Chinese scientists announced a breakthrough in creating a quantum communication network, successfully transmitting information across 750 miles using the principle of quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon in which photons, no matter how much distance is between them, act like a single photon. I move an entangled photon in a Texas lab slightly to the left, and its entangled partner sitting in a lab in Germany will simultaneously move slightly to the left. It’s weird, and it’s been disturbing scientists for decades. Einstein called it as “spooky action at a distance.”
This matters to future communications tech for a few reasons.
Quantum Encryption
A quantum communication network might be unhackable. Quantum keys can be used to lock down information if anyone tries to break in without the key. Without access to the sender/receiver photons, no one else can get to that information.
Quantum key technology is an area of active research by several major tech companies such as IBM, Toshiba, and HP. However, there are only a few companies currently offering quantum key encryption.
Space Exploration
As depicted in The Martian, you know that it takes several minutes to transmit a message to Mars, and even longer to get a reply. The information is traveling at the speed of light, and Mars is so far away that it takes up to 24 minutes to get there from Earth.
Transmissions further out in the solar system take even longer. Planning for long term space travel always has to assume that during a crisis the crew will essentially be on their own.
What if we could communicate over those long distances in real time, with no delay? How would that effect planning for long distance space travel, and what barriers to expanding into space would the technology tear down?
Spooky Future
Quantum entanglement technology might be the foundation that future society is built upon. Scientists have been working hard to understand it for a very long time, and science fiction can’t get enough of it. This is a field of research and innovation that is wide open right now.
Governments and large businesses alike have starting pouring money into research to build that future. DARPA actually built the first quantum encryption network in the early 2000’s, and the experiment discussed above is part of an international research program called Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS). Last year Facebook awarded its Internet Defense Prize to a team working on a quantum encryption algorithm that improves overall internet security protocols.
There are exciting things happening in quantum communications technologies, and it is definitely a field to watch for world-changing innovations.