The final frontier

I was born in the middle of WWII, so most of my schooling was in the 50’s. That was the first full decade of the Cold War and a very scary time indeed. In the classroom, we occasionally had “drop” exercises. We’d drop to the floor and nestle under our desks, giving us, absurdly, the illusion of protection from a nuclear blast.

During that era, a sense of urgency arose about any technological gap with the Soviet Union. To no avail, we hoped to preserve the gap in nuclear weaponry. Then came the missile gap and, when Sputnik went up, the space race followed. We were deeply unnerved. Rather than allow the USSR to “bury us”—Khrushchev’s words—we spent billions in pursuit of supremacy. This mania was mockingly portrayed at the conclusion of Dr. Strangelove: the end of human life was at hand, and only deep tunnels could preserve a select few, the seeds of the human future. It became obvious to those in the War Room that digging must commence immediately, or there could well be a “mineshaft gap”!

By the end of the 60’s, we had landed on the moon, and two decades later, the Soviet Union began to crumble. Seemingly, there was no gap left to fear. A communications revolution ensued. All sorts of institutions—governmental, corporate, military—and homes around the world began interlinking via private computer networks and the Internet. From all walks of life, people hailed these connections as a sign of utopian change. A boom decade was underway.

Enter the hackers, warped but clever individuals motivated by malice, They happily disrupted computer systems and corrupted data files for the thrill of it. We answered their “viruses” with “antiviruses,” but they were always one step ahead. As computer programs and networks became larger and richer in function, new security holes permitted new viruses to gain entrance. Even so, I thought of hackers as pests we could keep at bay, so long as we, the users, took a few intelligent precautions. I was wrong.

Before long, it dawned on criminals and hostile governments that hacking for the sheer evil pleasure of it was a waste. There was real money to be made by finding credit card numbers in customer databases. There were personnel records in employee databases that could be mined for intelligence information. There were secrets in private email that could be read and leaked to manipulate public opinion. We’ve already seen instances of all three. Most recently, Russia, behind the facade of Wikileaks, has published the emails of Hillary Clinton’s associates in an effort to sway the outcome of our presidential election. Can it get any worse? Yes indeed. There’s the specter of a hostile government hacking into the computer networks at the heart of our communication, energy, and military infrastructures. There’s a word for such a catastrophe: cyberwar.

Our government has awakened to the reality that national security is computer security. To achieve it, an unprecedented leap in computing speed and data storage is needed. Why these two? To start with, such computer systems could contain biometric information on every consumer and government employee in the nation. They could retrieve such information in a flash and even pose questions to further confirm a user’s identity. Just as important, hostile governments would recognize the power of these systems and know their speed and algorithms could readily break through the security defenses of less powerful systems.

Several years ago, an idea was put forward on how we might make such a leap in computing power. The idea was based on quantum mechanics, a branch of physics that’s no more than a century old. It happens, much to the consternation of physicists, that the physics of objects we can see, whether they’re as big as a star or as small as a grain of sand, is different from the physics of objects we can’t see—subatomic objects, known as quanta.

When we study quanta, we find some confounding surprises. Here’s a layman’s summary of them:

• Quanta sometimes act like particles—like electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on—and sometimes like waves. When we try to detect the location of a quantum (the singular form of the word), it always behaves like a particle. We never know precisely where the particle is. We only know that its location has a probability—say, 20%—of being at point A and another probability—80%—of being at point B.

• When we measure a quantum to determine its state—say, its energy or position—we can, at that moment, get a single result. But between measurements, the quantum is simultaneously in two states, each with a value expressed as a probability. The phenomenon of existing in two states at once is known as superposition.

• When two quanta interact in a certain way, their states become interdependent. When the state of one is measured, the state of the other is known immediately, no matter how far apart they are! One quantum can be in Pittsburgh, and the other can be in Beijing, or even on Jupiter. They seem to communicate instantaneously. This phenomenon is known as entanglement.

• A quantum traveling from point A to point B will take every possible route at the same time! (Please don’t ask me what makes a route “possible.”)

You may be thinking, OK, quantum mechanics is weird, but what possible application could it have in computing? Well, think of an irreducible unit of data in a traditional computer, a bit, short for “binary digit.” A bit can be in one of two states, 1 or 0, or if you like, on or off. In a theoretical quantum computer, a bit (renamed a qubit) can be a 1, a 0, or both at the same time—an instance of superposition. That’s 50% more information in every data unit. Further, all computer operations can be done in parallel, enhancing speed enormously. (I’m guessing this achievement is due to entanglement, but I’ve yet to read anything confirming it.)

You’re right if you’re thinking a quantum computer would be difficult to build. One exists, but it contains only a small number of qubits; it does little more than model the idea of quantum computing. In Australia, some researchers based in Sydney have a $33 million grant to create a sizable quantum computer. In the U.S., Google is trying to do the same. They have a project underway at an undisclosed location in California. They refuse to reveal much more than that. So far as I know, our government is funding no such project. If they are, the budget for it is hidden somewhere.

It’s imperative for our government to form the same kind of partnership with business as it did in putting a man on the moon. Our national security is at stake. And the side benefits will be far greater than those achieved by the Apollo program. A quantum computer would be able to do grammatically perfect and idiomatically correct translations simultaneously, in any number of languages. No more translators at the U.N. Weather forecasting would be 100% accurate up to two or three weeks ahead, maybe more. No more wondering what path a hurricane will take. At the CIA, million of pages of data would be analyzed in mere hours. Recommended courses of action and the probabilities of success would be available to our leaders. In medicine, incorrect diagnoses would be a thing of the past. The best plans for treatment would be at a doctor’s fingertips.

Escalation of tension with Russia (and perhaps China) is not an easy thing to advocate, especially by one who has lived through the worst years of the Cold War, but I believe we have no choice. The benefits far outweigh the risks. To those who would say that medical research or space exploration should be our foremost scientific priority, I say, neither is our final frontier—computing is.