Would you want this superpower?

[coronatiger]

You can teleport. You can go wherever you want, and it appears instantaneous, but in fact time elapses as if you had traveled via mundane means, walking, driving, flying etc. Going from your bedroom to the kitchen will take a few seconds, going to work might take half an hour, and going to the other side of the globe might take a day.

The big cost: While you're teleporting, you age twice as fast as normal. You also expend resources double what you'd do using regular means of travel. You might arrive hungry, and your bank account is mysteriously drained of gas/ticket money. Once you activate the ability, you can't abort, or stop for food/drink. If you're not planning well, you might arrive dead of thirst.

Obviously, you can use the power to get into places you couldn't normally access, e.g. you can jump into a bank vault and get rich. And as long as you're careful and eat/drink plenty before you go, everything should be fine...

You lose the "travel experience" but perhaps you're fine with that. Are the other costs/risks too high? Do you think you could keep from overusing the ability, or would it be an acceptable drawback that your lifespan would be cut short?

Edit: Clarification: During transportation, you are frozen in limbo. You don't perceive this; it seems to you that one second, you're in one place, the next, in another. If you see on your alarm clock that you've overslept and that you have five minutes until an important meeting, and think "I must put on some clothes and jump to work", everyone at the meeting will be angry with you for being late.

[Fred Brackin]

Well, _I_ would use it only for trivial purposes over short distances i.e. going to the grocery store but that's because I can't drive a car.

It's not the sort of power that would make a normal person into a "Super". It might make him into a successful smuggler if he had a way to contact people in that market.

If the possessor is a not-ordinary person such as an assassin-for-hire it becomes more useful but it'd still be msotly for short trips i.e. around security barriers. The advantage is that this method leaves no paper trail and gathers no official notice.

[Mister Ed]

I personally wouldn't want it, because I would have no incentive to use it. I'm not robbing banks or sneaking past security, so for my purposes, this method of travel is strictly worse than the mundane.

[Michael Cule]

Are you crazy?

Anyone who used this would be an idiot who thought they were going to live forever.

(Also, the description is a little vague. It 'appears' instantaneous: from whose point of view. But 'in fact' time passes: according to who?)

[whswhs]

I'm 71 years old. Any shortening of my future life is too high a price to pay for this.

[Varyon]

It certainly wouldn't be anywhere near the top of my list of powers I'd want, but given the choice between this power and nothing? I'd absolutely want it. I'd likely almost never use it, but simply having it in case of an emergency? Yeah, that would be useful. It means being able to get away from a mass shooter or other disaster, being able to get to the hospital if seriously sick/injured (I assume injuries don't worsen during the transit time), etc. If I were desperate, I could even use it to get into otherwise-inaccessible (or dangerous-to-access - no risk of getting mugged when slow-porting!) areas... and it could prove worthwhile for more typical uses, if it doesn't care about traffic conditions and the like (if somewhere usually takes me half an hour to drive to, but traffic is bad enough it would take me 2 hours to get there, using an hour of resources is a net gain, plus I actually get there in only 30 minutes).

There would be the temptation to overuse it and accidentally put myself in an early grave, of course, but I think I could resist that.

[Þorkell]

Let's suppose you teleport to someplace an hour away and it takes an hour, where are you during that hour?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by coronatiger

The big cost: While you're teleporting, you age twice as fast as normal. You also expend resources double what you'd do using regular means of travel.

So the trip costs me twice as much (including in terms of how much I age during it), I can't go anywhere I couldn't without this ability, and I don't get there any sooner. Why would anyone want to use that?

If it cost me the normal amount, instead of double, i.e. the only effect was skipping having to remember the trip, that might be slightly worthwhile, travel isn't always fun, though generally I can bring something to do that's at least more useful or entertaining than *utterly blank*. But at double cost *including* arriving in absolutely horrible condition from double hunger/thirst/lack of sleep from all the time I've "skipped" seems mostly useless.

I guess those short emergency escape hops are at least potentially useful, though most of us will never actually need it, and the travelling without trace could be useful if you wanted a career in smuggling or espionage, but even then I'm still at risk picking up and delivering my cargo, or of getting caught on the wrong side of a border without having the documentation to have legally passed it, so it's hardly foolproof even for that.

I mean, sure, I'll take it, on the chance I'll find something it's good for someday, but right at the moment I can't see how it would ever be tempting to use it on any sort of regular basis.

Edit- although you know thinking about it a bit more, if you are going to drive, that time is effectively lost to you, and there is an additional lifespan reduction already for the crash risk, and the air pollution from being near a highway. For an automobile trip where you were going to drive yourself, especially a short one where there are additional time costs to get your car out, find a parking spot, sit stationary in rush hour traffic that isn't counted in the teleport time cost etc., double aging might actually be a *win* in the long run. So maybe this is more useful than it first looks.

[coronatiger]

Added clarifications regarding Thorkell's and Michael's questions.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

It's definitely a fairly low-end superpower, but if it wasn't preventing me from getting some other, more generally useful power, sure. It sounds like there's no downside to having the power, merely using it.

That said, for as limited as it is, it could have some good emergency utility. Some guy pulls out a gun to mug me, and I can just exit the scenario and pop out a block away, having easily escaped the situation at no cost. Given the bank vault example, I also have to wonder if it might allow things like "travelling" from your car seat to the side of the road if you're about to get hit by another car. The "getting into places" possibilities are hard to think of moral, legal uses, but the "getting out of places" has a lot of possibility.

Not as much as a general teleportation or a variety of other powers, but you could still pull off some neat tricks. It's definitely low-tier for superpowers, but it still provides some small advantages.