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 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
