Seriously, you guys, what the hell. Let’s all pause with the I Fucking Love Science memes for a second, because something intense just happened. The BBC reports that Chinese scientists have managed to teleport an object from earth all the way into orbit around the planet. That situation transpired, so let’s everyone just take a beat, admire the awe-inspiring majesty of humankind’s relentless pursuit of knowledge, and bask in the glory of collective advancement, before getting back to complaining about why they’ve broken up Game Of Thrones into two smaller final seasons rather than one big one.
The researchers teleported a photon from a lab in the Gobi desert to a satellite orbiting some 300 miles away from Earth, using a method known as quantum teleportation. The Guardian explains this process as “an eerie phenomenon in which the complete properties of one particle are instantaneously transferred to another—in effect teleporting it to a distant location.” Again, this is a huge deal, and certainly worthy of at least several seconds of thoughtful appreciation prior to tweeting out something about how annoying it is that The Bachelorette no longer puts the rose ceremonies at the end of each episode, but rather drops them willy-nilly into the middle of every installment, the fuck is that all about.
Most promising, the achievement looks to have real, tangible potential for changing the world in the very near future, in particular by teasing the idea of an “unhackable quantum internet.” This is attainable by developing “a new form of communication network, in which information would be encoded by the quantum states of entangled photons, rather than strings of 0s and 1s.” Anyone attempting to tamper or eavesdrop on the photons’ states would immediately reveal their presence, is the bullet point here. It’s a remarkable step forward for the human race, one that certainly merits more attention than the damn idiotic decision to not board planes starting back to front, seriously, it’s so much quicker and more efficient, why the hell even have different zones for boarding if they’re just going to be strewn throughout the seating, delaying things even more than a simply one row at a time process would. Who dreamed up these sadistic schemes, and why do they hate logic so much?
So yeah, over the course of 32 days scientists successfully teleported photons more than 900 times. It’s incredible. We should all be amazed. Now, if you’ll excuse us, it looks like there’s a few set photos from The Dark Tower that are insufficiently enthusiasm-generating.