but the world itself isnt going to change. i mean the 5 pm news world.
heres the thing. we already kind of assume the riemann conjecture to be true. you can do a lot of things with it. its not PROVEN, and mathematicians will tell you that its not proven, but if it was such a big massive RSA attacks deal, hackers would just "assume" its proven and then calculate those primes. they would very quickly figure out whether the conjecture holds or not, in a practical sense.
i think what you misunderstand is that the riemann conjecture already exists. you can already use the result of the conjecture. the missing link is the proof. but you dont need the proof to apply the result. you can just apply it. maybe some mathematician comes along and disproves it. but the result is very accessible.
so the result cant be what would enable you to perform polynomial time attacks. it must be the proof. but since you dont know what the proof would look like (because it doesnt exist), it cant be in the proof. therefore, i kinda doubt what youre saying.
a conjecture is just a statement by a smart person that lacks the proof. from a mathematical point of view, its not a result. but for everyone else, including serious physicists, conjectures can be used as is to make progress. if the riemann conjecture allowed for primes to be calculated so fast that modern cryptography would suffer, then that would already be happening.
but thats just a tangent. my initial point was that the riemann conjecture isnt going to say anything about the world that a journalist will find interesting enough to construct something reportable out of.