Hello Friend!

Since you are always so interested in "future history" as you call it, and given your occupation, I thought you might enjoy this tidbit I found. I'm posting it as a blog entry as I thought your readership may enjoy it as well.

In our last e-mail bout, we discussed technologies that are in your time, budding and in my time, commonplace. We had a rather heated discussion about Teleportation. I was surprised at the amount of literature on the subject by yearly right-wing oppositionists.

Many on the religious right argued that Teleportation for humans was immoral, as the science of the time was looking mainly at options dealing with simultaneously breaking down an object at point "A" and reconstructing an exact duplicate at point "B". As the human soul is not a finite constructable object, it would be impossible to rebuild a human with a soul, therefore a person would either die a kind of spirit-death on the spot or perhaps spend the afterlife wandering the libo of earth.

The political climate of the time being what it was, research was all but abandoned. The government pulled all of it's funding for research, save one branch. At the time, the United States Post Office was allowed to run as an independent business. It put a significant portion of its resources toward research and development in the field of Teleportation. As the Postal Service already refused to participate in the trasportaion of live humans, they saw this not as a moral issue, but a business oportunity.

The rest was the stuff of anicdote and bad movies, two questionable gradstudents building on the vast amount of research already present, stumbled upon the "secret of teleportation" while at the lab late at night stealing bunson burners and Earlenmyer Flasks to construct waterpipes for extra spending money. Or so the legegend says. That last part comes from a comment posted to a celebrity gossip e-column. Take from that what you will.

Hope all is will with you. Still living in Grand Junction. Almost Spring. Going to try my hand at fieldwork if the weather permits. No other real news.

-Red5