What item from fiction would you most like to possess?
I would like a Babel Fish. I would like the whole world to own a Babel Fish.
“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn't thought of that,” and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
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On that note, I’ll take the infinite improbability drive.
Well, for me it would of course be fijords...
I'm with ZjayPo..... a Tardis would do the trick!
Babel Fish is almost a reality already. A teleport would be good for world travel, but it would need to be the kind that doesn't destroy you and replace you with a mere copy.
Only way I see that working would be wormholes... if that is even an actual possibility. Any teleport that disintegrates also kills.
@Anemynous If every atom is turned to energy and that same energy is turned back into the same atom at the far end, it would still be the original person. I don't think there's any realistic chance of such technology ever existing though, and it may be misguided in any case as we still don't know what we are (i.e. what is the sentience inside us).
I don’t think you survive the disintegration is all. You can make a perfect replica that thinks it’s you, and will tell you most sincerely the teleportation was a success... but the “real” you dies if it is disintegrated unless you are going to try and argue for a “soul”. If “you” are just a pattern of matter and energy that can be reconstituted from the same, why “beam” anything other than the pattern to be re-assembled from native materials at the site location, and skip the part where you have your original body disintegrated. Of, course now you’ll have another you running around across the universe... but hell, if we can create perfect replicas of human beings, then we are probably sophisticated enough to tinker up some brain to brain interface to “share” the collective experience of your “selves”.
If you don't have a soul of any kind, surely a reconstruction of the same material into the same configuration would be the same person just as a Lego house is the same house after being taken apart and rebuilt with all the bricks in the same places and orientations. If you believe in sentience, then there's something in us which is a minimal kind of soul, and if that's part of the matter we're made of or the energy acting within it, transferring all of that matter and energy to a different place by deconstructing and reconstructing it in every aspect would transfer the sentience/soul with it. But we're running up against something that science doesn't understand. Sentience itself looks impossible, or rather, it looks impossible for it to interface with anything that can generate data to document the experience of feelings. It can't be done in computers. You can program a computer to claim that it's suffering, but it isn't - we can trace back how the claims of suffering were generated and we'll always find out that they are just uninformed assertions which were not driven by any feeling anywhere. Very few people (atheists included) believe that people can't suffer, which means most of us believe feelings are real and that something experiences them. Many people have weird ideas about consciousness emerging (by magic) out of complexity to experience feelings without any of the component parts feeling anything at all, but that's every bit as bonkers as a religious belief. The puzzle of consciousness/sentience doesn't appear to have any possible solution.
If you're going Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you should go for the point of view gun. Which would rank pretty high in my list.
But I think I would have to go with one of any number of different devices that provide near infinite clean energy. Talk about world-changing!
But remember it doesn't work on women!
Babel fish would be really cool.
But so would the Heart of Gold.
Decisions, decisions. Could I have both?