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Earthbound.
Since waking up Monday morning, I've had an idea rattling around inside my head for as SF story. The concept: instantaneous (FTL) teleportation has been invented. However, it only works for women. Any human male who goes through the teleporter dies. One exception: pregnant women, up to six months or so, can safely teleport, even while carrying a male fetus.
Mars gets colonized via teleporter. (There might be a handful of men, who got there via rocket, and helped set up that end of the teleporter.) The logistics are overwhelming: it costs $500M to send a man via rocket, and $500 to send a woman via teleporter. There is a big controversy over the first boy to be born on Mars, since he will have to live out his life there.
Meanwhile it has been discovered that not only can teleporters "inertial compensators" be used to dampen momentum, they can be used to amplify it as well. Like *big time* amplification, limited only by the amount of power you can apply. Construction begins on a lunar orbit teleport pad.
After that, space-based teleport pads are used to launch very fast (.9c) probes. The probes also carry teleport pads, so after 5 years when the first probe passes Alpha Centauri, it can kick out another teleport pad, one that will be moving slow enough to orbit Alpha Centauri.
Female astronauts assemble remote space stations orbiting other stars, and eventually land teleporters on extra-solar planets. Space based teleportation platforms are used to send even more probes out, and slowly a network of extra-solar FTL teleportation links are set up. Men, meanwhile, remain earthbound (well, plus some on Mars.) Teleportation also starts replacing air travel on Earth. Women think nothing of jaunting off to New York, Australia, or even Mars for the day. Air travel becomes almost exclusively male. The shipping industry disappears. At any given moment, over one million women are away from Earth, either in space, on Mars, or eventually on other planets.
That is all of what has rattled out of my head at the moment. I'm not 100% sure where it is all going. Too bad I am not a better writer, because I think there could be some worthwhile themes to be explored in this.
Mars gets colonized via teleporter. (There might be a handful of men, who got there via rocket, and helped set up that end of the teleporter.) The logistics are overwhelming: it costs $500M to send a man via rocket, and $500 to send a woman via teleporter. There is a big controversy over the first boy to be born on Mars, since he will have to live out his life there.
Meanwhile it has been discovered that not only can teleporters "inertial compensators" be used to dampen momentum, they can be used to amplify it as well. Like *big time* amplification, limited only by the amount of power you can apply. Construction begins on a lunar orbit teleport pad.
After that, space-based teleport pads are used to launch very fast (.9c) probes. The probes also carry teleport pads, so after 5 years when the first probe passes Alpha Centauri, it can kick out another teleport pad, one that will be moving slow enough to orbit Alpha Centauri.
Female astronauts assemble remote space stations orbiting other stars, and eventually land teleporters on extra-solar planets. Space based teleportation platforms are used to send even more probes out, and slowly a network of extra-solar FTL teleportation links are set up. Men, meanwhile, remain earthbound (well, plus some on Mars.) Teleportation also starts replacing air travel on Earth. Women think nothing of jaunting off to New York, Australia, or even Mars for the day. Air travel becomes almost exclusively male. The shipping industry disappears. At any given moment, over one million women are away from Earth, either in space, on Mars, or eventually on other planets.
That is all of what has rattled out of my head at the moment. I'm not 100% sure where it is all going. Too bad I am not a better writer, because I think there could be some worthwhile themes to be explored in this.
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More seriously, I expect a different culture to arise on Mars, as you noted, because Mars will be significantly female dominated for many years. At first, it will be all female (with a negligible number of adult males), and a mix of children -- but the female children can be safely brought and forth to Earth, it is only the male children who are full time Martians.
By the time there are a significant number of adult male Martians, they'll still be swamped by the number of women who can, at a whim, travel there from Earth. Certainly some will use this technology to escape from overbearing patriarchal societies. Some Earth-based cultures may ban women from teleportation entirely, but they'll be left behind technologically like the Amish.
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