(shamelessly stolen from an imgur dump)
Why is everyone choosing whatever pill(s) they want to and describing what they’d do with it?
The instructions explicitly say you can only pick 2. Everyone gets gravel. Smh.
That’s all I want anyways though it would be cool to speak another language.
Oh.
2 and 3 easy.
Free gravel for life. So I have an endless supply of product I can sell for profit? Yes please.
And I see no time-limit on the teleportation. 7 inches at a time. Sure. But what stops me from instantly teleporting another 7 inches? And who says I can only do it horizontally. Pretty much giving me the ability to fly here. I’ll take it.
I agree with your choices but your logic for the teleportation doesn’t hold up. You’ve assumed your momentum wouldn’t be conserved through the teleportation in a weird way. Assuming momentum is conserved, you would still fall just as quickly. In fact, you would reach terminal velocity in short order, and would have to continually teleport to keep yourself from crashing into the ground. By itself that would be bad enough, but you moving through the air between teleports would cause the air to move as well, so assuming you could keep up and hold your elevation, your velocity relative to the ground would increase to some number higher than terminal velocity. Think Chell continually falling through portals. Now you’re stuck unless you can also teleport slightly to the side without falling. Best case you go to one of those indoor skydiving places and get in so you can slow down without dying. I was going to explore what would happen if your momentum somehow wasn’t conserved, but that would imply some absolute fixed frame of reference or magical mumbo jumbo, neither of which exist.
You could totally travel faster though, without even needing to walk. You would also be super dangerous in one on one combat sports. A well placed 7 inch teleportation can easily get the win in the right sports.
I disagree with your teleportation assessment. Just as I don’t think my momentum would be conserved, you think it is. You have no more reason to believe it would than I have to believe it wouldn’t. Because there’s no foundation for teleportation as it doesn’t exist.
I’m not sure what logic you want to use with something that is made up. But im gonna go ahead and assume my teleportation will work on my rules since no rules were ever specified.
You can feel free to use whatever made up rules you want for your own magical power.
Conservation of momentum is a law of nature, making it natural to assume it would still hold even with a hypothetical power. But you do you. It’s ok to be wrong sometimes.
conservation of momentum is only a true, when translational invariance holds. In addition, there may be a countless number of mechanisms by which teleportation changes a persons momentum. E.g. maybe the way this kind of teleportation works is Star Tek-like and your atoms get disassembled and reassembled, meaning they don’t need to have the same overall momentum, when whatever is doing the dissassembly stops atoms for dissassembly.
There are a ton of conditions that are left floating, for sure. Some people here are imagining this as “instant” teleportation. As in: here one second, there the next.
If zero time passes when a person is teleported, that causes some problems. I like thinking about that one, TBH. That starts to dive into the realm of breaking space itself, which is super cool to noodle on. (Wormholes FTW!)
My own questions would be more about how disassembly and reassembly would maintain original state. If an electron is moving when it is transported, where does that momentum go and how is it reapplied.
But what if teleportation doesn’t move you from A to B, but just lets you disappear and reappear while you’re just standing there, so that there’s no momentum at all?
No momentum at all relative to what? Relativity tells us that there is no fixed frame of reference. In practice what that means is there is no universal zero velocity. You only have velocity relative to other things. The implicit assumption in your argument is that you would have no momentum relative to the earth, which in itself is problematic. After all, the earth spins at a rate of 360 degrees per day, so not moving relative to the earth would mean moving 463.83 m/s relative to the surface of the earth at the equator, which is supersonic. But maybe you mean relative to the surface of the earth. What if you go to the moon? Or mars? Or into orbit? Maybe you mean relative to the nearest big thing. If you could somehow teleport from the ground into a plane, would the plane count as the nearest big thing? What about a bus? That’s on the ground, so maybe the nearest big thing would be the ground, if the mass of the thing matters in how the nearest big thing is determined. You can see how this can quickly turn into a mess of rules and special cases.
Where does the energy go if you are already moving when you teleport? Do you somehow lose all mass for a brief second? Instant transportation from point A to point B means that there is no in-between state to change the variables of nature. Zero time passes between being here one second and there the next.
Most everything that has mass and is moving has momentum. If momentum were to somehow be cancelled, which it can’t be, your body would probably just stop completely. Even electrons have mass (9.1093837 × 10-31kg) and just stopping all electrical signals in your body at the same time seems like a bad thing. (I say “most everything”, because there are these strange things called photons. It doesn’t have mass, but has momentum. It’s also a particle (err… “energy packet”?) and a wave, which is even weirder.)
Sure, we are taking about a completely fictional situation when it comes to teleporting so this conversation is just really just a thought experiment.
If you were granted any wish, but you only received an extremely literal version of that wish, what are the consequences? That is humorous to think about, actually.
Where does the energy go if you are already moving when you teleport?
If you are in fact moving, there’d be momentum, like you say. But if you don’t? If you just sit there, and teleport from one comfy armchair into another, not changing anything about your position?
That goes back to my point about the humble electron.
There are a ton of things moving in your body all the time regardless if you are sitting still of not. The only thing that I can think of that would be drastically impacted by instant cancellation of momentum is electrical signals. I admit, that is absolutely pushing the boundaries of what I know about physics at that scale.
Stopping every electrical signal in your body simultaneously and assuming it will just resume spontaneously seems odd to me, is all.
Well you see, there’s also the problem that if you teleported and it got rid of your momentum, unless something immediately speeds you back up to the speed of the earth, it will just woosh past you. Even if something like the air sped you up, while it’s speeding you up, the friction would likely tear you apart.
I love the thought experiment. However, what really makes me think is how air behaves.
Would the air from the destination get teleported back to fill the void that you left? Does the person just displace the air at the destination when they teleport?
What really gets me curious is what would happen during several quick teleports if the air is just displaced at the destination. Regardless, there would be an extreme vacuum at the starting location for a very short period of time. There was no specific time given about how long a person needs to wait between jumps, so you could leave a heck of a trail of destruction in your wake.
Some air would be displaced backwards after the teleport decreasing the volume of the void, but a void would still be there.
Would the forces be strong enough to suck the person backwards? Would the atmosphere simply collapse the void creating a bit of thunder and heat?
I can’t even fathom what happens to time. If you teleport instantly, that may imply that you are traveling faster than the speed of light. The universe implodes?
You know when you see people teleport on TV and they just appear in a different place with no major world breaking repercussions? It works like that
Sure. But that is boring. The magic of TV does a poor job of taking fictional situations and showing how things work in real life. Real life can be much more dramatic and interesting. (Or much less dramatic and interesting, in some cases. Like car explosions.)
But Midi-chlorians…
I was going to say 2 and 3 for the exact reason. And just dumping large amounts of gravel in random places.
I think the teleport one is only a one timer. You take the pill, you teleport away for 7 inches.
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Resell my free gravel for huge profits
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Have a great street magic trick where I ask the spectator to empty a single container out of many with my back turned, but I can always pick out which one
I’ll be Cris Angel, Gravel King
Redmond and blutarch are gonna be SEETHING when I collapse the gravel industry
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2 and 3 without question.
You’d make ludicrous money from the construction industry with an unlimited supply of gravel, while being able to teleport 7 inches would be useful for break-ins.
The teleport for break-ins only works if you and the object you want to go through are less than 7 inches thick. I’m not sure you could do anything with it
My thoughts exactly. God-tier talents, both of them. But if you got #2 you don’t really need to steal. I would use #3 to undress. Easily saves 5-10 seconds at bedtime. Or become the naked burglar of course.
Free gravel for life. Just become a gravel wholesaler. Corner the market instantly.
The price of gravel has plummeted. You now have a mountain of gravel and no one willing to buy it for more than what it would cost to transport it.
That fine, I’ll take the loss for now and later raise prices again once all the other gravel suppliers die out.
So what you’re saying is, I have a ton of free rocks!
Let’s goooooo
2 and 7. Free gravel? Sign me up that shit’s expensive. And I think another way to interpret 7 is that you can instantly tell whether any closed container is empty or not, since you can only see into empty containers.
2 and 7 feels OP compared to any other combo by a mile. Definitely getting nerfed in the next patch.
For some reason my mind skipped straight past 2 so I never considered it. I was going to go 5 and 7. 7 for the same reasoning as your own, and I could probably use 5 as some sort of weird toaster-only magic show to make money. 2 Is definitely the far superior moneymaker here, but I’d probably go with 5 anyway because it’d be more fun to have as an ability.
Depending on the exact rules, you could probably control anything you can bolt a toaster to.
For no real reason other than it sounds reasonable in my head, my personal head canon is that you can’t move anything heavier then the toaster itself. So a cloth on top of the toaster is fine, but a car just wouldn’t fly.
It’s fun to imagine what it would mean with no limits though. Could I send the earth spiraling into the sun simply by placing the toaster on the floor?
Even with limitations, like, would installing a toaster into a car, pimp my ride style, make the car a driveable toaster?
Definetly 2. You can make millions with that shit.
2 and 7, obviously. Good luck anyone carrying an empty box within my vicinity.
Agreed.
With 2, I build a fortune in the construction supply industry.
7 is just gravy at that point. A minor convenience.
Gravel is a very important construction aggregate.
Although it depends of the mechanics of how useful 2 would be. Does the gravel just like spear near you? Is there just a guy who gives you bags of gravel? Do you have to go to a specific location to get it? Is there a limit to the through put? What’s the volume of out out of the gravel. what type of gravel is it? Could it be processed for other minerals?
Like, free gravel sounds pretty damn awesome based on the mechanics.
After taking the pill, a pile of gravel the exact size and weight to be just enough to kill you lands on you immediately.
There is a guy who hands you handful of gravel, but no one else can see him. We’ll call the gravel type base gravel.
Define container; reasonably, a room could be defined as a container. A container of what? And furthermore, define empty! Knowing when something’s “empty” has all kinds of applications. That and teleporting, even a few inches could be incredible, especially dependent on how often/quickly you could do it. 3 & 7, hands down
I’d pick teleport but I’m afraid of the splicing consequences.
I’d rather just see inside empty objects. I’m sure I could use this in some circumstances. Being able to “know” if a box is empty or not could be perceived as super natural. There is probably a lot of money in that. Plus, a lot of gambling opportunities in things like that cup game. What defines a container? That could change things.
Controlling any toaster with my mind is ambiguous. I’ll assume it only works on toasters with power. So I can only turn them on/off to make toast. I could use this power to destroy countries. Power draw of a toaster isn’t too bad, but every toaster being turned on at the same time might damage an energy sector. It would take a while to debug as well.
I like the free gravel.
I think I’d pick free gravel and… Seeing inside empty objects. Seems like the most profitable with the least chance of a monkeys paw.
Everyone discounts oyster knowledge… But is the gravel unlimited? Like could I just demand 730,000 Tonnes of gravel tomorrow?
Weal, gravel be upon ye
2 for money
3 for everything else. Think about it! Assuming you can teleport in any direction as fast as you can think then you can fly, move super fast, dodge any attack, pass through thin barriers (such as fences, thin walls, etc) swim super fast and depending on the rules of this power maybe you can poop really fast by teleporting away but leaving your poop behind!
Plot twist: the act of teleportation is extremely tasking both physically and mentally. Even the most capable persons haven’t been able to teleport more than twice a day.
What is this, lost earth?
If you fly by teleportation you’d still accelerate towards the ground from gravity and when you land you’ll splat
What if we teleport upside down temporarily? Would we accelerate ‘Up’ for a moment, thus decelerating?
No, you’re teleporting, you instantly appear 7 inches away. In the time it takes you to teleporting again, no matter how short, you will start falling and gaining velocity.
But does teleporting reset momentum?
Unless otherwise stated, I assume all relative inertia is preserved.
does the teleporting retain the velocity?
Say some phrase in Khitan, then teleport. Become a world-famous magician as no one would believe you’re actually teleporting. The Khitan is for the show. Also drive all those people trying to debunk your trick insane.
Plus it’d be incredible for heists, there’s no mention of a cooldown so just spam it and piston-translocation glitch your way through some complex.
Careful. Do it too much and you’ll get gravgun-taken by the admins for a stern talking to.
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3 and 7. With 3 you can essentially walk through walls, and with 7 you will know exactly which boxes you don’t need to check when looking for something.
Getting powers and immediately offing yourself by phasing into a wall
Not how I wanted to become a stud, but I’ll take it
Only if you’re less than 7 inches across in the direction you’re teleporting. This is only useful for the super-skinny, otherwise you’re going to splinch yourself into a wall.
3, 7 in is enough to travel through a few mm thick steel wall
7, being able to see through the walls of an actual container can save some time while robbing them
Also,
5, controlling a toaster with your mind is like controlling a pretty impractical relay. Combine it with amateur arduino skills and you can actually control any electro mechanical device with your mind. In that case i would pick 5 and 2. Selling the gravel will pay for the expensive hobby
Can save some time while robbing what? The container is empty
You don’t have to go check the empty ones
Don’t waste time opening empty containers. Anything you can’t see inside must have something inside it.
Shit, this box is full of gravel!
