Edit: This only refers to costs (paid by the manufacturers), not fees (paid for by the buyers).

  • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
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    6 hours ago

    Not necessarily. Still takes energy to move it. Depending on the energy required, could still have a cost

    • Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      6 hours ago

      The cost will be comparatively less, and negligible given that digital goods don’t have “energy” fees (and never had, btw)

      • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 hours ago

        Why?

        We traded energy cost for time when we stopped walking, and replaced it with an animal and a cart, and again with cars, and airplanes. We save time, but the energy input is greater.

        Who’s to say that teleportation wouldn’t be a trade off between 5x the energy to take a jet, but instantaneous?

        Digital goods aren’t physical; teleportation is physical.

      • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        This really depends.

        Teleportation consists of three main phases:

        • scanning/deconstruction
        • sending
        • reconstruction

        If the deconstruction and/or reconstruction phases cost a ton of energy, it doesn’t matter if the sending phase has a high energy bill.

        But since you have transmit data on each atom, you will have huge amounts of data to send.

        For example, 1kg of carbon has about 5*10^25 atoms. Humans aren’t made entirely of carbon, but the rough order of magnitude will be similar. Let’s go with a 70kg human and we end up with roughly 10^27 atoms.

        Let’s say we have good compression techniques and a single byte is enough to store all data of one atom. That means, we need to send about 10^28 bits of data.

        In September 2023 the total bandwith of the global internet was about 1.2 Pbps, or 10^15 bits per second.

        So to transmit a single human being with the speed of the entire global internet combined it would take 10^13 seconds or about 300 000 years. I think that kind of data transmission could cost a little bit of money.

        Compare that to the cost of shipping 70kg of human being anywhere on the planet. By plane, it will cost in the order of a few thousand Euros and it will take one day, two at most, not 300 000 years.