Beam me up, Scotty, please...

Of all the inventions that they promised us and that were never delivered, the one I miss most is teleportation. You have definitely heard of it, whereby a man that needs to get from A to B need not bother with train, plane or automobile, bike nor bus, but a “dematerialisation” chamber at point A that beams him to point B where the reverse process takes place. His journey is done, over.
No more being held in thrall to Icelandic volcanoes, French air traffic controllers or Irish low-budget airlines. No more missing luggage – it can travel with you, see! Goodbye to lousy food and dratted engineering works. Why are the scientists taking so long to invent it? Personally, I blame George Langelaan for writing his short story The Fly in 1957, in which scientist Andre Delambre suffers a shocking accident when he experiments with a disintegrator –integrator, the “dematerialisation” chamber I wrote of earlier. The following year Kurt Neumann gave us the first screen version of the story, followed by David Cronenberg’s The Fly in 1986.
If it wasn’t for Langelaan and his discouraging developments in technology, airports would be obsolete by now and the debate over the third runway would never have happened. Oh, yes, there is always the danger of fusing genes with a mouse or with Boris Johnson, but technology has always been hazardous – don’t forget BP. The benefits of teleportation to the environment would be so enormous that the odd, unlikely fusion would hardly matter. Indeed, one or two might be an advantage – how about merging David Cameron with Nick Clegg? They are two of a kind, anyway. Stripy horses already exist in nature; how about furry fish, feathered goats and horned kittens? Come on, scientists! Take a few risks, make travel less miserable and we’ll be one step closer to whizzing untrammelled about the universe...