How soon will it be before you can press a button in your front room labeled 'Supermarket' and be transported a couple of miles up the road in front of the baskets ready to do your weekly shopping?

The prospect of removing the need for time-consuming travel would completely revolutionise modern life. If it were possible to transfer yourself instantaneously to anywhere in the world, people would most certainly be doing a great deal more 'traveling'. Short break holidays would occur every other week: a trip to the Caribbean would be just as convenient as popping up the road to visit Gran. Perhaps Grans the world over would be woefully neglected. There would be no need for roads, rails or airports. Think of all the extra land that would be available to clog with more houses.

Maybe people would even resort to applying buttons to the various sofas, seats and beds in their home so they could forego the need to climb a flight of stairs or negotiate the hall and, instead, just press their 'bed' button and teleport themselves from the 'TV position' to the 'snooze position' in a nanosecond. Glorious!

Unfortunately this technology isn't quite with us yet and ideas of how to implement this raise a few concerning questions. The current notion of teleporting is the transfer of data to replicate an item somewhere else. So, effectively, when you pressed the 'Supermarket' button on your 'Teleporter Turbo3000' it would communicate every piece of information that defined you to the receiver-type-thing and re-create you next to the shopping baskets. This would, of course, require destroying the original you to avoid duplication and over-population, though there probably would be space to house both of you. So, besides the moral issues raised by killing and re-birthing people every time it was used, the teleporter would have to be capable of replicating everything about you: your memories, experiences, motor-skills and beautiful smile. This is quite a lot of information and if it were to get one of these slightly wrong, it would create an entirely different you. People would respond differently to you and you might not be as good at your job anymore. Models, tennis players, memory champions- their careers would be at threat if there were any discrepancy in the accuracy of the replication process.

The facility to clone people would be a dangerous thing. Even with a strict law to ban the replication of people or things, there would always be some people willing to break it when faced with the potential of piracy and the subsequent incredible wealth. With replication occurring across the globe, the financial world would crumble, buy-one-get-one-free offers would be made obsolete, and most of America would disappear under the weight of fried chicken.

The best we appear to have on the horizon at the moment is the potential to increase the speed and longevity of space travel. There is talk of Solar sails which would be powered by the sun and dramatically increase the time a space mission could operate for. And Nuclear fission power which would propel rockets twice as fast as current chemical spacecraft. Mention of Antimatter Spacecraft sounds impressive one aspirin-sized piece of antimatter reputedly capable of sending a craft hundreds of lightyears and to the moon in just minutes. But, unfortunately, it requires more energy to create in the first place than it releases when used, and only 10 billionths of a gram of antimatter is produced each year. This precious sum isn't actually enough to even heat a cup of coffee.

So teleporting will have to wait. In the meantime, destroying and rebuilding ourselves will have to function without the rebuilding part, or our legs will have to be employed as they always have done, at least as far as the car.