There has been a lot of speculation about life on other planets, and how the speed of light presents a major barrier against so called intelligent species finding one another in a vast universe. Despite multiple decades of Star Trek inspired inventions, we don't seem to be getting any closer to breaking that barrier, even in a theoretical sense.

However, quantum entanglement, "spooky action at a distance," has gotten a lot of buzz. The current hope is to utilize it as a form of unbreakable encryption in the near future. There's no knowing where this might lead us, but here is a possibility for you:

Scientists decide to see how far they can push this technology. They manage to entangle a carbon atom on Earth with one on an exoplanet that is particularly interesting to them. The goal is to try to learn more about this planet by studying the atom in their lab.

Over time, they are able to replicate the plannet's environment around this atom. They study how chemical reactions behave by putting that carbon atom in different configurations with native elements on the planet (done by either entangling additional atoms or possibly just remotely influencing them).

Scientists now have a taste of what the conditions are like in a tiny corner of the planet and of course they want much more. So they try to use their remotely entangled atoms to build structures that can transmit more information for them. They need to come up with a way for these structures to replicate, as they have a lot invested and don't want their project to be damaged by the conditions of the planet...

I think you might see where this is going. The structures get more and more complex. We develop ways to detect images, and methods for these structures to move about. Of course they will also need some source of power... We are basically talking about life. All for the purpose of exploring and learning about a new world.

From here, there are so many possibilities. What if the conditions of the planet are harsh and familiar chemical structures don't work? Many iterations and evolutions would be necessary to find something stable. To an outsider, it would appear that what is taking place is a type of natural selection.

What if the planet already contains life? Would the scientists perhaps mimic the existing life forms with their projections, the same way we mimic nature with our current technology (the grays, anyone)?

What if, in our curiosity, we developed a way to plug our minds into these projections directly, to do the closest thing possible to directly travel to this other world. What if the experience is so powerful that we forgot we we're not the thing we were projecting to?

I realize that it's easy for a layman like me to get carried away by exotic quantum concepts like 'spooky action at a distance,' but I thought this idea was too interesting not to share. The idea of panspermia is taken seriously in a fair amount of the scientific community, but it seems to usually involve some kind of space virus that accidentally happens to bump into the Earth. Given the huge amounts of emptiness and dead asteroids in space, this seems like a major stretch. Crazy how in the end, the transporter seems to work out to be more plausible than the warp drive...