Although military investment has driven many different technologies over the years, ‘the military’ is actually a complex mix of the Armed forces themselves, government acquisition organisations, and prime contractors and their supply chains. The resultant acquisition processes of many countries are glacially slow, with sometimes decadal timescales from requirements definition to delivery of full operational capability. Military acquisition is not agile, except when urgent operational requirements force rapid tech change by taking acquisition shortcuts.
Where have I heard this before...
An acquaintance flew Concorde a lot in the 80's, the reason - "I could get to Heathrow in the morning, fly to New York, do a meeting, fly back and get home the next morning". Another friend is a exec at a bank now and goes on month long odysseys to the USA, Asia and Australia. The contrast in perspective and commitment is striking, I don't think that Concorde would matter at all to these folks.
The more comfortable you are in the flight, the less the actual number of hours flown bothers you.
No amount of money makes getting from your front door to the airport not be a massive pain potentially taking over an hour if you have some bad luck
Is this true? I thought that in the 40s-50s there was some argument over whether practical computers could really be built given that vacuum tubes were so unreliable. Von Neumann wrote gave a series of lectures in 1952 (eventually transcribed into an article) showing how it could be done: http://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/Von_Neumann_1956ro.pdf , and the argument became more or less moot once transistors arrived).
There's perhaps an analogy here to be made with quantum error correction, but that seems to be a lot harder...
I suppose double entry would be your error correction. That also benefits from having a calculating machine.
By 1950 then, the only question is whether we should, not whether we can.
I'd be really interested to hear what Gil Kalai has to say on this particular subject; he's generally pretty fair minded while being of a QC skeptic. He has a response up [1] but I haven't read through it yet.
[1] https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2019/09/23/quantum-computers-...
Except that you'd only be able to pay with physical cash.
To extend the analogy, quantum supremacy is like fusion for neutron source. There are commercial fusion devices to be used as neutron source.
Perhaps this was just a poor example, but we absolutely have a path to fusion power generation. ITER [0][2] is under construction now, and is expected to be capable of 10x power returns. DEMO [1] should have 25x.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station
[2] https://media4.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2017_52/2273651/17122... (worth a click)
> ITER Project was initiated in 1988.
> The expected cost of ITER has risen from US$5 billion to US$20 billion, and the timeline for operation at full power was moved from the original estimate of 2016 to 2027.
> A technical concern is that the 14 MeV neutrons produced by the fusion reactions will damage the materials from which the reactor is built
... definitely not clear to me that this is a "clear path forward" to fusion power, but I was encouraged to learn that a project of this sort was underway.
> The expected cost of ITER has risen from US$5 billion to US$20 billion
So factor 4 in 30 years. That's approximately inflation, no?
https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines#2
"ITER will not capture the energy it produces as electricity, but—as first of all fusion experiments in history to produce net energy gain—it will prepare the way for the machine that can."
Let me repeat, the project will not produce any usable electricity. It's still an experiment.
And the start of the experiment is at the moment planned for 2025. The ITER project started in 2007. That's how much the preparations "just" for the experiment take, even if the previous experiments were done for decades.
Also from their FAQ:
https://www.iter.org/FAQ#collapsible_2
"one of the missions for the later stages of ITER operation is to demonstrate the feasibility of one or more concepts of tritium production through the Test Blanket Module (TBM) program."
Namely, it's an experiment that "in the later stages" should manage to give results that would allow the development of the technology for tritium breeding. Without tritium breeding fusion can't be used commercially.
The path for experiments is known, but it's still far from confirmed that the desired results are achievable, as we'll need a lot of new developments which we don't have at the moment for that.
Also DEMO can be fully developed only once ITER succeeds, it needs the results from ITER.
It's simply very hard, and achievable as an experiment. The still open question is if its really commercially viable, in the sense, if the "hard" stuff can become manageable enough to be useful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_record...
If you're willing to admit handwaving and future-tech plans, then you can be excited now. It's estimated that a few million physical qubits (corresponding to few thousand logical qubits) will be necessary to crack an RSA key. It's at least a decade away, maybe several, but few experts believe there are hard barriers to number of qubits or minimal cost.
both of them are very flexible, but also definitively non independent.
"Thing is ridiculous, that could never work because of reasons A, B and C."
"What are you talking about, here is project that does thing, it functions perfectly."
Nothing like reality proving someones baseless naysaying wrong immediately.