Would you choose invisibility or teleportation?
You could turn invisibility on and off as you like and there would be no time limit. Your clothes would turn invisible too, and you could decide whether the items you are holding would be visible or not.
There would be no limits on how many times or where you could teleport. The items you hold while teleporting would be teleported too. You would also have the ability to know if the place would be safe to teleport to, so you wouldn't teleport and get impaled by an icicle or teleport inside a wall and get your insides filled with concrete or something.
Personally, I don't know which one would I pick. Invisibility would be awesome for pranks and stuff, but teleportation probably would be more useful for everyday life.
Teleportation every time. It's just too useful. Invisibility is really only useful for mischief and security. And both can also be done with teleportation.
Invisibility, while cool, just seems like it’d only be cool for a little bit. Like, oh wow, I can sneak into the girl’s room without anyone seeing, woooh. Or I could maybe attempt to rob something and carry whatever I can hold. Meanwhile, Teleportation would mean being able to go literally anywhere on Earth instantaneously. Would almost never need a car or plane ever again in my life. You could take a vacation to a new country every weekend. You would have a get out of jail free card for life. You could talk to anybody you wanted to (assuming their security didn’t tackle and/or kill you if they were important enough).
And you could make a killing on selling instant travel.
Or make instant travel a killing. Straight to the moon.
Altair-4
I'm struggling to think of any situation in which invisibility would benefit me personally. Teleportation would save me over an hour a day of driving to/from work alone, plus hours at work itself, fuel & vehicle maintenance costs just about disappear, world travel becomes something possible to do any time of any day on a whim, you could do anything.
I feel like Greek food for lunch, suddenly appears at a cafe in Athens.
Maybe some chocolate for dessert, pops into Switzerland for a moment , then back home in time for my kid's soccer game.
Have you thought about moving closer to work?
Teleportation. There's the obvious advantges like no commute. The biggest, however, is that I would just feel so much safer (as a woman). Dodgy situation? Just teleport away.
I seem to be alone in that I see teleportation as a great way to travel all the time without ever having to set foot on a plane again. The time and money saved would allow me to visit with distant friends on the regular.
And move to a cheap spacious house in the middle of nowhere, ideally somewhere absolutely beautiful. You could work anywhere you want and never need to actually live there. You could also become the first person on every planet and moon. I'd probably try to get nasa to pay me a billion dollars to be on call to teleport anything they want to anywhere in the solar system.
Most of the things you want to do with invisibility you can do with teleportation, but likely better. The only exception being hiding in the lockerroom of your preferred gender but bruh, c'mon this isn't a 80's movie. Also maybe faking a haunting since the invisibility lets you make stuff "float".
Wanna be rich or just have loot? Teleport somewhere you know has it. Grab and go.
Wanna kill somebody? Teleport to their bedroom while they sleep and shoot them. Or for the less messy alternative, teleport in, grab them, teleport a hundred feet above Point Nemo, drop 'em, and dip.
Wanna live a life unbothered by anyone? Teleport to the middle of nowhere and slowly bring in supplies. Pop out and back in whenever you feel like it.
Yeah, teleportation solves way more real life problems than invisibility does.
Invisibility in the real world, for a civilian, is really only good for pranks and crime. Which isn't exactly a bad thing, but teleportation can do all of that and more.
You could use your invisibility to become the most effective citizen journalist in the world though. Get footage of Exxon execs scheming with politicians to fuck the planet or get world leaders on tape dismissing the Geneva conventions, that sort of thing.
You could in most cases so the same with teleportation
You could do that just as well with teleportation, possibly even better depending on what security measures you need to bypass. Teleport in, plant a bug, dig through their computer for anything incriminating, teleport out.
Of course, obtaining evidence in this way makes it illegal to use in court, but that doesn't really matter because the people you're after will never be taken down in court anyway.
That’s why I said citizen journalist. Exposing corrupt people in the news is a major step towards criminal court, and even if there is no case, public opinion can be swayed and that’s a death sentence in many ways.
Teleportation by a long shot, though I would be afraid it would make me fat and unhealthy (never walking just teleporting everywhere).
If you are saying I can hold another person and teleport us both? Abso-damn-lutely teleportation, can you imagine the savings on travel?
Teleportation would be so much useful. I spend 80% of my time alone. People already can't see me.
I spend like 99% of my time alone and I feel like draw attention everywhere I go.
Teleportation is the queen of all powers. Invisibility can be basically mimicked with quick teleportation work if needed.
Although my legs would probably atrophy from lack of use, lol. Why walk to the kitchen when I could blink there and get a sandwich and blink back in no time at all?
Time control is the pinnacle of superpowers. Most aspects of every other super power can be achieved or closely appreciated with full time control.
Interesting view point. I would have to consider whether time still passes for the user of the power? If you freeze time for everyone else, do you still age? And if so, I would still take teleportation over that as travel would be instant vs "appearing" instant to outside perspectives.
Absolutely. You could never fail at anything, or you could try it again. You would have full control of probability, which is fucking insane.
Why visit the kitchen at all? Just teleport that sammich straight into the tum-tum.
Also, what's the king of all powers?
Having money
Queen is superior. At least in chess... and life 😉
And rock and roll
Love it!
And teleport it back out after the stomach cramps start!
Teleportation solves the world energy crisis, invisibility does not.
It could help in a lot of other crises too
During a natural disaster, you could jump back and forth carrying aid in, and the wounded people out. In any time sensitive crisis, you could get people out of harms way. This bit is more complicated, but you could potentially help out during floods and fires, depending on how far the 'teleport other stuff with you' extends to.
A reasonable limit might be 'Only what you could physically carry yourself', in which case you'd need to be a lot more strategic. In that case, you could work on personal strength and be a one-human-rescue-team. When there isn't a disaster, you could probably shuttle light weight (but important) stuff for a fee, then use that money to fund your own charity to do good
As for this prompt, you could probably just teleport away when someone might see you, or teleport to spots that people can't see. So you could do most things that invisibility would allow
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It could use energy proportional to the energy that could be gained by moving an object somewhere.
Sure, if you choose to change the parameters from what OP said, it might change the outcome.
How could teleportation solve the energy crisis? I'm too lazy to think myself so pls elaborate.
In addition to what the other commenter said: from the description of OP, the teleportation is basically "magic", ergo free potential energy (by moving objects from one place to another).
Create a large magnet in a generator that's very tall, free transport the magnet up to the top, let it fall slowly creating electricity. It's basically how hydro works: the sun "transports" water, in the form of clouds, to a higher point, gravity pulls it down, we use that to make energy.
What if you could only teleport yourself and not other objects?
Build a flywheel with a bunch of places to stand positioned around the wheel, teleport to the higher platforms as the wheel turns.
Sure, if you choose to change the parameters from what OP said, it might change the outcome.
That said, the other guy already answered you. It would become less efficient if you only had your body weight, but it still a solve of unlimited (though small volume) energy.
Scratch costs with transportation. No need for any means of transportation.
Also a lot more free time. No commuting, no early leave to get somewhere on time. Just blink and you're there.
Does the teleportation come with a bampf noise or do I have to carry my own bluetooth speaker and a button? This is make or break for me.
I want the H2G2 Krikkit robot teleportation noises: the sound of 100,000 people saying "WHOP!" when you appear, and 100,000 people saying "FOOP!" when you disappear.
Do I sense Nightcrawler vibes?
No, that super sense wasn’t one of the options.
The best teleporter ever created, regardless the drawback.
Yes! Although someone requested an Elderman sound and now I want the sound effect to be customizable via an app.
I only want teleportation if it makes me sound like an Enderman!
Not even a question for me, absolutely teleportation.
I wouldn't need to own a car, never need to pay for plane tickets or any sort of transportation.
I can go anywhere at any time. Live anywhere and then just blink where I want/need to be.
Invisibility doesn't provide nearly the same practical applications. The only useful thing I can think of for invisibility would be to hide inside a bank vault and steal money, but that could technically be achieved via teleportation too.
Invisibility does not get you out of the bank vault.
And unless you are stuffing your orifices, don't think you are getting far with a theft of floating cash anyhow
I’d just steal the regular cash
You could also surf all day without getting sunburnt.
Do I keep my velocity relative to earth if I teleport? Because if would really suck if I teleported from one side of the equator to the other one and am suddenly moving at 3300 km/h
There's always a catch, huh ...
In the same line of thinking: do I go blind if I turn invisible? After all: no light falls onto the receptors in my eyes, it all just passes through.
Teleport. I could be running late to something important but in the blink of an eye be there right on time. Plus, absolutely no need for any form of transport when you can just teleport.
If Flash taught me anything, is that being slow doesn’t make you late, but being fast makes you lazier, and laziness makes you very late.
Teleportation. Doesn't matter if you can see me when I can just pop in and out in an instant.
I'll teleport to where you can't see me. Checkmate legtards
If you can pop in and out fast enough then you can be there and not be there at the same time.
Wear clothes that cover your identifying features
Teleportation, hands down.
My first instinct would have been to pick invisibility - I'm a total introvert and I do NOT enjoy having to deal with people, so knowing that noone sees me anyway sounds tempting.
... but then again, teleportation sounds even more tempting for the same reason. Need groceries? Teleport into a store after hours, grab some stuff, teleport back and enjoy the rest of the day undisturbed (and with a still full wallet) without having interacted with anyone. Need to run an errand, like sending a letter? Who needs the post office anyway when I can just teleport wherever the letter was supposed to go and stuff it into the recipient's mailbox, then quickly teleport back...? I could sell the car since I would never need it again - no more traffic jams either. I would be on time for every appointment without having to rush. And there are a million smaller things too, like never having to worry about locking yourself out of the house.
Definitely teleportation for me.
Teleportation would be neat assuming you can just totally disregard basic laws of physics like conservation of momentum - otherwise you end up either as a red smear somewhere, or accidentally turn yourself into a kinetic energy weapon
I always understood teleportation as a accelerate-decelerate sequence to reach the end point, as in not A to B but A to B to C, where B is the midpoint where you have enough momentum to naturally stop at your destination.
A lot of depictions of teleportation seem to imply that you instantaneously move between two distinct points in space without having moved through the intervening matter - if that's the case you have to deal with a whole lot of complexity to ensure that you are moving at an appropriate speed at your destination - it depends a lot on your reference point, but imagine teleporting from the equator to the north pole without accounting for the difference in velocity of the ground due to the earth being a sphere. If you were standing still on the equator but preserved your momentum through the jump, you'd be moving at 1600km/h when you arrived. Air friction and the sonic boom alone would mess you up, let alone if you collided with something.
You are right, you could solve it by having the teleportation move you through some sort of hyperspace and making the jump almost instantaneous so you have time to accelerate and decelerate, but even then you'd need to hand wave away where the energy goes. Imagine the same set up, you've accelerated through hyperspace towards the pole, then decelerated back down to end up going 1600km/h slower than you started. For an average person this is about 8 MJ of excess kinetic energy that has to go somewhere
I would be afraid of accidentally teleporting into a wall.
That'd be covered by the "you know if it's safe" clause
Yeah but then the wall is fucked up.
As others have said, invisibility versus teleportation is way too lopsided in favor of teleportation. Even if we're talking perfect 'you cannot be detected unless you bump into something or otherwise reveal your own presence' invisibility, it's still not good enough to compete with teleportation. Especially with S-tier teleportation like described there.
You'd have to really beef up the invisibility side to make it more fair. Maybe instead of just invisibility, go full incorporeal, with the ability to have gravity affect you (or not affect you) however you want, relative to whatever reference frame you want (be very careful with this) and the ability to make any part of yourself incorporeal or corporeal without it being all of you. Even then, I'd have a bit of a hard time picking this over teleporting.
Or go with the Invisible Woman's powerset, that'd be a pretty solid other option versus that teleportation. At that point I would actually have a hard time choosing, cause that is some nice teleportation, but Sue Storm's powers are pretty high tier as well.
Force field bubbles are wild. I bet you could use them as transportation as well. Just explode one under your feet and catch yourself with them when you land.
At a minimum you could make bridges that would let you walk/run/ride/drive though the air or across water. Still great for travel.
Invisibility. Ever been the only person in a friend group who owns a truck?
"Oh, I guess the family and I will need to book some expensive flight tickets... unless PowerGloveSoBad wants to just give us a ride"
"Oh, I guess my administration will need to invest billions in foreign aid... unless PowerGloveSoBad wants to just carry all the boxes"
Your country needs you(r truck).
Grandma got a new phone... . . . -=Invisibility on=-
Just charge people for it. You could say $100 per teleport and then give your friends a "discounted" rate of $50. That's still like $300 to move half a dozen people and all you have to do is show up and spend a couple of minutes going back and forth.
PowerGloveSoBad's Mom: PowerGloveSoBad? It's Mom. I was talking to Aunt Kathy and she said you charged her $50 to move that stuff in her attic. Call me back or I'm coming over.
Oh no! Anyway...
Myeah 😏
If I could somehow be assured that the world wouldn’t immediately turn in me when they discovered my super power and try to capture me for its own ends, teleportation. If not…definitely invisibility. Much easier to hide the power, not just myself.
Invisibility.
I don't know why but I love the feeling of being able to watch people without them knowing about my presence. I spend a lot of time in nature and intentionally dress to blend in and I love that often when I hear/see people near me I can just stand there in plain sight and they still often don't notice me.
I don't know if this is creepy or cute but uh keep doing but not next to me
What if he's already invisible and saw you typing this comment?
Teleportation, because the only upside to invisibility is subterfuge. Not that I am some saint who denies ever wanting that, it just seems like teleportation would be just as good at any use case invisibility has. It would also have lots of very life changing above board benefits too.
Teleportation. Invisibility is a nice gimmick (until you accidentally leave it on and get hit by a car, that is).
Teleportation isn't just incredibly convenient, depending on the distances you can travel in one hop it'd also save you a lot of time (skip your commute, instantly travel to a nice vacation destination and back), and it'd be a money maker (fastest courier in the world).
Even if it was just line of sight, being able to easily reach places that are normally hard to reach or require extensive detours would be helpful. Even just crossing a busy street without having to wait for the traffic light would be a nice thing.
I would teleport to Japan to eat all my meals. So much good food for so cheap.
With the stipulations given here (no limits on where, and ability to know if it's safe) you could teleport to what astronomers speculate are earth-like planets. Grab some samples, head home, repeat. Maybe win the Nobel Prize for discovering extraterrestrial life.
Given that, it feels a bit one sided against the other option that would let you perv a locker room or get trapped in a bank vault when you trip a non-visual sensor.
If you could teleport anywhere, you could demonstrate the power to your region's space agency and get them to build a pressurised container or suit that can go with you.
Teleport to the moon and grab some rocks for a billionaire to make some money, then teleport to Mars and repair the broken rover. Take whatever samples the space agency wants,or transport some materials there ready for the first settlers.
This is just the standard stuff. Once you start using your imagination, there's not much of a limit :)
Even better, portals.
All the benefits of teleportation, plus you could slap a portal to the sun in front of people you don't like.
I feel like opening a portal to the sun would result in lots of highly pressurized, super-heated plasma shooting through and fucking annihilating everything in a massive area around the portal. I guess you could do it if you wanted to blow up, like, an entire building with a tiny and short-lived portal. Same thing in reverse when opening a portal into space.
"Don't like" was kind of understated.
Invisibility is cool and all, but teleportation is simply way better
Teleport. Could make so much money. Could advance science, depending on range.
I'm already invisible.
Who said that..?!
Lucky
Teleportation 100%. I could be anywhere on Earth, at any time. Invisibility is super cool but its most practical applications are kinda weird tbh. Being there without people knowing is basically always a privacy violation.
Teleportation, especially if you can take anyone with you. I'll be traveling the world without passport and go back home anytime I want.
Teleportation. I would pick it for the friends and family visits alone but the travel and science stuff would be amazing.
Even for those who inevitably want to use their power to commit crimes, teleportation is still more useful than invisibility.
Teleportation even if it was line of sight based like in the Dishonored games I think it still wins.
I think this depends on what invisible means. Does it mean no detectable signature - IR/thermal, scent, sound, etc.? Or just not on the visible light spectrum for humans? If not detectable at all, I think it would hold greater value for information gathering and have a lot of useful applications in hostage and other criminal situations, as well as state security through a very useful means of tradecraft. All that's out the door if a couple of rottweilers can sniff me out though.
It's a bit of a monkey's paw question as having either power puts a huge burden of secrecy as well as the threat of danger on yourself and whomever you choose to share knowledge of it that with.
Me being able to teleport would prove that FTL is possible so I think I'd have to take it for that alone. Invisibility in comparison is tricky but very grounded in existing physics.
Why would teleportation necessarily be faster than light?
Some assumptions are common with teleporting.
If it takes the same time to travel 10 meters or 10000 kilometers that kinda implies faster than light.
To light, there's no difference in those times, as I understand. A light particle doesn't experience traveling at all. From its own perspective, it exists where it is created, then immediately where it is absorbed, in the same instance. So you could say it doesn't experience time at all. All of its energy exists in its velocity, and none of it in its movement through time.
Don't ask me to prove or explain this, because I don't remember where I heard it or if I even remember it correctly. 😅
Actually light does experience time in its own frame of reference. For somebody observing(us in this example) the light or any object that moves at the speed of light in vacuum, it would seem that object is not experiencing time at all, that is, if there was clock on the object and we tried to measure the time that clock reads, it would give the same number as the result of the reading irrespective of when or where we measure it in our frame of reference.
It was my understanding that light does not experience time.
And yes it does experience time from our dimension because the speed of light is finite, making the lifetime of a photon as observed from a different frame of reference, non-zero.
I think the point I was trying to make was that the lifetime of the photon is nonzero to us, from our perspective, but zero to the photon, from its perspective. All of its energy is in its velocity.
Remember in Interstellar when they slingshot around the black hole and it cost them like 80 years or whatever? The time around them went by faster as a result. Well a photon going at c would see time around it going by at max time speed as well, so it would arrive at its destination immediately after it departed. (From its perspective.)
That's how I understand it.
By what you're saying, it sounds like you're confirming what I said, just in a different way. A photon experiences time, but in its own frame of reference, the time experienced is zero. From its perspective, the time it takes to travel from one destination to the next, is zero. Just like the clock following it would show, from our perspective. Or am I misunderstanding?
First of all, talking about a photon's experience is weird because when moving at the the speed of light, the transformation equations associated with changing the frame of reference start having infinities appearing within them which makes it impossible to mathematically define things like time elapsed or distance travelled.
Secondly it is a little confusing to talk about of frames of reference but I will try my best to explain.
Assume there are two balls(A and B) in an empty region of spacing moving away from each other at speed of 1m/s. Since there are refrences in the background, we have no idea of both the balls are moving or ball A is the only one moving or ball B is the only one moving. From ball A's perspective, it would seem like ball B is moving away from it while it is stationary. Vice versa for ball B which thinks A is moving while it is stationary. Now let us say that the balls have a way to measure the time elapsed and distance travelled. Now when ball A sees that 10 seconds have passed and that ball B has travelled 10m. To verify this it measures the reading shown by ball B. To its surprise it finds out the reading from B's instruments show that only 8 seconds have and that B travelled only 8m. This is the time dialation and length contraction that happens in special relativity. Till now everything is fine but interesting things start to happen when you switch perspectives. In the frame of reference of B, it measures that 10 seconds has passed and that A has moved 10m in that duration. When it tries to verify these measurements from A's instruments, it finds out that they show that only 8sec have passed and that A has only travelled 8m. Now we are in trouble as these measurements seem incompatible. Not only are the instruments not agreeing with each, other, the instruments don't even agree with themselves depending on the frame. This is eventually resolved by the realisation that the order of events is not the same for all frames. In A's, frame, it seems to B that started measuring late by 2s while from B's frame it seems A started measurements later. Adding this 2 second delay in both frames solves all the measurement inconsistency issues.(The numbers used are random. If you actually calculate the difference in measurements coming from a relative velocity of 1m/s, the differences will be exceeding small)
Now that a basic understanding is out of the way, let us discuss the case of the photon. From our frame of reference, the photon is moving at the speed of light, we can measure with our instruments for how long the photon moved and what was the distance it moved but when we measure using the photon's instruments we see that the clock always shows the same time and no time has lapsed. From the photon's frame, it seems like it is stationary and everything else is moving at the speed of(which is obviously not true. Weird things happen when we try talk of moving at the speed of light beacuse of the infinities I aluded to before) and so while it clock is ticking, the clocks of the world around it seem stopped. So in conclusion while it valid to say that photons experience no time, it is only because we can't go to the photon's frame of reference because physics and math fail us that point.
Sorry for the incredibly long reply.
Are you referring to dark matter? What kind of invisibility is grounded in physics?
It would require matter (including the inter-particle interactions) involving no absorption or emission of photons.
According to some models, subatomic particles exert action at a distance by exchanging photons.
This is what bothered me about the notion of a “black domain” in the Three Body series
You're wayyy over complicating it, invisibility is just a matter of taking the light that hits you, bending it around you and putting it back in place. We can already do this on a small scale with fixed stationary setups.
Even simpler is just a very accurate and fast camera/display system that records and displays the background onto itself.
How fast can you teleport? If there is no cooldown, you could teleport so fast nobody would see you being there
Ha, I'm already invisible for all non nefarious purposes, I choose teleportation.
Teleportation. I suppose it would be somewhat limited by the fact that teleporting to a place where other people might be would be tricky, since I absolutely don’t want to be caught.
Even with hesitation to teleport to populated areas, the ability to teleport home would be massively useful as a utility. I could also teleport out of danger in an emergency. I wonder if I pick up a person would allow me to teleport them with me, in which case then it’s got hero potential too.
If you had the teleport jump ability from the book Jumper that would be pretty cool and useful. The character fills a cistern by being in water and in the cistern simultaneously which would be a great way to help drought suffering areas while also helping flooding areas.
I'm looking for a new book to read but wasn't blown away by the movie. How different is the book?
Far better than the movie. Much crap was added to the movie. Better antagonists in the book and the sequel was also good. Upon searching just now I found that there are a total of four novels in the series.
Jumper, Reflex, Impulse and Exo all by Steven Gould. Now I have two more books to read.
Don't you became blind if you're invisible?
How will your eyes function if they can't control the way light hits your retina?
Teleportation. I love to travel, but I hate the airport.
Are you truly invisible? As in not appearing on thermal or any other commonly used forms of visual detection and imaging?
Teleportation for sure. It covers all practical applications that I can see for invis, plus more.
Depends on the situation. On the one hand, you can choose to teleport and go anywhere instantly and be able to save time, money, and get tasks done faster. On the other hand, you could choose invisibility to avoid Carl the office dickhead and prank the shitty hr department.
Teleportation. Hands down
Clearly teleportation, because when you are invisible, you cannot see - your body let photons through.
I’d pick invisibility if it came with some mechanism to keep people from running into me.
I attract way too much attention in public and I’d like to be able to go out and walk around without all the attention.
eat both pills