Means of Transportation

There is a correspondence between the spatial scale and rate of communication on one side, and the kinds of transport on the other. Generally, technological development means mastering ever more rapid modes of movement. However, too rapid movement may be inefficient at shorter distances, and the older ways of transportation have to be retained in the culture. Thus, we use airplanes to skip over the ocean - but we would prefer an on-surface vehicle (a car, a bus, a train) to go to a neighboring town - and we will probably just walk from one room to another within an apartment. In the same way, sea shipping remains more efficient than the air way across the ocean when mass cargo transportation is concerned.

In the same way, space exploration is associated with new scales of transport rapidity. However, the velocities optimal for interplanetary travel are much slower then those for interstellar flight, and those latter may possibly be much slower than the prospective velocities for travelling among the galaxies (which should certainly be higher than the speed of light). In view of these considerations, the feasibility of teleportation (so cherished by science-fiction writers) for short-range travel seems rather doubtful.

Another side of it is the existence of a lower limit for the characteristic time of communication. The same effect due to the opposite mechanism may be observed on the computer market: the costs are permanently moving down with technological development, but the old-fashioned models disappear from the market, and the minimal price of a computer would not fall below several hundred dollars.

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