How can a colony of teleporters make the most money while keeping their teleportation a secret?
The Situation
A colony of 100 teleporters (between the ages of 20-40) have been hidden away living like monks for 1000's of years to prevent their detection.
With the death of their old leader, a young new leader takes control and wishes to push the colony out into society and break the shackles of the boring monotonous mountain lifestyle.
The new leader has some very clear initial goals. In order of importance, he wants to:
- Retain the absolute secrecy of the colony. No one must know that the colony exists or that they are teleporters
- Do everything ethically responsibly1 and sustainably (this operation should be able to keep running even if he needs to step away for a few weeks)
- Have each of the 100 teleporters make at least \$100,000/yr (or collectively have the colony make >\$10,000,000/yr)
- The colony members must all be free during key times of the week, so time-sensitive jobs are only good if the time can be planned in advance.
As the teleporters have been living in the mountains their whole lives, they don't have many skills to offer society. While the new leader considered having them work office jobs, after several brutal interviews he's decided the only answer is their teleportation.
The Teleportation
Each teleporter has a finite number of base teleports a day before they become too tired to continue teleporting. This base number is found by having each member teleport a 10lb box 100 miles repeatedly. The colony members' base teleports range between 100-300 teleports/day. A teleport of distance $d$ miles carrying an object weighing $w$ pounds would use $d/100 \cdot w/1$ base teleports of the 100-300 (if $w \lt 1$, $w$ gets rounded up to 1).
ie. A trip from San Diego to New York (~2700mi) carrying 5lbs would burn $2700/100 \cdot 5/1 = 135$ base teleports and would likely leave them too tired to teleport much more for the rest of the day.
In practice this means a teleporter can make tens of thousands of teleports a day from the couch to the kitchen to grab a cookie, but could probably only make 2-3 teleports a day with a new car between neighboring cities.
Things to Note
The technology level (currently) is that of modern (real-world) Earth.
While the colony is removed from society, they have been keeping tabs from afar. A group of elites does scheduled reconnaissance--picking up newspapers and going to libraries to use the internet, so the colony has knowledge of the outside world.
The Question
What is the best way for these teleporters to make this amount of money ethically and sustainably while also keeping the secret about their teleporation?
1. I've chosen "ethically responsibly" over "legally" given the audience here on World Building :) By this, I essentially mean avoid outright stealing or killing for the money. Clearly the books will have to be cooked and lies will have to be told to hide the teleportation. I'll be adding to this footnote to patch any other ethical loopholes found.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/111349. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Moving things into low earth orbit might be an option. You could make your ten million dollars with only a single delivery to the ISS.
The space shuttle cost \$1.5 Billion per launch. Billion.
NASA is working on a rocket that only costs \$500 Million per launch.
Falcon 9 launch costs an average of \$57 million, which works out to less than \$2,500 per pound to orbit.
If they can move something the size of a car, even if they can only do it once a day, you're talking huge profits.
If you have the option to tell one person
Have the leader befriend Elon Musk, get him to sign an NDA, then offer to ferry some small things up, like fuel. He launches a rocket with a deep space probe with just enough fuel to get into LEO. Then you take up enough fuel to finish the mission.
It takes a lot of fuel to launch the amount of fuel you'll need to get to Mars and beyond. The cost savings for Space X would be really big.
To get around people discovering your secret
This is how you get around people trying to figure out how you get things move from A to B so quickly and accidentally discover your secret: you announce to the world that you have invented The Teleporter. The box uses quantum entanglement to break the laws of physics and sends object at distance faster than the speed of light!
It'll immediately get dismissed as a hoax, and any evidence that you are actually teleporting things will be taken as trickery. Now you can do whatever else you want to do in plain sight, and no-one will ever consider that you're actually teleporting stuff.
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