First Object Teleported from Earth to Orbit

[Around the Horn]

This sounds interesting... 

A photon has been teleported from the Gobi desert to a satellite in space.

In Star Trek, people ‘beam up’ to the Enterprise at the flick of a switch – and today, a team of scientists announced they had done it for real.

Well, on a very, very small scale, anyway.

Chinese scientists announced that the Chinese Micius satellite had detected the first object teleported from Earth to orbit – a single photon.

It’s done using quantum entanglement – a weird phenomenon when two quantum objects, such as photons form at the same time, and have the same properties.

Scientists can use it to transmit the information about a photon over a large distance – effectively teleporting it.

It’s been used to ‘teleport’ photons over distances on the ground – but never into space, according to MIT’s Technology Review.

The Chinese team said, ‘We report the first quantum teleportation of independent single-photon qubits from a ground observatory to a low Earth orbit satellite – through an up-link channel – with a distance up to 1400 km,” says the Chinese team.

‘Previous teleportation experiments between distant locations were limited to a distance on the order of 100 kilometers, due to photon loss in optical fibers or terrestrial free-space channels.’

 

‘Long-distance teleportation has been recognized as a fundamental element in protocols such as large-scale quantum networks and distributed quantum computation.’

 

[Union Tpke]

That is really amazing!

[Kamen Rider]

You know... really...

 

I'm not that impressed. 

 

We've had this technology for more than a decade. It's nothing new to advanced science. It's not even really teleportation, it's just a name they gave it because it was so similar to the concept from science fiction. It's basically a really expensive fax machine, and that's not hyperbole. all they are doing is scanning the particle on the ground and transmitting it's physical characteristics to the receiver. 

 

 

This is all aside from the fact describing something with no mass as an object is a stretch in an of itself.

 

Nor does this have anything to do with a Star Trek transporter which actually moves the physical object from A to B. Except when it's convenient for the writers to say otherwise...