Imagine a world of clarity in which what has been uncertain in life become instantaneously certain, where choices are not made one by one, but are presented to you all at once. Imagine a world where drug discovery can occur within mere days instead of months and years. Imagine a life lived with less concern about personal future healthcare issues because of the emergence of disease risk prediction. Imagine a system that could erase or revise “digital signatures – which in countries including the U.S. are used to execute contracts in the same way as a handwritten mark –” that are currently protected with encryption keys. The need to imagine quantum computing uses benefits or threats, won’t inhabit only our imaginations for too long because it will most likely exist in true form with an operational magnitude exponentially equal to or even bypass the importance of the discovery of nuclear fission with the next decade. “For example, Quantum Defense (QD5)’s executive vice president, Tilo Kunz, told officials from the Defense Information Systems Agency that possibly as soon as 2025, the world would arrive at what has been dubbed ‘Q-day,’ the day when quantum computers make current encryption methods useless.”

     “Even though our traditional computers can operate in amazing ways, they cannot compute nature, where things are not just simply turned on and off but remain in uncertain states at its subatomic level. To understand the smallest scale of our environment, physicists developed quantum mechanics, which is the basis of physics, that underlies chemistry, and is the foundation of biology.” To accurately simulate and model that which is found in these disciplines, scientists require a computer that can compute the uncertainty of life without error on an enormous exponential level, such as that which is equal to 300 qubits or 1090. Quantum mechanics researchers are in the middle of achieving this technological feat by probing a world on the scale of atoms (one million times smaller than the width of the human hair), to build an operational quantum computer large enough to solve some of life’s most complex problems. With an adequate amount of qubits that are stable long enough, a quantum computer would be able to perform exponentially more calculations than current supercomputers. In a single step, it could solve problems that could take classic computers years to do so. For example, quantum computer capabilities could enable computations otherwise not possible in areas like chemistry, such as modeling, that could produce new materials by simulating the behavior of matter at the atomic level.