Expanded from a conversation I was having elsewhere

Fifty years from now the issue of teleportation will define me as a socially regressive conservative. I will not put enough faith in science to believe that the ‘me’ coming out on the other side is really ‘me’ at all. The idea of dissolving my body into some machine and transmitting its biological data as a bunch of ones and zeros to some other location where my physical form is reconstructed will prove far too frightening for my old-fashioned self to handle. I’ll fear that it’s not a continuation of my singular consciousness at all. I’ll assume that I simply die on one end and some new person who’s exactly like me (but not me!) is created on the other. No matter how many people tell me that they’re still the same person after as they were before, I’ll simply reply “But you can’t ever really know!”

And so, in the 2058 economy where one cannot hope to have a successful career without travelling all over the planet (and to Mars, surely) within a half second, I’ll become an out-of-touch and irrelevant old troglodyte, hopelessly lost in a world I don’t understand. My grandkids will beg me to go on vacation with the family to the new Jupiter colony, and I’ll just angrily swing my cane at them (teleporting bastards won’t be my real grandkids anymore, anyway). I’ll soon come to a point where I only associate with other regressive folk, and together we’ll become the base of the Republican Party. My bleeding-heart kids will argue at me about the need for forward-looking leadership, but I’ll just shake my fist and yell something about the Democrats no longer being the “Party of Obama.” They’ll have gone too far, I will claim. Obama never would have allowed his kids to be uploaded into a computer.

“But Grandpa!” they will say, “Don’t you see you’re just like those people who held back gay rights?” And so, firmly planted on the wrong side of history, I will become bitter and defensive. I will come to resent progress and change in general, and develop a deep mistrust for science and education. I will charge those who are up on the times as being elitists. It is then that I will vote Sarah Palin, her body kept alive by a swarm of nano-bots, for President.

Of course the nano-bots will be keeping me alive, as well. So unlike all the other old, out-of-touch luddites up to that point, I won’t die. I’ll just continue on in my alienated and miserable existence, driving my loved ones away from me and being endlessly angry at the world, for centuries to come. I will be a sad, sad sight.

But then, one lonely night, I’ll be leafing through my old DVD collection (they’ll make a hipster comeback in the 2030s, and I’ll just hang on to mine after that) until I eventually stumble across an old title I haven’t watched in decades. I’ll smile gently as I plug it into my home entertainment system (surely computers of the future will be smart enough to not give me shit about plug-ins and drivers and playing such old file types, right?) and watch what will, as of that moment, be my favourite film ever.




I really can’t wait.