Information teleported between atoms

[jester47]

Doom 3- Comming to a reality near you!

A.

 

[Angcuru]

Doom 3- Comming to a reality near you!

A.

Nay, nay! Larry Niven's Known Space coming to a reality near you!

Now I just wonder when we'll be able to develop boosterspice, since if things go as planned in life, I DO hope to live forever.

 

[Krieg]

Keep hoping there Louis Wu!

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

So, the LG paladin who teleports, becomes a CE blackguard at the end of the trip?

Since we are talking about information teleported:
When person A decides to become a LG paladin, person B becomes a CE blackguard.

 

[Turanil]

More seriously: would that entail that in some near future (before 2050), we will have communications that are not limited by the speed of light, and thus enable to directly speak with someone several light-years away as you do now with a phone?

Star Trek suddenly looks more plausible...

EDIT: By the way, this discovery nearly invalidates the Paradox of Fermi. Currently our communications are based on radio, and after years scanning the cosmos for radio emissions, as we have found none, Fermi says it proves that no other technologically advanced civilizations exist in the Galaxy. However, maybe in the next 50 years all radio communications will be replaced with "teleportation between atoms", in which case we ourselves will have ceased to use radio communication, so Fermi could say that even the human civilization doesn't exist...

 

[Zappo]

After reading the article, I looked around for some more detailed information; I didn't understand much of what I found, but I've gathered that there are serious obstacles to using this in practice. I wouldn't hold my breath for instantaneous communication. If it did work, though, that would explain why we don't get radio signals from aliens... this kind of communication would be entirely impossible to intercept. If a civilization only uses radio communication for a couple hundred years, it makes sense that we couldn't detect anyone else using it. A thousand years of difference in technological advance would be more than enough for us to have missed those transmission for any given civilization, and a thousand years are very little on an evolutionary scale.

 

[Umbran]

EDIT: By the way, this discovery nearly invalidates the Paradox of Fermi.

That's a bit of a premature assessment.

For one thing, this may or may not become a useful communication technology. If it doesn't, Fermi still holds.

For another, your conclusion skips a possibility that a civilization will continue with radio transmissions because they would want to be found. If you think that an alien civilization would give up on the possibility of being found, then Fermi is invalidated.

And, if they don't want to be found... well, maybe it is better that we just leave them alone, and consider them non-existant anyway.

 

[tarchon]

After reading the article, I looked around for some more detailed information; I didn't understand much of what I found, but I've gathered that there are serious obstacles to using this in practice. I wouldn't hold my breath for instantaneous communication.

People have been trying to use the EPR phenomenon to demonstrate FTL communication for decades without much success. The problem usually lies in needing extra information about the transmission to interpret the received data.
The big difficulty with practical application of most entangled photon effects though is in generating entangled photons. It's typically an extremely inefficient process, so if you need high speeds, like in data communication, you just don't have enough photon flux to compete with more mundane techniques. The ultimate physical limit on data throughput at high speeds usually comes down to not having enough quanta ("shot noise"), so a technique that has already given up 90% of its photons has a hard time competing.

 

[eryndel]

From what I understand, it's generally accepted that information cannot be sent at speeds faster than light, at least through quantum entanglement phenomena. The problem lies in that the actual signal recieved on either side appears random. It's only when the two signals are compared is the correlation apparant. However, the comparison of the signals still requires a more standard channel of communication which is slower than light.

But just because it's generally accepted as impossible doesn't mean there aren't a ton of scientists looking into the problem. And QE still has some pretty impressive applications in encryption and in quantum computing.

 

[Angcuru]

Keep hoping there Louis Wu!

Stepping discs for everyone!