So you can teleport. Congratulations. Welcome to the club. You are a superhero. But superheroes
are boring: they just go and save a few lives. You can do so much better than that. Here
is how to take over the world.
Let's get the problems out of the way first. Hopefully your teleportation is relative to
Earth, because Earth is moving at about 30 clicks a second around the sun, and about
ten times that relative to the cosmic microwave background, which is the closest thing we've
got to a reference frame.
If you're not relative to Earth, then you haven't so much learned to teleport as you
have learned to disappear into deep space never to be seen again.
<< I'm... I'm over here.
There we go. Your second problem: different parts of the Earth's surface move at different
speeds. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but it's kind of like a record. The bits at
the poles barely move at all in one day, but the bits at the equator have so much further
to travel. Which means that if you teleport from, say, one city block to another --
-- then you're going to be fine. But New York to DC? You will hit the wall at 20mph. Poles
to the equator? You will be a red smear on the wall at 1,000mph. I mean, it doesn't take
much energy to compensate for that, about 7000J, which you can get from a sip of cola.
But - be aware of it.
Also, try not to appear upside-down when you're going to Australia.
Steven Gould's Jumper series does a good job of working with the physics of that and seeing
what it'd be like for someone who can control momentum.
But comic-book superheroes? They don't worry about that at all. They can teleport all the
way into space despite the fact that the energy required to get that far out of a gravity
well is more calories than they you could take in in a week. And they can jump straight
back down, despite the fact that the waste heat they should generate should cook them
from the inside. They don't worry about that.
They are violating the laws of thermodynamics and, if you can do that, oh, then you can
take over the world.
If you're evil, never mind bank robberies or kidnapping the president. Just get something
big and heavy --
-- teleport somewhere high --
-- give it and yourself a few hundred miles an hour downwards. Then let it go, and teleport
away.
[DISTANT EXPLOSION] They'll... they'll be fine.
You've just created an artificial asteroid strike. Or, heck, use something really big
and dense, you've basically got the equivalent of a tactical nuclear bomb only without all
that nasty radiation and fallout.
Heck, you could threaten to 'port to the asteroid belt -- you've got power over momentum -- and
push a rock towards Earth. That should net you a few billion dollars.
Or if you're good? Ah, there's a much better idea.
Find something big, heavy and magnetic >>
-- something like this, but bigger. Get up high and drop it through a massive coil of
wire. You're generating free electricity. Or better yet, if you're one of those people
who can create portals in mid-air --
like that -- much better thing you can do.
Get your something big and heavy and magnetic, create an infinite loop...
There we go. Put a coil around that, infinite free energy generation. That ought to save
a few million lives.
Or better yet, jump to orbit, make the cost of putting something into space nothing more
than your time. Or jump to Mars, with some colonists and some equipment. You could kickstart
the colonisation of the solar system.
Or: you could do what every other superhero does, and fight crime in one city in one country
on one planet. Superheroes have no imagination.
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