, that’s not great. I was hoping for measuring from the center or something. What happens if i overlap something, anyway? Nuclear fusion?

        • Decoy321@lemmy.worldM
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          1 year ago

          It wouldn’t matter what part of your body moves if your whole body retains its shape (as in, doesn’t stretch or deform in any way). If you stay the same shape, you moving 7" means the whole of you (front, middle, and back) moving 7".

          If your body stretched during teleport, then you’ll probably have other problems aside of the displacement issue.

          • TheMauveAvenger@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            It matters what part of the body the measurement is tied to for start and finish. If it has to be the same point on the body then it’s a problem, but if the anchor point can change then there are greater possibilities.

            I can put my hand on the door and extend my foot backwards. If my hand is the anchor point to start and my foot is the anchor point to end, then certain parts of my body have teleported more than 7", but in the aggregate at least one part of my whole body is always within a 7" distance from anchor to anchor. That would mean I could teleport my whole body through any solid item that is less than 7" thick.

            • zeppo@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Thanks, this helps. I had to think about it for a while. I think what I envisioned was “teleport me past any obstacle less than 7 inches”.

            • Gnome Kat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              1 year ago

              The more important question is, what is the cool down? If you can just spam it really fast you can essentially move at (7inchs/teleport) * (teleports/second)… if you can spam that multiple times a second you could actually move really fast, even fly.

            • Decoy321@lemmy.worldM
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              1 year ago

              Fair, but at that point you’re just arbitrarily redefining the rule of “teleport 7” away" to cheat this thought experiment.

              • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one
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                1 year ago

                Pre teleport hand position is A.

                Post teleport foot position is B.

                The distance between A and B is 7 inches.

                “You” teleport 7 inches, but if “you” is a relative concept thats so far undefined (are your clothes “you”? The contents of your stomach? The air in your lungs? What chemicals dissolved in your blood count as “you”?), and A and B are both “you,” technically youve teleported 7 inches while sort of fudging the actual distance.

                As with all magic, the interpretation of the rules is more important than the rules themselves.

                • swab148@startrek.website
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                  1 year ago

                  I think we’d have to figure out at what part of the brain consciousness originates before we could implement teleportation, because you’d (almost) always want to travel exactly 7" from your point of view.

                • I_Has_A_Hat@startrek.website
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                  1 year ago

                  No, that’s fundamentally breaking the 7 inch limit.

                  In that scenario, both your hand and foot would have traveled more than 7 inches. They would have traveled 7 PLUS the pre-teleport distance between your hand and foot. That’s the same distance every part of your body would have traveled.

                  It doesn’t matter how you cut it, or how you define “you”. You would be teleporting more than 7 inches. There isn’t a single part of you that would ONLY be teleporting 7 inches.

    • SadTrain@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Too bad your clothes stay on the other side. I guess you can try to teleport out of county lockup too

      • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Cops dont even show up to actual crimes. Aint no one grabbing the naked dude blipping in and out of reality as they pass through walls.

      • kibiz0r@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If your clothes stay behind, then what else does?

        Dirt, dust, dead skin? Oils? Gut bacteria? Dental fillings? Food you just ate? Oxygen in your lungs? Oxygen in your blood? Implants for sure, right? What about hair, or nails?

        I can imagine a scenario where someone tries this ability for the first time only to wind up naked, perfectly clean-shaven, bleeding profusely from every orifice and extremity, breathless and doubled over in pain, convulsing on a pile of shit, hair and other gross, getting their back sliced open by disembodied toenails.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          And do you swap places with matter at your destination or just fit your pieces around and into whatever is already there?

          If you don’t swap, you could end up with air in your blood stream and bacteria and fungal spores everywhere. And a chance of nuclear fusion depending on how close atoms end up to each other. And if it can fuck with things at a nuclear level, it will also fuck with them at a chemical and structural level.

          Or if you do swap, it becomes a powerful weapon where you just pop into someone’s body, putting the parts of them you overlap with where you used to be, then you just pop back out in a different spot. Bank vault door is too thick? Just teleport multiple times and you’ll get through safely as long as you can remain pretty still while going through it. If you can constantly teleport a tiny distance, you might be impervious to all attacks because stuff would get swapped before it impacts you, but that “might” is doing a lot of lifting. Though you probably also wouldn’t be able to hear sound, so you would be vulnerable when having conversations or listening to music.

      • zeppo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What this comes down to is too few details. The fine print definitely matters

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      Free gravel is a clear winner… If there’s no limits, you could straight up build artificial islands, you could destroy cities… It’s a legit super power. Hell, unless there’s extreme limits that make it worthless, you could do a lot.

      Teleporting is tempting, and if you could use it fast enough you could fly or at least walk at insane speeds… Depending on the limits, I’d take that over gravel

      But any toaster? That’s a brain computer interface right there. Even if it’s one way, and you have to do it manually and pay for power? With 30 toasters you could type anything. You could learn stenography to do it faster. Or, if you could manipulate toasters past their capabilities, you could generate infinite power or burn down entire cities

      • MBM@lemmings.world
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        1 year ago

        For the gravel, I assumed it meant that any place that sells gravel is forced to give it to you for free. Still really powerful, but you have to think about the logistics.

    • MTK@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Also if you can telelport but leave your poop behind think how easy pooping would be!