Researchers Succeed in Quantum Teleportation of Light Waves

I've always thought that if a truly advanced alien species existed they would have to use quantum communication as their form of communicating, as radio waves are far to slow to travel the vast distances of space. Which is probably why we never hear them with our feeble radio telescopes... we're not listening in the right place!

Yep, in Star Trek they 'warped' space. In the book Dune, they 'folded' space. The spacecraft would exist in two places at once until the space was unfolded again leaving the craft on the other side.

This little experiment is a small but definite step in that direction.

it looks too complicated and bulky for home use... oh well.

The first thing that popped in my head when I read the header was; with all those optical lenses all over the place, how do they know?

Being the case that I don't have $15 bucks for every edata science article I read, I guess I'll just take everyone at their word and jump on the bandwagon to congratulate them. Yay!, I guess. Simple question though. I'm sure that Tokyo didn't make AAAS.org pay for the article, so why should I have to?

OK, sorry, AAAS.org; I wasn't as much of a scrounge for free material as I should have been. For anyone as curious and as broke as me; follow the link above at 'preserve the integrity', then scroll down to where it says 'cited by other articles', and click on abstract and you'll get a download in .pdf format.

Quantum entanglement has always been mostly over my head, but I was under the impression that in order to transfer the information--or "read" the data, if you prefer--you need to send another piece of information over a classical channel. Is that the case for this as well? Or is this truly instantaneous?

-IMP ;) :)

You know what this means in FPS games?
or the real one!!!!
I hope not but this is one of the options?

Ohhhh sweet baby Jesus.

I say it from here...brilliant.

I say from over there....brilliant.

actually, in star trek, they didn't "warp" space...when they went to warp, they went in subspace, sort of another dimension of the space time continuum. just search the Star Trek Encyclopedia and look on page 456.

The Schroedinger cat thought experiment actually dealt with the apparent ability of conscious observation to collapse superposition quantum states. Many physicists such as David Bohm and Roger Penrose have described how the human brain itself may be operating as a quantum computer. Research suggests that mental thought collapses the superposition states of calcium ions that enter neuronal vesicles and thus cause neurons to fire or not fire and animate our behavior. This is controversial because the only current experiments we can do with qubits in the lab today require near absolute zero temperatures to achieve entanglement. It's not clear that quantum entanglement effects would be sustainable in the warm and wet environment of the brain but evolution has solved harder information problems than this before (see DNA). One exciting possibility would be the ability to transfer the quantum states of a human mind to a machine consciousness that could last hundreds or even thousands of years. This would allow us to explore distant galaxies and achieve a degree of immortality beyond the capacity of natural evolution.

@ davewright hope you have carbonite when you download yourself into the computer id hate for one of your hardrives to crash.

@dave...that is actually being researched, can consciousness be transfered? i believe it is possible

Maybe they will use this to manufacture a portal gun.

@bigburb. I believe those listening for extra-terrestrial communications via radio telescope aren't necessarily listening for directly intended communication. They are listening for any form of transmission that has bled into the universe in our direction.

But what about teleporting matter? Light is not Matter and thus should be much easier to teleport than Matter.

@AtomicFedora But we know it's possible, because we know matter and energy are the same thing in different states.

@IceMetalPunk - the most common misconception about entanglement is that there's a transfer of information. It's for this reason, too, that even Eistein didn't believe it (because he understood it as information transfer faster than the speed of light, which is impossible with relativity).

What I think is fantastic about this is it simply means one day I can be living on some distant exoplanet and still play on a minecraft server with someone from Earth.

This is all vague. Is this the answer to a new age for mankind? Is it accurate entanglement communication faster than the speed of light? Will this make instant communications to the Moon, Mars, and habitable planets in other solar systems possible? If it is we could presence in robots to work any ware: in warfare, mines, on the Moon, even on Mars to build large space ships to put in orbit and colonies space.

Space craft from Mars or the moon have less gravity and could easily be put into orbit for people to live in, much like nuclear subs today. Why make a rocket when you could build it on the moon and wench it out on a tether. This would also mean we could raise humans on any habitable planets that we find in the universe. Just send them as embryos using Saturn’s magnetic field as propulsion, and escape our solar system easier and cheaper than going to Mars.

I've always thought that if a truly advanced alien species existed they would have to use quantum communication as their form of communicating, as radio waves are far to slow to travel the vast distances of space. Which is probably why we never hear them with our feeble radio telescopes... we're not listening in the right place!

-
You do realize radio waves are light waves, and therefore cannot go any faster

that doesn't mean entanglement isn't faster, because even at the speed of light, it would still take about three years to hear from someone from around proxima centauri, the closest star to our own. as well as the fact that no matter how fast light is, instant communication will always be faster.

yeah humanity has been aware of the "speed of light" for quite some time now and we have not been using it for important stuff like the advancement of the human race. Quantum Mechanics is the future of communication, travel, life.

@dave
you have a good mindset. i see the transfer of the human mind to that of machines would allow the "human" race to live for millions of years. maybe that's how some ETs have managed to stay alive for as long as they have and achieved great feats like teleportation and so forth. dont forget that a human with alot of time on its hands has the capacity to make the impossible possible. maybe a machine would evolve differently then a human. it makes happy to think of the infinite possibilities we would achieve.

The problem with Quantum entanglement, is not the entanglement bit, but the keeping the particles entangled. Until now, they have not been able to keep them together for very long.
I would also assume that for a space fairing people, QE is the only possible means of communications given vast limitations of radio waves.
Especially, when they have figured out faster than light travel, it could be that their home world would have died out by the time a radio message made a round trip.

Looks like they made zero improvements from previous experiments. Judging by the article, they are not even aware of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It also seems as if they are not doing the experiment from scratch and base it on CalTech's past experiments on teleportations.

Id be willing to bet that the communication is not instantaneous. I bet it still requires a signal to be sent to the second machine that holds the quantum information to be reconstructed.

Its considered quantum teleportation in the sense that the particle is physically destroyed in one place. The information describing the quantum state is then sent along a light beam to another place where it reconstructs a second particle with the same exact quantum state.

Even though the communication is not instantaneous, its still very beneficial as it most likely eliminates noise and conserves the fidelity of the signal.

The problem with classical communication is that the signal degrades over distance and time. Don't quote me on this but I believe communication through quantum teleportation does not degrade like this. But its definitely not super luminal or instantaneous.

www.pixelvortex.org - Blog discussing the philosophy of reality

@davewright,

I agree with you 100%. I do believe that will be how our species eventually evolves and explores the universe. By downloading our entire minds consciousness into a computer/robot we could then live for thousands of years without food, water, oxygen or a habital planet. Gravity would not be concern any more either.

Some people laugh at first when I say that the most realistic alien movie that has ever hit the silver screen is Transformers. That is also the most realistic future for the human race. 1000 years from now we probably wont have fleshy bodies anymore.

Another step towards the singularity. Can't wait.

This is not teleportation...the beginnings of it maybe...but all they are doing is transferring the information on the state the photon is in. Researchers have been able to "teleport" a proton in the same manner. Nevertheless if teleportion like in star trek is ever to become a reality..we'll need computers that compute at c to reconstruct the angles and orbits of all the atoms and electrons of the object being teleported.

The trans-humanist agenda will fail or horribly or go wrong ie. Borg. We don't understand how the human brain/body works, yet we are already looking past it. Silly humans.

Full-body teleportation of a human being through hyperspace was achieved around 12 years ago on two occasions.

No doubt this process is no better at sending information faster than the speed of light than any of the single particle "teleportation" processes are. It's just a way to do the same thing in greater volume, and with less errors. For most of the comments here, everyone is falling into the trap of thinking quantum teleportation gets around the barriers of of sending information faster than light. However, if you spend some time with materials discussing other experiments with single particles, the subtleties are explained. It comes down to the fact that forwarding random information that is erased or lost at the sending site is not the same as sending an email with actual information content or even a spam message. Any real content has to be prepped to travel beforehand at speeds limited by the speed of light.

Does this mean that to be able to communicate with alien life forms those aliens must have developed their own 'teleporter', since I assume there must be a sender and a receiver as well? And what if they send us a bomb or other nasty devices?

The idea of using this technology to make us live for ever in e g some kind of robots actually will kill our natural body and then install our consciousness in that robot, but that would perhaps just mimic the natural counterpart, wouldn't it? Maybe a more feasible way of consciousness transfer would be to extend our brains with memory banks, artificial sense organs and so forth ... but I still can't fathom how the 'self' could be replaced or transfered!

@makelle - Human beings are actually energy beings living in physical body containers. You can experience this with the Monroe Gateway Hemi-Syncing sounds called "Lift Off" whereby the tones resonate the energy field at its natural frequency so that you pop out of your body. It's like shaking a glass of water at the right vibration so that the water spills out.

Energy beings can then transfer into another's body and operate the body. You can see this in musicians who have little talent or experience on their own who allow another energy musician to occupy his body and play the guitar effortlessly. Others channel to the great master painters and produce paintings equal to their own many centuries ago, yet the paint is still wet.

It s very interesting but keep in mind what they are transporting is information.Quantum laws and experiments only work for quantum sized objects i e photons and light waves.The experiments only have relevance to info transfer. The quantum laws fall apart on objects that have mass.Really a shame in a way , there are certain people who might be fun to...oh never mind.

“You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”