What would you do if you could teleport?
Imagine that you could teleport.
What would you do with that ability?
There are a lot of different ways one could answer that question, but I'm most especially curious about one particular thing:
What could you ethically do with the ability to teleport that would earn you enough money to live on?
I have a feeling we've discussed the ethical issues with certain superpowers before, but I can't find that discussion offhand. For example, invisibility as a power has a lot of morally questionable uses, but not so many obvious uses that are morally sound.
And I think teleportation is much the same. There's a lot of bad or gray-area stuff you could do with it. What could you do with it that you'd be proud of?
When I brought this up in a face-to-face conversation after seeing the movie of Jumper, there was one particular career that several people immediately came up with; I'm not going to mention it yet 'cause I'm curious what y'all will come up with.
If you want to make things harder, you can narrow the parameters a little by going with stuff specified in the book of Jumper:
- You can only teleport to a place that you've seen in person before and can visualize clearly.
- You can take people and things with you, but only if you can lift them off the ground.
- What if you're 17 years old and don't have ID? (And you have to financially support yourself.)
- What if you don't want to become publicly known, at least not under your real name? What if you don't want to come to the attention of the government?
- Given the above parameters, how would you deal with the IRS and paying taxes on your income?
See also my earlier entries on Super Rescue (also featuring a 2006 comment from Dave S suggesting that we read his book, which we can now do!) and Small superpowers.