NOTES
But the students could have some real fun figuring out the social implications of teleportation. Some are obvious (no airplanes or cars except for fun), some are less so, like the effect on crime, or the creation of “flash crowds” (a flash crowd is a crowd that appears whenever and wherever something interesting is happening. If we assume that teleportation is cheap and easy, a crowd can grow very quickly, since it draws on the whole world's population of possibly interested parties). We see “flash crowd”-like effects on the Internet now - “teleporting” to a web site is easy, so an overwhelming number of hits can happen to any site that is attractive (see the Risks forum for a mention of this http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.86.shtml#subj8). I highly recommend Niven’s article on the subject, by the way.