I've read in Popular Science, that scientists have accomplished the first step in teleportation. They have developed the ability to have an atom on one side of the room, aquire the characteristics of an atom on the other side of the room. So far it's just a very fancy copy machine. Not too good for human transportation yet, but producing/delivering cargo? Hmm. Maybe in another 50-100 years we'll be "beaming" all over the world.
Joe
Back in 1970, during the first weeks of university (1st year) I had a fellow believing that in Puerto Rico we used teleportation for local transportation, and we only had trucks and carriers for short-haul cargo. The only reason we had airports and airplanes was to travel to the US because the US had no teleportation capability.
Of course, the fellow wasn't believing me, until another fellow chimed in that he'd visited me over the summer and that it was fun beaming about...
After a while, we let him down slowly.... (side bar: the original Star Trek series was still very popular in re-runs, so the "bed was made")