Scientists working on quantum teleportation have succeeded and set a new record for teleporting photon particles from Tibet to satellite Micius, which is orbiting 870 miles above Earth.
Just to clarify, the scientists sent a packet of information using pairs of quantum-entangled particles in an effort to establish a secure, long-distance communication system. Their work has nothing to do with sending humans to another point in space.
So will human teleportation be possible in the future? One has to understand the concepts better to answer this.
Is Human Teleportation Possible?
The quick answer is that something like it could become possible someday but likely not through quantum entanglement — at least not the way fiction writers imagine. This is because teleportation through quantum entanglement is such a sensitive process that any slight disturbance could cause it to fail. Case-in-point: out of the 4,000 pairs of photons beamed into orbit, only 911 were successful because the Earth's atmosphere tends to deviate.
"Even then people were thinking about Star Trek. But we are talking about sending the state of a single particle, not the billions of billions of billions of particles that form a person," Bristol University's Professor Sandu Popescu explained. Professor Popescu has been working on quantum entanglement for decades.
It's really difficult to rule out any technology that seems too futuristic since science is always advancing.
Quantum vs. Fictional Teleportation
Teleportation through quantum entanglement actually deals with sending packets of information in quantum entangled photons. Think of it as a set of twins with a strong psychic link wherein one knows and can feel what the other is thinking or feeling at the exact same moment so that they exhibit the same changes.
Fictional human teleportation has something to do with sending the exact information from one point to materialize in another point in space.
If one would insist on applying quantum entanglement for human teleportation, then he or she must be prepared to face some serious existential crisis.
This is because this method would require copying every single information contained within every single particle in a person's body to a quantum entangled version of himself in the desired location. This would create a perfect copy — like a perfectly executed cloning process — wherein both entities are aware of each other's thoughts, feelings, activities, etc. Both entities will exist in point A and point B so it's not really a full teleportation.
If one wishes to ensure that they don't merely create copies of themselves in another place, then the process would require destroying the particles from the point of origin to recreate them in the destination. It's a clone whose previous version would have to keep committing suicide just to be in another location instantly.
It's a little like what The Doctor did to himself in "Heaven Sent" while trapped in the confession dial for 4.5 billion years. The Doctor consistently recreating himself from a certain point in time as his previous self is turned to ashes, so it is not at all like Captain Montgomery Scott's painless transporter.
Watch the video below to witness The Doctor's 4.5 billion years of painful "teleportation."
There's also the fact that a single human being is made up of billions of particles and a successful teleportation has only been done to hundreds, so humanity is not even close to duplicating the teleportation technologies seen in science fiction films.
