There was a brief argument in a now closed thread because Wikipedia, the all knowing infallible source of knowledge, said that entanglement hasn't been reached yet. While I am a sci-fi geek who stays up to date on everything through pre publish servers said we had reached it and were expanding.
Funny thing about a user editable "source" of information, it's usually wrong.
It's been done in Barcelona over a record setting distance.
The next decade is going to be amazing, especially with the recent successful firing of what is essentially an artificial sun in South Korea. KSTAR information Link
We are on the precipice of a world that has only existed in the imagination of some of the greatest writers of our time, and despite everything else going on around the world currently, I am excited, and almost hopeful of the near future.
It's a sci-fi nerds dream coming true.
Many people do not realize how much of science fiction is really "future prediction".
Now... if we can just keep AI from taking over, or killing us all....
Counterpoint. We are berkeleying doomed.
I think I may have been involved in that argument. I didn't argue that entanglement hadn't been achieved, because it certainly had long before then, but that quantum entanglement can't be used for faster-than-light communications (since the spin state of the entangled particles can't be controlled and a classical channel is required to transmit meaningful information), and that FTL communication in general appears incompatible with our current understanding of physics.
Also technological advancement in itself gives me approximately no hope whatsoever, because most technologies that could help us could also threaten us depending on how they're used, and we live in a world that tends to incentivize the more harmful uses of technology. There has been a lot of advancement in areas that seem sure to throw gasoline on the fires most of us would like to put out, such as AI, life extension, and synthetic biology.
In reply to RevRico :
That article is pretty dense and fairly technical. From what I could glean from it though, it doesn't seem to indicate FTL data transmission. It indicates that quantum computing data could be transmitted over long distances without loss in signal strength.
It's not saying we're moving towards the capability of FTL data transmission. It's saying we're moving towards functional quantum computing networks that can transfer data over long distances and remain as quantum data, rather than having to convert to and from conventional digital. This would allow for networks that compute faster and transfer much larger data bandwidth, but that the data would still be limited by the speed of light.
