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If only I could apparate!

Let’s face it, I hate Harry Potter. But the past 24 hour of zombie like travelling has made me yearn for a concept found only in the world of Harry Potter, and that is the concept of apparation. (In other news, I finally found out how Scott Adams gets his weird ideas.)

Let me give a summary of the last 24 hours. I'm currently at Frankfurt airport, and I'm sure that this blog post will not be published until I reach home; but I'm writing it anyway, so that the flavour is not diluted by the happiness of being at home.

Travelling is tedious. I woke up at around 07:00 EST, reached the bus stop in Ithaca at around 09:15. The bus arrived shortly after, but some 6 idiots passengers forgot to give the driver their tickets. This meant that the driver counted the tickets three times over, in his painfully slow 60s-something grandpa style, after which he declared that he would not move the bus until the tickets had been submitted. Result: bus supposed to start off at 09:40 started off at 10:10.

Things were just getting better. The bus broke down on NY-17 around 220 miles from NYC. The breakdown resulted in the driver calling a mechanic, who subsequently fixed the bus (or so I think), but then a replacement bus showed up, and we were all asked to switch buses just to “be safe”. This involved lugging a suitcase, a backpack and a camera bag around 30 feet in the snow on the side of the road; which may not seem like much, but picture 55 folks trying to do the same at the same time.

The breakdown cost another hour and a half. By now, I was really worried about making it on time for my flight from JFK. Then I saw the NYC traffic…

From Port Authority Bus Terminal, I did not get the shuttle to JFK for a long time, apparently because all the shuttles were stopped by the police for “inspection”. The manager apologised, and said that the police were probably looking for “Christmas money”, though I suspect that claim.

Damn, Times Square is the worst place on earth. Half an hour just to get out of three blocks? I've begun to hate that place already.

At JFK, I made it to the gate just 20 minutes before the scheduled boarding time, but my day was just getting better. Apparently, Singapore Airlines, an airline which I’ve not known to delay flights did just that, and boarding was delayed by around 45-50 minutes. I'm sick of waiting.

Thanks to the delay, we get stuck in the congestion at JFK, which means that we’re further delayed by around 45 minutes.

Then, I face the daunting prospect of sitting in one place for 7 hours, something I rarely manage. Deplane at Frankfurt while the plane is being serviced, and that’s when I'm writing this blog.

I wonder how nice would it be to be able to travel without the time wasted in travelling. I wish I could apparate. Poof, and I vanish from Ithaca, to reappear in Singapore, halfway across the globe. This may not even need magic. It could be possible to study the structure of my body, break it down atom by atom, and send the atoms over to the other side of the globe. In fact, this may not even need the atoms to be transmitted, but we could have a certain stock of atoms at every apparation-port. Given that people travel fairly randomly (that is how airliners today are able to survive, as they have assured fares both ways of operation of their flights), this idea may not be all that infeasible.

One danger however is the lack of identity that this method will introduce. Essentially, the person will be destroyed at one end of the world, and his essence retransmitted to another part, where he would be re-assembled from spare atoms which in turn may belong to thousands of other people.

On the plus side, this would mean that over the course of time, all of us humans will be able to claim that we are all made up of each other. Perhaps this method will be able to promote world peace and brotherhood (hey, after all, we’re all made up of the same borrowed stuff, right?).

Any thoughts? Wouldn't it be great to be able to travel without actually travelling? To be able to reap the benefits of going home, meeting friends and relatives, without spending close to two days each way in pressurised metal tubes travelling at the speed of a bullet? Or worse, spending hours in a Shortline coach, which apparently has lesser reliability than Poonam Pandey's claims.

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Labels:
Location: Frankfurt International Airport (FRA), 60547 Frankfurt, Germany

Comments

  1. Prashant26 December 2012 at 04:17

    IDK about apparition, but the closest thing that could arguably be considered to be within our reach in the next few decades, would have to be portals and portal guns. If I am not wrong, I've already heard about simple experiments that managed to atomically disintegrate substances and reconstruct them in another place.

    Apart from which, I had to hunt around a bit in the page source to reach the comments form. Is this so to dissuade uninterested (or generally HTML-illiterate) parties? :)

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    1. Skand Hurkat26 December 2012 at 04:34

      Prashant, you always have to do things the hard way, don't you?
      The comment form can be viewed just by clicking on the "view comments" link. :)

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  2. KM26 December 2012 at 06:44

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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    1. Skand Hurkat26 December 2012 at 06:50

      I'd agree that reproducing thoughts may be a tad more difficult. Maybe not. Remember that we're talking about transmitting the exact atomic structure of a human being. The thoughts ought to be encoded in that.

      Are you, by any chance, taking a course in law? Nothing apart from that fact can explain the convoluted last line, of which I can make but little sense.
      Given that I've got a certain distance to travel, I really don't have an option when it comes to choosing the airport I want to fly out of. As for the aircraft, I did fly an A380, but that does not make flying any faster. I wish we still had the Concorde...

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    2. KM26 December 2012 at 06:56

      First of all, I apologise for the mess of comments I am making. The convoluted line you are referring to could be caused by my simultaneous thinking and writing process (please quote it, so that I can explain). I am verbose by nature :) And I am just saying that direct flights are faster modes of transport in general. Equivalently, you could be lodged in a rocket! :D By the way, Concorde was only a trans-Atlantic plane, wasn't it?

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    3. Skand Hurkat26 December 2012 at 06:58

      KM, there are no direct flights from the US to India, I believe, except an Air India service from Toronto (that's Canada) to India; and I'm not keen on that flight.
      As for the Concorde, it only flew transatlantic routes, but that does not mean that it could not fly other routes. :)

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    4. KM26 December 2012 at 07:07

      I was suggesting an alternative, much less imaginary than apparition :P anyway, only electric impulses can be captured and reproduced, perhaps. and structure of atoms will be responsible for taking care of, let's say, medical history, too. but the reproduction of the chain of thoughts that gave rise to the 'frozen' eletric impulses at the time of apparition is pretty difficult. one can easily imitate the electric impulse, but not the way the impulse evolved (from other unique set of impulses before the information being frozen). I could be wrong as well, but I would love to be explained how!

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  3. KM26 December 2012 at 06:50

    Well, in terms of atoms and molecules stuck together working collectively as several self-sustaining clusters, the implementation of the concept of apparition seems pretty tempting. Biology seems to create a problem, though. To exactly reproduce your thoughts and nervous responses and the time of apparating along with the medical and virtual memory of your body and brain is a task beyond our reach (currently and, as far as I can imagine, for quite a while into the future). So, although you are bored of waiting and/or travelling for long periods of time, your best (and admittedly far-fetched) bet would still only be to board an A380 from the nearest (no-more-)domestic airport to Mumbai...

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