Let's get this out of the way now: Quantum teleportation will not bring us one step closer to the Star Trek transporter. But it will get you as far as the boundary of space now. Sort of.
The officially defined boundary of space is about 100 km up, or 62 miles. That just so happens to be the new record set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. You just might need to hoist up 62 miles of fiber optic cables to the boundary to accomplish it. It's not the record for the farther quantum teleportation ever achieved—one method reached 89 miles. But the previous record for fiber optics was just 15 miles, set by NASA.
Here's how quantum teleportation actually works, and it's a little less sexy than science fiction. Essentially, a photon at either of two receivers needs to be in the same quantum state—this means that you need two photons to spin in the right direction. If you entangle them, it causes one photon to move exactly like the other photon, and if you change one, the other changes automatically, even if they are separated by distance. Thus, if you can entangle the photons correctly, they act like an exact copy of one another.
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