I want more science fiction

Interplanetary Internet, anyone?

While NASA is busy extending the Internet to outer space by increasing fault-tolerance and caching for packets traveling long distances over long periods of time, Chinese scientists are helping invent something that could make communication between Mars and Earth even more reliable. Or help create the next generation of quantum computers.

I’m talking about data teleportation. Data has been teleported before — as far as 89 miles — but never between two large, physically visible objects.

So the scientists at Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences in Anhui, China entangled photonic quantum bits in a quantum memory node, sent one of the entangled particles to another quantum memory node via an optical cable, made changes to the spinwave state of the nearby photon, and observed the same changes happening in the remote photo.

If you understand this, you’re a genius. Stop reading immediately and create a Star Trek-style matter teleporter, charge the world royalties, and retire as the richest human in the history of the world.

The stupid translation — meaning one I can understand — is that some super-smart geeks mysteriously connected two tiny particles so that they want to be twins but cruelly separated them. They then made changes to Mike (the nearest one) and observed equivalent changes automatically happening in Ike (the farthest one).