I was just eating lunch thinking, how drastic would our lives change if teleportation (humans and all) was made possible? Shipping/trucking companies would cease to exist as soon as they delivered enough teleportation devices to make themselves obsolete. There would probably still be "hotshot" type deliveries from the teleportation facility to your house. Airlines would be only for the poor. And then you have to think these things are basically instant 3d printers. Cloning, instant whatever-you-want-to-eat... It'd be like the blueprint factory in real life. Throw in the right core ingredients and it spits our your product. But the security protocols that would have to be put into place to ensure people aren't teleporting bombs to their enemies, making their own clone armies, etc...that'd be a mess to sort out. Man...my mind goes to a lot of dark places when I really start thinking about the possibilities.
I think we have a good chance of seeing it coming comfortably or to simply disappear before, with all steps required to get there. Having the ability to manipulate matter to that point implies a power and technological level that makes "aliens" look like "gods" and "Star Trek" like a bunch of monkeys that have stolen their technology from them...
There would probably be a way to mess with teleporter signal to prevent it from being used wherever you want and a way to detect what is going to be teleported and whole infrastructure for teleportation would be set up like roads are for cars now, like transport locations and lanes and gates And using teleporters would likely be more expensive than simply moving stuff with vehicles so it would be used only for people and small or important stuff By time it exists other technology like better and ftl propulsion would exist too I guess
The amount of energy required to do a single teleport would be extremely large, to say the least. And that's if the materials needed to reconstruct the item already existed at the destination (if not, then even more energy would be needed to send the materials). Then, of course, there's always the existential issues surrounding teleportation (do you die? etc). In any case, practical teleportation would certainly be revolutionary, but I'm not sure we can predict what human society might look like at the point at which we achieve it, let alone how teleportation might change it.
