A friend of mine who was instrumental in the initial research into adaptive optics now widely used in telescopes to cancel out the interference of the atmosphere, is now the head of a company working on transmission of data across laser beams. The method uses the same basic technology as the telescopes do where the adaptive optics is used to reconstruct the beam at the receiving end to cancel out any deviations.
Last I talked to him a year or so ago, they were achieving incredible rates of transfer. He talked about being able to pump the entire contents of the internet over a beam the size of a pencil. The distances they were projecting were astronomical as well with theories predicting distant spacecraft using this transmission method with huge throughput.
As you can imagine, the military is beating down his door which is very funny considering the guy used to be quite a "Deadhead".
Art
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