Science Fiction Novelist Peter Hamilton Discusses His Vision of the Future

hardwarephreak said:
I have thought about what the future will hold as drone deliveries become common place...almost ubiquitous.
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Or the internet is augmented with vaccum tubes that bring you your stuff.
"I've got terabit quantum fiber and a 1-meter diameter tube. How about you?"
"I live in fly-over country, we can only get Gigabit fiber and a 12" tube. So no x-large pizza for me, it's personal at best."
 
sfsuphysics said:
But he said cease to physically exist, obviously your soul simply teleports to your new vessel that was recently teleported
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There's nothing obvious about souls, and there never will be.
If teleportation existed, there'd could be a substantial effort by religious folk to outlaw it as worse than murder, at the crusade/jihad level.
And if you think religion will ever vanish or become a trivial factor in human society, again, fantasy.
 
My answer to the question "If you could have one super power what would it be?" has been the ability to create teleportation portals of any size I like to any place I want, with the portals being move-able using a proportionately large, hard to build and somewhat hard to move, but not actually expensive or power consuming, technology.

If used properly it would solve all of humanities problems forever. If used incorrectly it would be the end of mankind. I would do my darnedest to make it the former.
 
hardwarephreak said:
The idea of turning highways and such into shopping centers....did he really spend 6 months hashing things out because that's asinine. Does the internet cease to exist? If we have teleportation...you would have distribution centers that would just beam stuff to your house immediately after you order it online. Why the heck would I go to a shopping center...when was the last time you went to a mall?

I have thought about what the future will hold as drone deliveries become common place...almost ubiquitous. Like the opening scene of Ready Player One when the drone is delivering the pizza. Eventually, if we don't implode as a society, our thirst for instantaneous gratification will be further fleshed out by almost instant Amazon Prime drone deliveries, Dominos drone deliveries, etc...really anything. There are obviously a ton of things that would need to be worked out for that kind of world to exist, it won't happen overnight, but it will be someone's actually future, and I think that generation is alive now.
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You'd go to a shopping center to showroom shop for personal stuff in person. Otherwise how do you know exactly the clothing you are purchasing will even fit your taste or furniture will match your decore? By looking at images in your VR headset?!

For commodity things like food, yeah I can see it being instantaneously arrive in your delivery box.
 
Disposal portal in the sun? Solves the age old problem of how to dispose of the body(ies). No need to shoot someone, just hack their portal and make a simple change of destination address. Literally Poof! no more body. None of that pesky DNA residue either. Don't know what happened. Must have been that fifth Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and fat fingering the destination.
 
Tweak42 said:
You'd go to a shopping center to showroom shop for personal stuff in person. Otherwise how do you know exactly the clothing you are purchasing will even fit your taste or furniture will match your decore? By looking at images in your VR headset?!

For commodity things like food, yeah I can see it being instantaneously arrive in your delivery box.
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Of course, the shoplifting thing could be problematic.

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Tweak42 said:
Otherwise how do you know exactly the clothing you are purchasing will even fit your taste ... By looking at images in your VR headset?!
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Sure. It'll be better than a mirror, because it will use NVidia RTX ray tracing to render. And there will be no more need to ask Honest Abe "Does this dress make my backside look big?" As to fit, your VR system will measure you (see, e.g., Sword Art Online) and all clothing will be bespoke, made to your exact dimensions and preference.

Beats trying on clothes that some stranger (with lice) tried on before you.
 
pcgeekesq must be a physicist, a great one. It's only the lesser physicists that are actually doing work to make this kind of stuff a reality.
I guess in his big grand mind, he's already done all the theoretical math that says it's impossible.
Funny thing though, the math says it is possible. The technology to make a reality of the math doesn't exist. To say that it is impossible though, is short sighted. Hell, we have working applications of teleportation right now, these wonderful things called quantum computers.

What do I know though, apparently I believe that terries gonna build one and beam bombs around. No, that can't be it, I think all the terries are dead, apparently.

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pcgeekesq said:
Not at all. The aboriginals would have no reason to think that a Polaroid wasn't possible.
We have many reasons to think macroscopic teleportation isn't possible.
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i get your point, and its not a bad point, i just disagree. also your response isnt really what i was talking about, but it was a reply to exactly what i said so... to clarify

they would have thought it voodoo or magic - we know it to be a simple process, but they would not have and as such would have seen it as not of their natural world and thus- not possible... without the whole magic part of it.

you have reasons to think teleportation isnt possible, but i choose to believe that we have the same understanding of the process at THIS point in our history, that an aboriginal would have of a polaroid camera- pretty much none.... and as such, it could not exist in how we understand our physical world right now. in a couple more thousand years however.... who knows? we certainly wont... but that does not mean a shift in the understanding of the physical world would not open up that kind of knowledge given a couple thousand years.
 
harbingerofdoom said:
you have reasons to think teleportation isnt possible, but i choose to believe that we have the same understanding of the process at THIS point in our history, that an aboriginal would have of a polaroid camera- pretty much none.... and as such, it could not exist in how we understand our physical world right now. in a couple more thousand years however.... who knows? we certainly wont... but that does not mean a shift in the understanding of the physical world would not open up that kind of knowledge given a couple thousand years.
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So, in your mind, what distinguishes science fiction from fantasy fiction?
'Cause you know, we don't know how to do full-out no-rules miracle-level magic either, but what do we know?

Science fiction should involve logical and plausible extensions of the science we know, not mere wishful thinking and technobabble.
Yes, that means what is SF may change over time: for example, we now know there's no canals on Mars.
But if you're going to bother to distinguish science fiction from fantasy fiction, what other test can you propose?
 
alxlwson said:
It's only the lesser physicists that are actually doing work to make this kind of stuff a reality.
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Name a single reputable physicist that is working to make macroscopic teleportation a reality.
Or admit you're just pulling carp out of your sass.
 
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Turns out, the author of the book is a scientific ignoramus. For example: he says in the article that x-rays go through everything and therefor would be a good weapon. Except they don't go through everything, and if they did (like neutrinos do) they'd be useless as a weapon, because a weapon has to deliver energy and/or momentum to the target to be effective, and if a particle "goes right through everything," it doesn't do that.

So it should come as no surprise that, like so many people with little science education, he thinks Star-Trek-type teleportation is a scientific possibility.
And no more of a surprise that there are plenty of ignorati that believe him.
 
Everyone here seems to think teleportation would work like the transporters in Star Trek.

What if they created a stable worm hole between two locations (like in Stargate). No dematerialization and reassembly, no suicide, etc.
It would be like stepping through a doorway.
In theory, this would be more scientifically possible.

Also, other Science Fiction authors have already explored this.
I believe it was Larry Niven who wrote about portals in a few of his books.
In one book, he went into how countries blocked international traffic and forced all international traffic to go customs. They used old airports for this.
He also talk about how most the highways where turned into parks, while some sections where turn into race tracks where collectors would show off their old cars.

He also went into the problem with smugglers bypassing the international connections. :eek:
 
i will throw the teleport onto another teleport, thus make a teleport to a whole different dimension where i am god-emperor

=D
 
As soon as Dr. Venture invents the teleporter, the OSI will take it from him and bury it.
 
pcgeekesq said:
Name a single reputable physicist that is working to make macroscopic teleportation a reality.
Or admit you're just pulling carp out of your sass.
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Well considering the first theoretical paper on the teleportation of an actual particle, not a quantum state is less than 2 years old you kind of are asking a lot and also dismissing quite a bit.
 
For everyone who would never take a teleporter because of the implications, I recommend Stephen King’s short story “The Jaunt”.

It won’t make you feel any better, but then he’s mostly a horror writer.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Well considering the first theoretical paper on the teleportation of an actual particle, not a quantum state is less than 2 years old you kind of are asking a lot and also dismissing quite a bit.
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So your saying alxlwson is communicating an untruth when he says "physicists ... are actually doing work to make this kind of stuff a reality" ?
Thought so.

Now, with that settled, what's your criteria for distinguishing science fiction from fantasy fiction?
 
We're already doing a pseudo teleport: Your Avatar in Online Gaming. So in the future, teleportation is just transferring your consciousness into an avatar.

It'll work by sending your "consciousness" through a vast information network (this has to be set up first) to an awaiting avatar/robot/orb, then you control it. Everything that happens is recorded and immediately uploaded to back this advanced network, saving everything as you go along.

It's not practical to control in real time due to the massive lag from the distance of space, so everything has to be recorded first, then uploaded back to you after everything is done. It might take months but you'll receive everything in a form of a memory of when you were using that avatar.

The avatar might require you to return it to its home base, or if you leave it suddenly, it will have a return home function if it is not damaged, destroyed, or gone missing.

This is the only way to "teleport".
 
harbingerofdoom said:
i get your point, and its not a bad point, i just disagree. also your response isnt really what i was talking about, but it was a reply to exactly what i said so... to clarify

they would have thought it voodoo or magic - we know it to be a simple process, but they would not have and as such would have seen it as not of their natural world and thus- not possible... without the whole magic part of it.

you have reasons to think teleportation isnt possible, but i choose to believe that we have the same understanding of the process at THIS point in our history, that an aboriginal would have of a polaroid camera- pretty much none.... and as such, it could not exist in how we understand our physical world right now. in a couple more thousand years however.... who knows? we certainly wont... but that does not mean a shift in the understanding of the physical world would not open up that kind of knowledge given a couple thousand years.
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Arthur C Clarke was a brilliant futurist and writer, but he is probably most widely known for the third of his famous three laws, "Any sufficiently advanced pornography is indistinguishable from magic."
 
I'd have been more interested if instead of teleportation it was talking about biological 3d printers and transferring consciousness, that seems more solveable. Defeinitely one of the big neuroscience questions as to whether something structurely, electrically and chemically identical would be the same. Or is it quantum.

Who am I kidding, I'll still read it.
 
nutzo said:
Everyone here seems to think teleportation would work like the transporters in Star Trek.

What if they created a stable worm hole between two locations (like in Stargate). No dematerialization and reassembly, no suicide, etc.
It would be like stepping through a doorway.
In theory, this would be more scientifically possible.

Also, other Science Fiction authors have already explored this.
I believe it was Larry Niven who wrote about portals in a few of his books.
In one book, he went into how countries blocked international traffic and forced all international traffic to go customs. They used old airports for this.
He also talk about how most the highways where turned into parks, while some sections where turn into race tracks where collectors would show off their old cars.

He also went into the problem with smugglers bypassing the international connections. :eek:
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But in Stargate, they do dematerialize. That is why when unwelcome travelers try to come to Earth, they are instantly killed if the Iris is closed.
 
cageymaru said:
British science fiction novelist Peter F. Hamilton has a very unique vision of how the world would work and operate if teleportation portals were invented. He spent 6 months hashing out how the world would be changed while working on his newest novel Salvation.

Since we no longer need highways, they would be converted into parks and shopping centers. Hotels and motels would cease to exist as the trip from England to the USA could be completed in 2 minutes; thus a person would just sleep in their own bed. From irrigation to space travel, teleportation revolutionizes society's efficiency to the point where humans have to make a choice; spend a lifetime doing nothing or begin genetic engineering for higher intelligence.

Teleportation might also allow humanity to easily explore the galaxy. Hamilton's interstellar starships are propelled forward by exhaust channeled through a portal. "You have one part of the portal that you just drop into the sun, and the other half is the rocket engine on the starship," he says. "No need for any antimatter or fusion or anything."
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There's an assumption that all hotels are just a place to rest. Some people get rooms just to get away.

Any way it's very very hard to measure matter without changing it. And as mind bending as it may be even observing matter changes it's state. Thus teleportation is a pipe dream.

We're more likely to change higgs boson mass or speed of light constant before we have the science and technology to measure and store entire molecular structure of humans.
 
The black market and sex trade would thrive and chemical/biological/nuclear weapons could easily be moved, even if not set off they could take an entire country hostage. Unauthorized portals can easily proliferate quickly.
 
powdermnky007 said:
Until you are going to the grocery store and are accidentally connected to the portal on the sun. Instantly being fried and creating some interesting gravity as well.
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Don't worry. That will be fixed in the next software update :)
 
pcgeekesq said:
That's not science fiction, it's pure fantasy. Teleportation is magic, not science.
Like imagining "how the world would work" if you could summon unicorns with a snap of your finger.
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In ancient times they thought the earth was flat and the universe moved around it. Galileo was persecuted for saying the earth moved around the sun. They had plenty of reason to believe that this world view was untrue.

In 1842 they thought it was impossible to know any of the composition of the stars/planets. Authors were writing stories about men traveling to the moon as early as the mid 1600s. Today we accept as fact that we know the composition of the stars and some planets.

It was widely though human flight was impossible. Just 8 years after Lord Kelvin stated this it was done. Its now common place.

Jules Verne wrote about man traveling to the moon and it was though to be impossible to leave orbit due to not being able to accelerate w/out killing the passengers. Today we accept its something we can do.

Nobody thought you could ever get a phone small enough to fit in your pocket. Let alone discussing how ancients might view a phone as some sort of talking box.

Nobody thought we were ever have a way to turn something invisible...and yet scientists draw near making real cloaking technology.

History is rife with examples of things people considered pure fantasy...only to have scientists go "not so quick...". I find your attitude to be dismissive at best.

griff30 said:
Teleportation isn't happening.
Though if it could, Mars, the Moon, Venus, Titan, Calisto, ect could all be terraformed, completely, in a year.
Open the portal between Venus the moon and Mars and all the others in a portal Gigabit switch and bam! Venus, the Moon, Mars ect would have an atmospheric pressure of Earth. Then its a process of adding plants water ect. Any excess pressure just vent to a space portal.

Nice idea but teleportation is a pipe dream. FTL communication is currently a pipe dream.
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Thats what they said about flying...yet we do it daily.

schoenda said:
To me Salvation is as well written and paced as any of Mr. Hamilton's work. I loved the Void Trilogy, and his Commonwealth Saga is among the most captivating, if not THE MOST captivating sagas that I have ever read in this genre.

The portals are a quantum entanglement McGuffin, but Mr. Hamilton is more of a high concept sci fi author than a hard sci fi author. Reading his books one must be OK with sufficiently advanced technology looking like magic...after all, isn't it supposed to?
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I particularly enjoyed the Commonwealth Saga.

pcgeekesq said:
There's nothing obvious about souls, and there never will be.
If teleportation existed, there'd could be a substantial effort by religious folk to outlaw it as worse than murder, at the crusade/jihad level.
And if you think religion will ever vanish or become a trivial factor in human society, again, fantasy.
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There could be, but there also might not be. I think youre wrong about religion starting to take a back seat. The older generation is much more religious than the current one. A quick google search turns this up: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pro...ng-religious-landscape-poll/story?id=54995663

Dr. Righteous said:
Put your worries aside. When we do get portals they will be operated by the TSA; perfectly safe. ;)
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Great so now my individual atoms can be groped by a former convict.
 
pcgeekesq said:
Turns out, the author of the book is a scientific ignoramus. For example: he says in the article that x-rays go through everything and therefor would be a good weapon.
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So what exactly would stop an x-ray laser powered by say a fusion reactor or portal tapped into a sun mr super scientist?
 
gunbust3r said:
So what exactly would stop an x-ray laser powered by say a fusion reactor or portal tapped into a sun mr super scientist?
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Are you kidding?
Even in the 1930's, readers of kid's comic books (e.g., Superman) knew that lead can stop x-rays.
As would anyone who used an x-ray machine at a dentist's office or a hospital.
Generating the x-ray using a laser wouldn't change that, nor would the power source for the laser.

And lead isn't the only material or even the best at absorbing x-rays. Platinum, Iridium, Osmium, and Tungsten are all about 50% better.

You come off with a lot of attitude for someone so ignorant they can't be bothered with a simple internet search before running their mouth.
Sometimes I forget how stupid people can be. Thanks for the reminder.
 
pcgeekesq said:
So your saying alxlwson is communicating an untruth when he says "physicists ... are actually doing work to make this kind of stuff a reality" ?
Thought so.

Now, with that settled, what's your criteria for distinguishing science fiction from fantasy fiction?
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No what I'm saying is you're dismissing the idea of teleportation from the very get go was a little quick to jump to conclusions... again considering the first actual scientific paper on REAL teleportation (i.e. not "teleporting" silly quantum numbers and what not) is less than 2 years old.

As to a criteria from distinguishing science fiction from fantasy fiction, never really gave it much thought, if I had to just throw something out there I would say something that was mathematically possible, even if unfeasible, even on the smallest levels using known physics often requiring some "unknown" to push it into the realm of feasible. Some examples of this criteria, worm holes mathematically are not impossible, and sure they might collapse as soon as anything enters possibly requiring some "exotic matter" or "negative energy" to hold open fast forward to science fiction where worm holes are used as a method of travel throughout the Universe we don't know how they are stable in these cases but whatever that's why it's called science fiction. Teleportation, papers have been written on everything from quantum states to an actual particle, tests have been done on quantum states and show it can be done, fast forward to science fiction and macroscopic objects can now be teleported maybe through the aid of a lot of technobabble, confinement beams, pattern buffers, Heisenberg compensators, etc. Of transporters not necessarily teleportation, i.e. Aperture Science portal generators, which given some of the description in the summary seems to be more along what the author is going for (I could be wrong on this regard), and then you basically have worm hole technology, which points to my first example, sure there may not be special paint made from Moon dust but whatever it's fiction.

Now what would be fantasy fiction, something like a lot of super hero comic characters, firing beams of energy from their eyes, creating magnetic fields due to a biological power, teleporting from one place to another with a "bamf"
 
Teleportation, transmogrification, or Emperor's New Clothes? You decide:

http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Transmogrifier

(personally, I think that's one of the great benefits of VR -- you can go, see, and even experience places that you can't possibly go to; especially when you are aged or infirm -- with far fewer risks than any possible teleportation system will have, anytime soon)
 
pcgeekesq said:
So, in your mind, what distinguishes science fiction from fantasy fiction?
'Cause you know, we don't know how to do full-out no-rules miracle-level magic either, but what do we know?

Science fiction should involve logical and plausible extensions of the science we know, not mere wishful thinking and technobabble.
Yes, that means what is SF may change over time: for example, we now know there's no canals on Mars.
But if you're going to bother to distinguish science fiction from fantasy fiction, what other test can you propose?
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you are asking an overly broad question, but its okay, ill do some of the heavy lifting for you.

what distinguishes science from fantasy in literature is plausibility.
its plausible that the understanding of our physical world can change over time leading to new advancements that at current would not possibly fit into the natural world. Thus, if laid out in a consistent manner with itself, could be science fiction.
its not plausible that unicorns and dragons are flying out of your butt. no matter how well you lay out that story line, they still do not exist. thus fantasy.
 
harbingerofdoom said:
what distinguishes science from fantasy in literature is plausibility ... unicorns and dragons ... no matter how well you lay out that story line, they still do not exist. thus fantasy.
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Yet the "Dragonriders of Pern" series is considered science fiction, pretty universally.
So obviously, you're wrong.
 
pcgeekesq said:
So, in your mind, what distinguishes science fiction from fantasy fiction?
'Cause you know, we don't know how to do full-out no-rules miracle-level magic either, but what do we know?
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You are trying to define Hard Science Fiction, not Science Fiction as a whole. Science Fiction is actually a very broad topic. But the key part of the definition is "Fiction", meaning unproven science. Science Fiction also covers more than just physics, it also covers other sciences like psychology and sociology.

Also your assertions that teleportation is impossible because of macro vs micro is ridiculous. There is a difference between being able to do things on a small scale and a large scale. Experiments usually start out small and then start moving to bigger tests. Most often this is because of the money or logistics involved. Consider super colliders. There was a time when no one thought it would be possible to make something capable of the energy exhibited in them, or the discoveries from them.

For someone calling others out, your ignorance is truly appalling honestly.
 
pcgeekesq said:
Yet the "Dragonriders of Pern" series is considered science fiction, pretty universally.
So obviously, you're wrong.
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So youre saying if there is life out there in the universe there will never be anything on any planet that is capable of flight that looks like what we consider a dragon to look like?
 
NoOther said:
You are trying to define Hard Science Fiction, not Science Fiction as a whole. Science Fiction is actually a very broad topic. But the key part of the definition is "Fiction", meaning unproven science. Science Fiction also covers more than just physics, it also covers other sciences like psychology and sociology.
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You're dodging the question, not answering. I said teleporation was fantasy. A bunch of ignorati disagreed. That's the context.

NoOther said:
Also your assertions that teleportation is impossible because of macro vs micro is ridiculous. There is a difference between being able to do things on a small scale and a large scale. Experiments usually start out small and then start moving to bigger tests. Most often this is because of the money or logistics involved. Consider super colliders.
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Wow, it's like you haven't even heard of the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle.

I hate to expose your ignorance-- oh, no, actually, I enjoy it-- but the effects of quantum mechanics are highly scale dependent. An electron may be able to quantum-tunnel through an insulator 10 nanometers thick with usable regularity, but your car is not going to quantum-tunnel through a brick wall any time this universe.
 
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