Quantum Teleportation today, Quantum Internet & Quantum Cryptography Tomorrow?
I wrote recently about some exciting trends in computing, including some impending breakthroughs in quantum computing.
Today, I woke up to news that China has achieved the first successful teleportation into earth's orbit. By entangling two protons and then separating them (in this case, between a lab in the Gobi desert and a satellite in earth's orbit), scientists were able to instantly teleport quantum information from one proton to the other. From MIT:
The team created the first satellite-to-ground quantum network, in the process smashing the record for the longest distance over which entanglement has been measured. And they’ve used this quantum network to teleport the first object from the ground to orbit.
An illustration of China's experimental design via MIT
Quantum teleportation isn't exactly new, but it also isn't common enough yet that its implications are widely known. The first place my mind went was that this teleportation breakthrough will help advance the race towards the first competitive quantum computer, but it turns out it has much more immediate applications. A quantum network based on this principle would be a "communications network secured by the code to end all codes," says The Christian Science Monitor:
The accomplishment proves possible the ultimate aim of cryptography: an invincible code system theoretically capable of instantly connecting any two (or more) points on Earth.
And to make the story even juicier, there are already Realists painting this scenario as a potential zero-sum threat to national security!
The State of the Quantum "Arms Race"
The concept of a Quantum "Arms Race" seems a bit premature to me, given that we don't really have a functional quantum computer yet. To put it in perspective, Google's target for "Quantum Supremacy" is a 49-qubit system they plan to produce in 2017, whereas it's generally accepted that "quantum processors would need to be much larger than 50 qubits to be capable of useful work."-MIT).
Nevertheless, competition between China and the United Snakes isn't hard to find, and I wouldn't put it past Statists and Industrialists in either country to jump at any "arms race" they can. There's certainly an "arms race" on for conventional supercomputers, and it's one that the United Snakes is currently losing. And clearly China leads the way with its quantum satellite, but countries like Canada are not far behind.
However we slice the competition in computing and information, the billions of dollars being dumped into future tech signals we're nowhere near the end of our information revolution-- in fact, we may be nearing a point of inflection
mfw the future is quantum
Great writeup .... I'm guessing DARPA has a bit under the hood that they haven't shown off. Never underestimate American ingenuity :D
I bet you're right! In my last post I discovered that DARPA and the NSF are funding a Stanford/MIT collab on a 3D computer architecture that'll probably be more useful sooner than quantum computing will get off the ground.
From what I gather, that system could still play nicely with all our current OSes and apps, unlike quantum, which is gonna need some time to get the software up to speed even after the chips get sorted out!
But with a team like Stanford, MIT, DARPA, and the NSF all playing together, I'd say it's a safe bet that they're gonna produce results :D
They are going ham. Researchers in China have reported editing the genes of human embryos to try to make them resistant to HIV infection, CRISPR on human embryos.
I hadn't heard about that! Do you have any good links about it?
Love this post. Technology is going to blow up in the next 50 years, soon we will see computers as clever as humans!
I think you're right! I mean, just look at the last 10-20 years-- tech already has blown up! I can't imagine what MORE blow-up will be like, but I guess that's the fun of it, eh? :D
P.S.-- I originally misread "clever" as "CLEAVER" in your comment, which conjured some funny images! haha
Hahaha, good one!
I saw a great talk by one of the leads from Dwave solutions a few years ago. Very inspiring stuff but it really doesn't feel that close before we get something usefu, or widely available.
Very interesting post though.
Didn't D-Wave get bought out by Google/aren't they tied together somehow? I bet that's a big reason Google's talking about achieving "Quantum Supremacy" this year
We may never know what the future brings.
...until it gets here! And then we'll have to figure out what it means!
We need to figure out security before these suckers make market. They could crack passwords 100,000x faster than a super computer. BTW Iota is supposed to have such adaptability.