Would you choose invisibility or teleportation?

You could turn invisibility on and off as you like and there would be no time limit. Your clothes would turn invisible too, and you could decide whether the items you are holding would be visible or not.

There would be no limits on how many times or where you could teleport. The items you hold while teleporting would be teleported too. You would also have the ability to know if the place would be safe to teleport to, so you wouldn’t teleport and get impaled by an icicle or teleport inside a wall and get your insides filled with concrete or something.

Personally, I don’t know which one would I pick. Invisibility would be awesome for pranks and stuff, but teleportation probably would be more useful for everyday life.

Xariphon,

Teleportation, hands down.

RegalPotoo,
@RegalPotoo@lemmy.world avatar

Teleportation would be neat assuming you can just totally disregard basic laws of physics like conservation of momentum - otherwise you end up either as a red smear somewhere, or accidentally turn yourself into a kinetic energy weapon

jol,

I would be afraid of accidentally teleporting into a wall.

Maalus,

That’d be covered by the “you know if it’s safe” clause

intensely_human,

Yeah but then the wall is fucked up.

qyron,

I always understood teleportation as a accelerate-decelerate sequence to reach the end point, as in not A to B but A to B to C, where B is the midpoint where you have enough momentum to naturally stop at your destination.

RegalPotoo,
@RegalPotoo@lemmy.world avatar

A lot of depictions of teleportation seem to imply that you instantaneously move between two distinct points in space without having moved through the intervening matter - if that’s the case you have to deal with a whole lot of complexity to ensure that you are moving at an appropriate speed at your destination - it depends a lot on your reference point, but imagine teleporting from the equator to the north pole without accounting for the difference in velocity of the ground due to the earth being a sphere. If you were standing still on the equator but preserved your momentum through the jump, you’d be moving at 1600km/h when you arrived. Air friction and the sonic boom alone would mess you up, let alone if you collided with something.

You are right, you could solve it by having the teleportation move you through some sort of hyperspace and making the jump almost instantaneous so you have time to accelerate and decelerate, but even then you’d need to hand wave away where the energy goes. Imagine the same set up, you’ve accelerated through hyperspace towards the pole, then decelerated back down to end up going 1600km/h slower than you started. For an average person this is about 8 MJ of excess kinetic energy that has to go somewhere

PowerGloveSoBad,

Invisibility. Ever been the only person in a friend group who owns a truck?

“Oh, I guess the family and I will need to book some expensive flight tickets… unless PowerGloveSoBad wants to just give us a ride”

“Oh, I guess my administration will need to invest billions in foreign aid… unless PowerGloveSoBad wants to just carry all the boxes”

ExtraMedicated,

Your country needs you(r truck).

ace_garp, (edited )
@ace_garp@lemmy.world avatar

Grandma got a new phone… . . . -=Invisibility on=-

AeroLemming,

Just charge people for it. You could say $100 per teleport and then give your friends a “discounted” rate of $50. That’s still like $300 to move half a dozen people and all you have to do is show up and spend a couple of minutes going back and forth.

PowerGloveSoBad,

PowerGloveSoBad’s Mom: PowerGloveSoBad? It’s Mom. I was talking to Aunt Kathy and she said you charged her $50 to move that stuff in her attic. Call me back or I’m coming over.

AeroLemming,

Oh no! Anyway…

justlookingfordragon,
@justlookingfordragon@lemmy.world avatar

My first instinct would have been to pick invisibility - I’m a total introvert and I do NOT enjoy having to deal with people, so knowing that noone sees me anyway sounds tempting.

… but then again, teleportation sounds even more tempting for the same reason. Need groceries? Teleport into a store after hours, grab some stuff, teleport back and enjoy the rest of the day undisturbed (and with a still full wallet) without having interacted with anyone. Need to run an errand, like sending a letter? Who needs the post office anyway when I can just teleport wherever the letter was supposed to go and stuff it into the recipient’s mailbox, then quickly teleport back…? I could sell the car since I would never need it again - no more traffic jams either. I would be on time for every appointment without having to rush. And there are a million smaller things too, like never having to worry about locking yourself out of the house.

Definitely teleportation for me.

Tedesche,

If I could somehow be assured that the world wouldn’t immediately turn in me when they discovered my super power and try to capture me for its own ends, teleportation. If not…definitely invisibility. Much easier to hide the power, not just myself.

Thorny_Insight,

Invisibility.

I don’t know why but I love the feeling of being able to watch people without them knowing about my presence. I spend a lot of time in nature and intentionally dress to blend in and I love that often when I hear/see people near me I can just stand there in plain sight and they still often don’t notice me.

RogueBanana,

I don’t know if this is creepy or cute but uh keep doing but not next to me

Asudox,
@Asudox@lemmy.world avatar

What if he’s already invisible and saw you typing this comment?

Mnemnosyne,

As others have said, invisibility versus teleportation is way too lopsided in favor of teleportation. Even if we’re talking perfect ‘you cannot be detected unless you bump into something or otherwise reveal your own presence’ invisibility, it’s still not good enough to compete with teleportation. Especially with S-tier teleportation like described there.

You’d have to really beef up the invisibility side to make it more fair. Maybe instead of just invisibility, go full incorporeal, with the ability to have gravity affect you (or not affect you) however you want, relative to whatever reference frame you want (be very careful with this) and the ability to make any part of yourself incorporeal or corporeal without it being all of you. Even then, I’d have a bit of a hard time picking this over teleporting.

Or go with the Invisible Woman’s powerset, that’d be a pretty solid other option versus that teleportation. At that point I would actually have a hard time choosing, cause that is some nice teleportation, but Sue Storm’s powers are pretty high tier as well.

mosiacmango, (edited )

Force field bubbles are wild. I bet you could use them as transportation as well. Just explode one under your feet and catch yourself with them when you land.

At a minimum you could make bridges that would let you walk/run/ride/drive though the air or across water. Still great for travel.

victorz,

awesome for pranks “and stuff”

Myeah 😏

burliman,

Teleportation, because the only upside to invisibility is subterfuge. Not that I am some saint who denies ever wanting that, it just seems like teleportation would be just as good at any use case invisibility has. It would also have lots of very life changing above board benefits too.

Alphadef,

Invisibility is cool and all, but teleportation is simply way better

TheBananaKing,

Even better, portals.

All the benefits of teleportation, plus you could slap a portal to the sun in front of people you don’t like.

AeroLemming, (edited )

I feel like opening a portal to the sun would result in lots of highly pressurized, super-heated plasma shooting through and fucking annihilating everything in a massive area around the portal. I guess you could do it if you wanted to blow up, like, an entire building with a tiny and short-lived portal. Same thing in reverse when opening a portal into space.

TheBananaKing,

“Don’t like” was kind of understated.

SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT,

Teleportation. Invisibility is a nice gimmick (until you accidentally leave it on and get hit by a car, that is).

Teleportation isn’t just incredibly convenient, depending on the distances you can travel in one hop it’d also save you a lot of time (skip your commute, instantly travel to a nice vacation destination and back), and it’d be a money maker (fastest courier in the world).

Even if it was just line of sight, being able to easily reach places that are normally hard to reach or require extensive detours would be helpful. Even just crossing a busy street without having to wait for the traffic light would be a nice thing.

Riven,
@Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I would teleport to Japan to eat all my meals. So much good food for so cheap.

key,
@key@lemmy.keychat.org avatar

With the stipulations given here (no limits on where, and ability to know if it’s safe) you could teleport to what astronomers speculate are earth-like planets. Grab some samples, head home, repeat. Maybe win the Nobel Prize for discovering extraterrestrial life.

Given that, it feels a bit one sided against the other option that would let you perv a locker room or get trapped in a bank vault when you trip a non-visual sensor.

Tippon,

If you could teleport anywhere, you could demonstrate the power to your region’s space agency and get them to build a pressurised container or suit that can go with you.

Teleport to the moon and grab some rocks for a billionaire to make some money, then teleport to Mars and repair the broken rover. Take whatever samples the space agency wants,or transport some materials there ready for the first settlers.

This is just the standard stuff. Once you start using your imagination, there’s not much of a limit :)

jedi,

Teleportation, especially if you can take anyone with you. I’ll be traveling the world without passport and go back home anytime I want.

Feathercrown,

Teleportation 100%. I could be anywhere on Earth, at any time. Invisibility is super cool but its most practical applications are kinda weird tbh. Being there without people knowing is basically always a privacy violation.

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