unseriously serious
Where Are The Teleportation Startups?
Where are all the teleportation startups? I think we should be focusing more on intra-planetary travel rather than sending people to space (though that's also cool). So what's holding us back?
Quantum teleportation requires entangled particles. Basically, particles are connected (kind of like telepathy) and what happens to one particle instantly affects its partner, regardless of distance. This isn’t the same as beaming matter across space. It’s more like transferring quantum information from one location to another.
Because of the no-cloning theorem, when teleporting a quantum state from A to B, the original state in A must be destroyed in the process. The state that appears at B becomes, for all intents and purposes, identical to what was in A, but it doesn’t use the same atoms.
So far we've managed to teleport quantum states of photons, atoms, and even small molecules across significant distances.
Doctor Who was right that quantum teleportation will likely occur in specialised "hubs." Entanglement is fragile and can easily be disrupted by interacting with the environment, so controlled environments would make it easier to maintain these delicate quantum connections. This doesn’t mean that it has to occur in hubs, it’s just easier if it does. Creating and maintaining entanglement between specific particles is much more practical than trying to entangle arbitrary particles throughout the world. Controlled enviromnents are useful for preparing entangled pairs and protecting them from disentanglement.
Once the physics of teleportation have been sorted out, there’ll still be quite a way to go: teleporting a human would require precisely measuring and reconstructing the quantum states of approximately ten octillion (10^28) atoms (larger amount = more difficult and complex).
So far advancements in teleportation are mostly in service of building a quantum internet, with teleportation being used to securely transmit quantum information. I’m hopeful that these discoveries will soon be more usefully applied to the travel industry.
But once the physics of teleportation have been sorted out, we’ll be faced with a much bigger question: what does it mean to die? If your state in A must perish for you to occur in B, or in other words, if you can exist in A or B at any given time but never both simultaneously, what are space, time, and for lack of a better term, death, relative to identify?