Monday, 14 May 2012

Travel to the Mars in 0 seconds?

Every traveler is always dreaming about ways to make their journey pass quicker. I also realized this after 19 hours journey to France. No one would feel any discomfort if journey lasts only 0 seconds. Very quick isn't it? It's even faster than light if you are traveling over a huge distance, for example going to the Mars. But what device could actually do it? These things are usually met in almost every science fiction movie- they are called teleportation machines. People have fantasized about traveling quick and far from very early days. The first written story appeared as early as 1877 in Edward Page Mitchell's story "The Man Without a Body". After it everyone put only more and more effort to create a real teleportation machine. But did they succeed? Apparently they did! Scientists were studying real teleportation since 1997. Sadly it is really different from teleportation we imagine. It will take decades to transfer the smallest lead ball you could ever imagine as this effect was achieved only for photons. Despite this, scientists are moving forward and teleportation record was broken by Chinese researchers. Instead of 16 km they managed to transfer photons by almost 100 km, which is 6 times more than anyone did it before. So how was this made? Firstly teleportation can appear only between entangled photons which means they have to interact to each other to get the same quantum state and then after separation if one photon changes another becomes the same as well. This leads to the idea of having our avatars in every place of the world in order to be able to teleport, but agree with me, it is better than nothing. I can already imagine transatlantic airplanes (maybe even galactic starships) full of humanoids. We would transfer our minds to them only after the flight. Just imagine comfort of this! I can already see increasing tourism as you can have a truck full of them and no one will complain about it. But let's go back to the topic. The biggest problem till now was laser pulse dispersion, which caused a reduced number of photons reaching the target. It was solved by using very fancy optics with which even this camera couldn't compare http://easyphys.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/digitalizing-universe.html. This is one of the most welcome devices so let's be patient. 
Everything can be found in more details here: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27843/

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