Earthbound.

[fings]

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.

Comments

[auryn29a.livejournal.com]

So what is it about males that prevents them from going through? Is it the testosterone? What would hormone treatments do?

What about sperm? Does it survive? Can all plants survive? What about insects?

I realize you don't have the answer to these questions. I'm just thinking out loud. This sort of thing fascinates me.

I would imagine with fewer women on Earth society would undergo interesting changes. Hmm. Maybe a terrorist group plans to destroys the terrestial interstellar transport pad and restore Earth to its former glory. Maybe in time scientists create a gene therapy to flawlessly change a male to a female and back again. Or maybe that technology is being developed and someone doesn't want it to happen.

So many ideas pop up.

[jayspec.livejournal.com]

90% of war is logistics. Women would suddenly become the uber-warriors. But maybe I'm just thinking like a man. :)

[auryn29a.livejournal.com]

Well, that depends, actually. I mean, many women might jump at the chance to get transported off-planet, leaving more men than women at home. That's not good for the men. I imagine a bit of regression and more aggression happening. It could be that men start thinking of women as a (even more) precious resource. Could be a whole societal shift. And maybe now women fight and race to find transport pads off the planet to escape from oppression. They hear that on the colonies, women are in control. Hmm...

[jayspec.livejournal.com]

And we're just looking at it from a Western perspective. Certainly, oppressive patriarchal societies will not be happy with this technology...

[auryn29a.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the philosophical and religious implications. Maybe some religions will decide that women can get transported because they don't have souls. And of course there'll be groups protesting teleportation in general because of the concept that it actually kills people and creates all new people on the other end. It'll certainly be a political talking point. Should teleportation be made illegal? Does it actually kill people?

[fings.livejournal.com]

On writing the post, I realized there was a possibility to work in a "Mars needs women" joke.

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.

[king-duncan.livejournal.com]

Plus, gay men would likely become very popular on Earth- at least surreptitiously.

[fings.livejournal.com]

In my thinking it's something to do with the Y-chromosome; in fact, I wonder if androgen insensitive XY females would also be affected.

Sperm does survive, so off-planet sperm banks are possible. However, it is easier for a woman just to teleport back to Earth and get knocked up the old-fashioned way.

By and large, plants can survive; I'm not sure what level of problems there would be with the rest of the animal kingdom.