Teleportation is already happening. In fact in an article in New Scientist, Dr Michio Kaku points out that teleporting photons and atoms across laboratories is a routine practice. This makes the possibility of long distance quantum communications feasible in the near future.
The idea is based off of refining the understanding of quantum entanglement which allows two particles to behave as one, regardless of how far apart they are. Photons can be entangled so that if one is vertically polarized, for instance, then the other photon in the pair is always horizontally polarized. A recent breakthrough was achieved by a team at the University of Vienna that managed to teleport photons without destroying them.
If teleportation at a quantum level gets perfected it could quickly make communications faster, more reliable, easier to set-up (due to no need for a cable infrastructure) and then lead to the teleportation of non-organic itens and living tissue. In a world where we spend a lot of time and energy transporting ourselves and our stuff around the world, even being able to teleport say holiday gifts would save time, hopefully money, and definitely green house gas emissions. But even without visions of fighting crime in far off galaxies, long-distance quantum communication has big potential to make this a more efficient world.
