All true JC, yet a world powered by atomic energy seems to await commercial fusion which out of my world view is a thing, despite recent progress, is a decades off. Nukes may have reduced the great war cycles, but Putin has restarted it again. Even with nukes. All it takes is a different set of values and culture and there we go. Comrade Xi seems of a similar mind set. For energy and prosperity it becomes a matter of getting along until that golden day arrives. The societal impact of QC is sketchy to me, as it needs to be conformed to human impacts if it is to be better than conventional? It may hit this secretly with code cracking which for all I know may already be here? In that case all foreign policy would need to become visceral, in the sense that one knows everyone's intent, and thus adjusts accordingly. Not my idea of the 21st century, but then who asked my opinion? American Serf, Spud100 (olde sod!)
-----Original Message----- From: John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> To: spudboy...@aol.com Cc: everything-list@googlegroups.com <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Sat, Jun 25, 2022 7:20 am Subject: Re: Quantum Computing On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 8:12 PM <spudboy...@aol.com> wrote: > John, isn't it a wiser thing to consider impact over capability? One thing at a time. Before you can have any impact you've got to have a capacity. And if large-scale quantum computers are practical, and it's getting to look like they are, then somebody somewhere is certain to make one. The best historical analogy is with nuclear energy, we've known since 1905 that matter contained a huge amount of energy but there didn't seem to be any practical way to get at it; that suddenly changed in 1938 when Uranium fission was discovered, after that the technological path one needed to travel to release a large amount of that energy very quickly was obvious. It was also very expensive, but it was only a matter of time before somebody somewhere did so. And just 7 years later somebody did. The moral is that if something very powerful can be made then like it or not it will be made. > then in the 1950's the immensity of nuclear fission over carbon burning > should have led to an Atomic Age, but it didn't. Nuclear didn't beat out fossil fuels its true but you could still say we live in an Atomic Age because it still had an enormous impact on society. Considering the rate that wars were happening in the first half of the 20th century, if nuclear weapons were impossible or impractical to make I imagine we'd be in the middle of World War 5 or 6 about now; they wouldn't be nuclear wars but 20 million people died in the first world war and 50 million died in the second. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis nwb -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/2096272874.23231.1656463206918%40mail.yahoo.com.
