Russia Wants Teleportation in 20 Years
Beam me up, Vlad.
Star-Trek style teleportation is part of a deeply funded research and development plan announced Wednesday in Russia. According to the Telegraph, the Russian government, i.e. Vladimir Putin, wants to develop a technology roadmap for the next 20 years.
A part of the country's National Technology Initiative is a plan to advance quantum technologies light years ahead of where it is today. Harnessing quantum physics is essential to teleportation because it rules all matter on the atomic scale.
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"It sounds fantastical today, but there have been successful experiments at Stanford at the molecular level," Alexander Galitsky, a prominent investor in the country's technology sector, told Russia's Kommersant. "Much of the tech we have today was drawn from science fiction films 20 years ago."
Yes it's true. Scientists have made significant leaps quantum physics.
Back in 2010, Chinese scientists reported that they were able to "teleport" information 9.9 miles. Then in 2014, another group of scientists were able to teleport the quantum state of a light particle 15.5 miles. A year later, Hiroki Takesue, a NIST guest researcher from NTT in Japan, and his team were able to transfer the quantum state from one photon to another over 60 miles.
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And thanks to Large Hadron Collider, we can expect to start seeing a "firehose" of quantum data.
But transporting an entire person from one point to another is an ultra complicated process. For starters, the very process of teleportation requires that the original object -- a person, for example -- be destroyed in order to read the "data" locked in the subatomic particles of an atom and then reconstructed.
Not only that, the amount of data inside a person's atoms is so huge that it would require an actual working quantum supercomputer, which doesn't exist.
The most likely thing we'll be able to do in 20 years is teleport data, which would make for incredibly fast computer networks. Hey, that's something.
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