The Propeller – The Ball Drops this Wednesday Night! = 12=28=2025

Here’s what most people don’t understand about the quantum computers being built right now.

How Normal Computers Work: If you lose your car keys, you search each room. Kitchen, then living room, then bedroom. Room by room until you find them.

Your computer does the same. It tries one potential answer, then another, then another. Very quickly, but just one at a time nonetheless.

How Quantum Computers Work: A quantum computer would try every room in your home at once at the same moment. All of them, all at once, until it finds the keys.

Why This Changes Everything: Issues that would take ordinary computers years to figure out are accomplished in a flash. We’re not talking faster computers. We’re talking computers that work entirely differently.

New medicines might be discovered in days instead of decades. Weather predictions might actually be true. Traffic problems in entire cities might be solved flawlessly.

The Corporate Race: All the major tech firms are spending billions of dollars on this because they know whoever gets there first controls the future.

Google built a quantum computer that is capable of solving a specific problem in 200 seconds. It would take normal computers 10,000 years to solve the problem.

IBM responded by building an even larger quantum chip. And then more companies joined in. Everyone’s competing because second place is about being behind everyone else.

The Current Problem: These quantum computers only work in ideal conditions. They need to be colder than space outside and can’t have any vibrations at all.

Engineers have reported that a truck driving by outside is sufficient enough to ruin hours of work. A person walking too heavily in the room next door can break the computer’s computations.

It’s like stacking cards in an earthquake.

What Happens When They Work: All passwords that protect your bank account, credit cards, and secret messages rely on math problems being unbreakable.

Quantum computers make these math problems easy, such as 2+2=4.

All internet security is made obsolete overnight. All secret information is readable. All secure systems are no longer secure.

The Timeline: The majority of experts think that we will have working quantum computers in 10 years. Some think in 5 years. Some think we are nearly there already.

Companies aren’t battling for dollars. They’re battling to re-imagine privacy, security, and computing for every human being on the planet.

It’s no longer science fiction. It’s already happening in research labs, getting closer every month.

Everybody thinks that the internet is wireless, intangible, or stored “in the cloud.” Not a chance. It’s actually giant underwater cables between continents, and trillions of miles of fiber optic cable underneath your streets.

When you text from London to New York, it actually goes through a cable buried on the ocean floor. Not so crazy for something we assume as “wireless,” right?

How Your Message Actually Travels:

You send the message “Hey” to your Japanese friend on your cell phone. Your cell phone sends that message to the nearest cell tower. The tower sends it through buried cables to your internet service provider. Your provider sends it through cables to other companies’ networks.

Finally, your “Hey” is fired off in a laser beam in an underwater cable across the Pacific Ocean. It arrives in Japan, goes through their set of cables, reaches their cell towers, and rings your friend’s phone.

It accomplishes all this in about 0.15 seconds for a three-letter word.

The Cable Reality:

There are more than 400 underwater cables that stretch from continent to continent. They’re roughly the same diameter as a garden hose, yet each can carry all the internet traffic of half the globe.

Sharks will bite these cables every now and then because they think they are a fish. And when they do, whole countries are without the internet. No joke. Shark bites on the internet are something engineers must fix.

Why Your Wi-Fi Sucks Sometimes:

Your home Wi-Fi is the last link in a chain that circumnavigates the globe. Your internet signal must travel thousands of miles through dozens of cables and networks before it even reaches your router.

If any link in that enormous chain decelerates, gets faulty, or just requires a cup of coffee, your Netflix buffer freezes. It’s a miracle it works at all.

The Warehouse Truth:

All those websites, apps, and “cloud” services? They’re all just on computers in massive warehouses called data centers. Facebook isn’t in mid-air – it’s on thousands of servers in buildings everywhere in the world.

Data centers use more electricity than cities. Google alone uses as much electricity as 200,000 homes, just to ensure your search results come back fast.

What Happens When You Google Something:

You type in “best pizza near me.” Your computer asks the closest Google data center (which could be 500 miles from you) for an answer. Google’s computers speedily search through billions of web pages, sort them out, and give back a list.

That list returns via the same network of cables, towers, and routers to find its way onto your screen. The entire process takes place within 0.2 seconds and the coordination of dozens of companies’ networks.

The Bottom Line:

The internet is essentially the world’s biggest and most complicated machine ever constructed. It’s not magic or wireless; it’s millions of miles of wire, thousands of warehouses loaded with computers, and a brigade of engineers making sure everything ticks along 24/7 so you can watch cat videos at 3 AM.

Go Ohio State on Wednesday!
 

This is re-published from the weekly email sent by Leonard Mack entitled The Propeller.  To subscribe, visit https://www.LeonardMack.com/subscribe and read it every Sunday evening.

This intellectual nourishment is intended for informational purposes only. One should not construe anything herein as being legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

My rule is this – I have no advice to give, only experience to share. I have no interest in being a guru or telling people what they should do. Rather, I share my own experience because there is no right or wrong. Your mileage may vary.