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agsr

Beam me up? Scientists teleport first object ever from Earth into space

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2017/07/13/beam-me-up-scientists-teleport-1st-object-ever-earth-into-space/475713001/

Great progress made to transport an object to space.  I believe it sets a scientific foundation to make StarTrek like teleporting of people possible before the end of the century.

AlwaysCorrect

@agsr

To quote the source referenced in your source more fully:

"But to construct an entire human being from scratch — to say nothing about whether that human being at the destination is even the same person as the one you began with at the source — is a different problem entirely. Until we have a solution to that, a Star Trek-style transporter, even though it's heavily featured in my upcoming book, Treknology, is as far off in the realm of science fiction as it's ever been."

Your argument that we are a lot closer is not supported by your own source. Indeed because this is about the transportation of information rather than mass, it's not even the topic under study! The study itself presents this as the first step towards a quantum internet, not teleportation.

Nor can it even really be counted as a new step in quantum teleportation (which as explained is not the same thing as teleportation). We have been able to quantum teleport photons for 20 years. That we can now teleport individual photons longer distances does not break the constraints that so far we are unable to quantum teleport a single molecule any distance at all. Even if we found a way to teleport a photon to Mars, that wouldn't make us any closer to being able to teleport people an inch.

Max_Air29

Yes, scientists have now teleported an object into space.

AlwaysCorrect

@Max_Air29

No, they haven't. They have "quantum teleported" a photon.

Quantum teleporting isn't the same as teleportation as it's normally understood. It transits information from one particle to another rather than moving the actual particle.

Also as a photon is an elementary particle with 0 mass, so it is hard to describe it as an "object".

agsr

@AlwaysCorrect, but that can still be a foundation of teleporting. If they can decompose an object in photons and send state of each photon remotely then an object can be transported.  Of course that is a high gap from today, but a great start.

AlwaysCorrect

@agsr

But that's not what they're doing. Two photons existed in two separate locations prior to the quantum teleportation.

This teleportation transferred information between two photons, it didn't even transport the photons - let alone an object.

The possible eventual extrnsion extension of this would not be teleportation as people normally think of it, but rather fully formed identical clones of people being created (through some entirely separate process we are in no way capable of) and then the person's mind being transferred into the clone. However as your article states, even this form of teleportation is a different problem entirely from what has occured here.

agsr

@AlwaysCorrect, agree with you that it's a different form of teletransport from what people think traditionally.  I also agree with the clone concern.  That said, it's still a critical technology breakthrough that sets a foundation of further improvements.  With most large technology advancement, we see a serious of incremental improvements that we need to further build upon.  There is always the initial one that sets the foundation.  Perhaps in this case, we still need to go through 10 more rounds of innovation before it gives us a full teleport feature.

melef

Teleportation may become the new normal in a couple of decades. This technology which is emerging can be sued towards shipping items into space and on the ground. It can also be targeted towards moving people into space space and on ground.

walterba

I don't believe that teleportation would become the new normal. What do you think @logic ? The technology may still be dangerous.

agsr

I believe that one day (maybe 50-100+ years) we will come much closer to this type of technology and it one day (maybe very far in the future will become the new norm).  This discovery today though was, while really a great first step, turns out to be a just a tiny step (maybe a drop in ocean) towards real capability.   

joecavalry

The type of technology will become the new normal for travel and other industries may be torn.

MayCaesar

The article strongly misrepresents the nature of the performed teleportation. Quantum teleportation does not transmit any kind of detectable information. What actually happens is a bit tricky; a simple explanation would be that two particles are "linked", and when the link breaks on one side, the link on the other side is also broken. However, until that particle has been operated with, there is no way to tell whether the link has been broken or not - and such an operation would break the link anyway, making it impossible to say whether the link was broken on the other side or not.

The consequence of this is that quantum teleportation has no observable physical consequences. It is, in a way, a mathematical trick, having a very obscure physical meaning. While quantum teleportation does, strictly speaking, change something in the Universe, this change cannot be told apart from the lack of it.

These teleportation experiments are not a gimmick, but their popular interpretation is incorrect. Teleportation of a photon in space will never lead to any kind of practically useful technology (unless we do not know something crucial about the Universe), and rather these experiments are illustrations of tricks we can perform with the modern technology. They are pretty useless as far as science goes.