VICE (2013) s06e18 Episode Script
A New Leaf & Quantum Supremacy
1 SHANE SMITH: This week on Vice: Colombia's war on drugs.
(MAN SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: We're on our way upriver to check out a coca field that was eradicated by the army yesterday.
SHANE: And then, the next quantum leap in computing.
TAYLOR: How does a qubit differ than that just one and zero? At 300 qubits, you can encode more information than all of the atoms in the universe.
- Wow.
- (SCIENTIST SPEAKING) (THEME MUSIC PLAYING) (CROWD SHOUTING) They're saying that right now, it's time for change.
(SHOUTING) In 2016, a peace deal brokered by Colombia's president put an end to a bloody 50-year war, between the government and FARC guerrilla fighters.
Now, despite this historic achievement, the cocaine trade, which previously funded these rebels, continues to flourish, accounting for 92 percent of all cocaine seized in the US.
So, we sent Charlet Duboc to Colombia to find out why.
(HELICOPTER WHIRRING) (QUINTERO SPEAKING) QUINTERO: Coca, coca CHARLET: Lieutenant Jesús Quintero has been on the frontlines of Colombia's drug war for the past 10 years.
He's a commander in the anti-narcotics police force, which continues to conduct operations in Colombia, even though the government has signed a peace deal with the FARC.
He's currently overseeing operations in Tumaco, home to the world's largest concentration of coca crops, the base ingredient of cocaine.
(QUINTERO SPEAKING SPANISH) So, before the men can enter the field and manually pull up the crops, they have to send in dogs, which sniff out any IEDs, land mines that've been lain by criminal factions here.
Tell me, these crops look like they've already been eradicated.
Well, it's been cut.
Yeah.
Maybe two months ago.
- And, right now, it's like this.
- It's already growing back.
It's growing back, and if you wait for four more months, it would be ready to take the leaves out of the plant.
CHARLET: So, eradication's been going on for a long time.
- QUINTERO: Yeah.
- In this area, 15 years.
How can you deal with the fact that, from the outside, it can seem like a futile task? This eradication.
Well, I cannot accept that this is a futile job.
I've been doing this for 10 years, so I respect the guys who have been offering their own lives to do this job.
So, it's not futile.
I do believe that it's part of a huge strategy, and we must contain the problem.
CHARLET: But containment doesn't work.
FARC dissidents and other groups still want to buy coca, so farmers are still growing it, faster than the government can eradicate it.
In fact, in the last five years, coca cultivation has almost tripled, and cocaine in the US and around the world is being consumed more now than ever before.
- (INDISTINCT CONVERSATION) - We spoke to Hernando Zuleta, a drug policy expert at the University of the Andes.
(SPEAKING SPANISH) We're on our way upriver to check out a coca field that was eradicated by the army only yesterday.
It's affected everyone on this boat.
While we're up there, there's a possibility that the army's still around, so there's a chance we might run into them.
CHARLET: What happened here? (SPEAKING SPANISH) I noticed they've left a lot of the plants.
They've uprooted them, but they've left the leaves.
CHARLET: What's the next step for you? How are you gonna deal with the situation in this field? (SPEAKING SPANISH) (MAN SPEAKING SPANISH) (SPEAKING QUIETLY): The coca farmers have found some of the army members who are doing the eradication.
They're currently having a debate.
(SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: Vanessa Rueda is a community leader of several townships along the InÃrida River.
These were once self-sufficient fishing and hunting villages.
But after decades of being incentivized by the FARC to grow coca leaf, they developed into bustling towns centered around this crop.
How has this area been affected by the peace agreement? (SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: Leo Cárdenas is one of thousands of people still locked into coca farming in Colombia.
He's the manager of a coca field, and he left us see his operation.
CHARLET: In the past few years, especially since the peace agreement, cocaine production in Colombia has more than doubled.
Do you know why? (SPEAKING SPANISH) So this is where the process of making cocaine all starts.
These guys come down here to the farms at the crack of dawn, before it gets too hot, bind their fingers in fabric, and literally rip the leaves off the trees.
This activity's going on at this time every day, all across this region.
CHARLET: So, the leaf pickers are done stripping the plants for the day.
They bundle up all the leaves they've picked, carry them towards the farm, where there's a kind of rudimentary lab.
(WEEDWHACKER BUZZING) (MAN SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: This is the final stage of making coca paste.
In order to make it into the white paste, he cooks it up on the same stove that his family cooks their meals on.
CHARLET: How come you don't turn it into cocaine? (SPEAKING SPANISH) (SCRAPING METAL BOWL) They say money doesn't grow on trees.
(LAUGHS) To get a sense of just how entrenched in the coca trade these communities are, in cash-poor areas, like Golondrinas, coca paste is not only a way to make money, it is money.
CHARLET: So, how often do people pay in coca paste? (SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: When did that start happening? Hmm Why is it just as good as cash to you? (CHILDREN CHATTERING) CHARLET: But against the odds, some farmers are trying legal alternatives, with help from the government.
After farming coca leaf for over a decade, LuÃs Rodrigo Mosquera replaced his crops with cacao, better known as chocolate.
(SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: The program he's referring to is the crop substitution program, one of the terms of the peace agreement.
It was designed to encourage farmers to sever ties with the guerrillas who buy their coca paste.
The government offers a monthly stipend, technical training, security, and, in some cases, land.
(SPEAKING SPANISH) This is Miraflores, which is an extremely remote, rural town, which was once geared entirely to the production of coca leaf.
It's been pretty receptive to the crop substitution program.
But along with the payments, the government also promised investment in local infrastructure, but that has not materialized.
And there's talk around town that if something doesn't change soon, Miraflores is at risk of returning to the coca producing hub it used to be.
At a landing strip where cocaine was once flown out, now government money flies in, to support farmers willing to make the switch to legal crops.
Of the more than 100,000 coca-growing families in Colombia, around 60,000 have signed up to the crop substitution program.
CHARLET: But this small amount of progress is already at risk.
In June 2018, Colombia elected right-wing candidate Iván Duque as president.
One of his campaign promises was to make changes to much of the peace deal, including the crop substitution program.
(SPEAKING SPANISH) (HERNANDO SPEAKING SPANISH) (MAN SPEAKING SPANISH) Which of you would go back to farming coca if this doesn't work out? Can you raise your hands? FARMERS: Todo.
At our current technological pace, our ability to continue to make ever faster and smaller computer chips is slowing.
Today, researchers think that the next big scientific leap could involve one of the most powerful and mysterious forces of nature: quantum physics.
Now, what would take years for current computers to do, a quantum computer could achieve in just a few moments, promising profound leaps in everything from medicine, communications, and space travel, to an understanding of human consciousness itself.
While labs all over the world are racing to create the first commercially viable quantum computers, fundamental questions remain about how this technology could be used, or misused, going forward.
So, we sent Taylor Wilson to investigate.
One more set of gloves, and your safety glasses.
Safety glasses.
Thank you.
MIKE: So, what we do here is we try to imagine what the future will look like, and our goal here is to push the envelope to get ahead of the technology curve, so to speak, so that we're ready for what the future brings.
TAYLOR: The future will usher in the age of the quantum computer, a device using quantum physics to create a computer with the possibility of one million times more processing strength than all computers in the world today combined.
TAYLOR: My cellphone has a classical computer chip, and that produces a computer code that's made up of bits, so ones or zeroes.
How does a quantum bit, or a qubit, differ than that just one and zero? - Imagine this coin is a bit in a conventional computer.
- Okay.
So, you see this side of the coin is a one, this side of the coin is not a one.
A conventional computer basically flips bits - Yes.
Yes.
- to do a calculation.
The larger the calculation, - the more bits you need.
- Bits you need.
TAYLOR: That means bits are a classical computer's building blocks: individual data units represented as a zero or a one that allow computers to display numbers, texts, images, and sounds.
But a quantum computer is different.
A quantum computer qubit, it's a combination of heads or tails.
- Okay.
- And you can, you can visualize it by thinking of spinning.
We call it "superposition.
" TAYLOR: When you go below the atomic level, and into the quantum realm, the physics are, in many ways, wildly different from what we perceive.
One of those unique principles is superposition, and that's what computer makers are trying to harness.
In a quantum computer, the quantum bit, or qubit, uses this principle of superposition to be both a zero and a one at the same time, effectively multitasking, and that's part of what makes a qubit so powerful.
Classical computers run one calculation at a time, but a computer that utilizes quantum effects could run through several calculations simultaneously.
At 300 qubits, you can encode more information than all of the atoms in the universe.
Wow.
Wow.
If we only had to make individual qubits work, - we'd basically be done.
- Yeah.
The fact that we have to make them all work simultaneously, that's make this a really hard, hard problem.
TAYLOR: The engineering needed to harness that kind of power, known as quantum supremacy, has set off a race among computer giants to get the first fully functional quantum computer.
And while a commercially viable quantum computer is likely still years away, the first computing device to tap into quantum principles, called the D-Wave, is now being used by the United States' biggest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin.
(JET ENGINES ROAR) We are looking at the very hardest problems, the problems that are intractable, we say, for classical computers, which just means that we can't solve them with the amount of time and resources that we have.
Yeah.
Problems that would take on the age of the universe, - or something, to compute.
- Exactly.
(ENGINE HUMS) TAYLOR: Senior quantum engineer, Dr.
Kristen Pudenz, has used the D-Wave to ensure that some of Lockheed Martin's weapon systems are error-free.
Advanced weapon systems are using increasingly more complex software, like the F-35, which runs on more than eight million lines of code.
KRISTEN: The software verification problem is something that's particularly difficult.
It's something that consumes a huge amount of resources for Lockheed Martin, and for, really, every other company that's developing systems with computers inside it.
- It costs a lot of money.
- Costs an incredible amount of money.
If we could speed it up even a fraction of a percent, we would probably pay for the entire quantum computing program.
TAYLOR: And so, while the race to be the first to build a commercially viable quantum computer hits a fever pitch, an entirely new computer language is being written to program these powerful machines.
So, once we have quantum hardware that actually works, you're working on how to code it - and how to be ready for that hardware.
- Yeah, exactly.
TAYLOR: Krysta Svore and her team at Microsoft are figuring out exactly how to put the power of a quantum computer to use, once a breakthrough is achieved.
So, how many qubits can this software, kind of, simulate? You can simulate roughly 30 to 32 qubits.
- Okay.
- But if we go larger, let's say we wanted to simulate 250 qubits on this device.
It doesn't sound like a very big number, but that will take you the age of the universe to do one operation.
Let's say we want to understand, - you know, how do the electrons configure - Yeah.
- in a hydrogen gas, right, in that structure.
- Absolutely.
We're gonna run the chemistry solution (KEYSTROKE) And there's a lot of numbers flying by.
TAYLOR: This simulator mimics a quantum computer, only much slower.
A real quantum computer will be able to solve some of the most complex science and engineering problems, almost instantaneously, effectively condensing years worth of manual laboratory testing, to just a few moments.
And that might reshape our world to look a little bit more like the worlds of science fiction.
If we can take, you know, knowledge like this, we can feed that in to ways to actually engineer new materials.
You know, imagine a new paint that could make a plane disappear, you know, from signals, right? From your visible eye.
When we think about how do we - transport power, right? - Yeah.
- Across, say, the United States.
- Yeah.
Phoenix is really sunny a lot of the time.
I live in Seattle, not so sunny a lot of the time.
Maybe we could transport solar power really efficiently from Phoenix to Seattle.
You wanna do drug design, you wanna better produce fertilizer, you wanna find a high-temperature superconductor, or interesting materials.
It's not just a step in computing power.
This is a - a quantum leap in terms of - No pun intended.
- computing power.
- Absolutely.
TAYLOR: And while this leap in computing power opens the door to amazing science, like any new technology, it also introduces problems that we have not yet imagined, or potentially intensifies dangers we already face.
Cyber chaos this morning Chances are, some of your personal, or financial information, - was compromised - Russia launched a sophisticated cyber attack against the Pentagon TAYLOR: In the last five years alone, hackers breached billions of accounts and systems worldwide.
These attacks were all done with the classical computers we use today.
Because of a quantum computer's speed and power, there are no current security methods we employ that can fully protect our banks, identities, and even our infrastructure.
The irony is that a country widely accused of hacking intellectual property is now leading the world in creating it's own impenetrable quantum technology for cyber security.
(HISSING) TAYLOR: At the University of Science and Technology of China, Dr.
Pan Jianwei, known in China as the Father of Quantum, has created the first secure quantum communications network, as a first step in countering the threat that actual quantum computers will pose.
TAYLOR: This is the first quantum satellite in existence? Do you wanna just take us, very basically, through how this process works? Okay.
TAYLOR: But not really.
The scientists are exploiting a principle of quantum physics called "entanglement," a concept so strange, that Albert Einstein even called it spooky.
Entangled photons are essentially linked across time and space and can instantly teleport their quantum information with each other other over incredibly large distances.
(PHONE DIALING) - Hi! - Hi.
(LAUGHS) TAYLOR: So, what Pan's team is doing is linking, or entangling particles, to create a completely safe communication channel between two locations on Earth, and a satellite using a laser.
Two entangled particles are used to create a key to secure a conversation, and because of how fragile keeping a quantum connection is, if a hacker listens in on that conversation, the connection between the entangled photons will fall apart, and the network will close.
TAYLOR: So, the information that's actually going through this teleconference is actually being encrypted through the quantum information system.
TAYLOR: But encrypted communication is just one quantum application Pan Jianwei is pursuing.
China will be spending at least $10 billion over the next three years on quantum technology, including computing, around 13 times more than the US government is spending on quantum research.
TAYLOR: And unraveling the strange nature of quantum mechanics might even take us beyond inventing new, incredible technologies.
It might also play a key part in unlocking one of the greatest questions humanity has ever asked: What is the nature of human consciousness? (PAN JIANWEI SPEAKING) TAYLOR: A computer like this might actually give an answer to it.
(PAN JIANWEI SPEAKING)
(MAN SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: We're on our way upriver to check out a coca field that was eradicated by the army yesterday.
SHANE: And then, the next quantum leap in computing.
TAYLOR: How does a qubit differ than that just one and zero? At 300 qubits, you can encode more information than all of the atoms in the universe.
- Wow.
- (SCIENTIST SPEAKING) (THEME MUSIC PLAYING) (CROWD SHOUTING) They're saying that right now, it's time for change.
(SHOUTING) In 2016, a peace deal brokered by Colombia's president put an end to a bloody 50-year war, between the government and FARC guerrilla fighters.
Now, despite this historic achievement, the cocaine trade, which previously funded these rebels, continues to flourish, accounting for 92 percent of all cocaine seized in the US.
So, we sent Charlet Duboc to Colombia to find out why.
(HELICOPTER WHIRRING) (QUINTERO SPEAKING) QUINTERO: Coca, coca CHARLET: Lieutenant Jesús Quintero has been on the frontlines of Colombia's drug war for the past 10 years.
He's a commander in the anti-narcotics police force, which continues to conduct operations in Colombia, even though the government has signed a peace deal with the FARC.
He's currently overseeing operations in Tumaco, home to the world's largest concentration of coca crops, the base ingredient of cocaine.
(QUINTERO SPEAKING SPANISH) So, before the men can enter the field and manually pull up the crops, they have to send in dogs, which sniff out any IEDs, land mines that've been lain by criminal factions here.
Tell me, these crops look like they've already been eradicated.
Well, it's been cut.
Yeah.
Maybe two months ago.
- And, right now, it's like this.
- It's already growing back.
It's growing back, and if you wait for four more months, it would be ready to take the leaves out of the plant.
CHARLET: So, eradication's been going on for a long time.
- QUINTERO: Yeah.
- In this area, 15 years.
How can you deal with the fact that, from the outside, it can seem like a futile task? This eradication.
Well, I cannot accept that this is a futile job.
I've been doing this for 10 years, so I respect the guys who have been offering their own lives to do this job.
So, it's not futile.
I do believe that it's part of a huge strategy, and we must contain the problem.
CHARLET: But containment doesn't work.
FARC dissidents and other groups still want to buy coca, so farmers are still growing it, faster than the government can eradicate it.
In fact, in the last five years, coca cultivation has almost tripled, and cocaine in the US and around the world is being consumed more now than ever before.
- (INDISTINCT CONVERSATION) - We spoke to Hernando Zuleta, a drug policy expert at the University of the Andes.
(SPEAKING SPANISH) We're on our way upriver to check out a coca field that was eradicated by the army only yesterday.
It's affected everyone on this boat.
While we're up there, there's a possibility that the army's still around, so there's a chance we might run into them.
CHARLET: What happened here? (SPEAKING SPANISH) I noticed they've left a lot of the plants.
They've uprooted them, but they've left the leaves.
CHARLET: What's the next step for you? How are you gonna deal with the situation in this field? (SPEAKING SPANISH) (MAN SPEAKING SPANISH) (SPEAKING QUIETLY): The coca farmers have found some of the army members who are doing the eradication.
They're currently having a debate.
(SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: Vanessa Rueda is a community leader of several townships along the InÃrida River.
These were once self-sufficient fishing and hunting villages.
But after decades of being incentivized by the FARC to grow coca leaf, they developed into bustling towns centered around this crop.
How has this area been affected by the peace agreement? (SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: Leo Cárdenas is one of thousands of people still locked into coca farming in Colombia.
He's the manager of a coca field, and he left us see his operation.
CHARLET: In the past few years, especially since the peace agreement, cocaine production in Colombia has more than doubled.
Do you know why? (SPEAKING SPANISH) So this is where the process of making cocaine all starts.
These guys come down here to the farms at the crack of dawn, before it gets too hot, bind their fingers in fabric, and literally rip the leaves off the trees.
This activity's going on at this time every day, all across this region.
CHARLET: So, the leaf pickers are done stripping the plants for the day.
They bundle up all the leaves they've picked, carry them towards the farm, where there's a kind of rudimentary lab.
(WEEDWHACKER BUZZING) (MAN SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: This is the final stage of making coca paste.
In order to make it into the white paste, he cooks it up on the same stove that his family cooks their meals on.
CHARLET: How come you don't turn it into cocaine? (SPEAKING SPANISH) (SCRAPING METAL BOWL) They say money doesn't grow on trees.
(LAUGHS) To get a sense of just how entrenched in the coca trade these communities are, in cash-poor areas, like Golondrinas, coca paste is not only a way to make money, it is money.
CHARLET: So, how often do people pay in coca paste? (SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: When did that start happening? Hmm Why is it just as good as cash to you? (CHILDREN CHATTERING) CHARLET: But against the odds, some farmers are trying legal alternatives, with help from the government.
After farming coca leaf for over a decade, LuÃs Rodrigo Mosquera replaced his crops with cacao, better known as chocolate.
(SPEAKING SPANISH) CHARLET: The program he's referring to is the crop substitution program, one of the terms of the peace agreement.
It was designed to encourage farmers to sever ties with the guerrillas who buy their coca paste.
The government offers a monthly stipend, technical training, security, and, in some cases, land.
(SPEAKING SPANISH) This is Miraflores, which is an extremely remote, rural town, which was once geared entirely to the production of coca leaf.
It's been pretty receptive to the crop substitution program.
But along with the payments, the government also promised investment in local infrastructure, but that has not materialized.
And there's talk around town that if something doesn't change soon, Miraflores is at risk of returning to the coca producing hub it used to be.
At a landing strip where cocaine was once flown out, now government money flies in, to support farmers willing to make the switch to legal crops.
Of the more than 100,000 coca-growing families in Colombia, around 60,000 have signed up to the crop substitution program.
CHARLET: But this small amount of progress is already at risk.
In June 2018, Colombia elected right-wing candidate Iván Duque as president.
One of his campaign promises was to make changes to much of the peace deal, including the crop substitution program.
(SPEAKING SPANISH) (HERNANDO SPEAKING SPANISH) (MAN SPEAKING SPANISH) Which of you would go back to farming coca if this doesn't work out? Can you raise your hands? FARMERS: Todo.
At our current technological pace, our ability to continue to make ever faster and smaller computer chips is slowing.
Today, researchers think that the next big scientific leap could involve one of the most powerful and mysterious forces of nature: quantum physics.
Now, what would take years for current computers to do, a quantum computer could achieve in just a few moments, promising profound leaps in everything from medicine, communications, and space travel, to an understanding of human consciousness itself.
While labs all over the world are racing to create the first commercially viable quantum computers, fundamental questions remain about how this technology could be used, or misused, going forward.
So, we sent Taylor Wilson to investigate.
One more set of gloves, and your safety glasses.
Safety glasses.
Thank you.
MIKE: So, what we do here is we try to imagine what the future will look like, and our goal here is to push the envelope to get ahead of the technology curve, so to speak, so that we're ready for what the future brings.
TAYLOR: The future will usher in the age of the quantum computer, a device using quantum physics to create a computer with the possibility of one million times more processing strength than all computers in the world today combined.
TAYLOR: My cellphone has a classical computer chip, and that produces a computer code that's made up of bits, so ones or zeroes.
How does a quantum bit, or a qubit, differ than that just one and zero? - Imagine this coin is a bit in a conventional computer.
- Okay.
So, you see this side of the coin is a one, this side of the coin is not a one.
A conventional computer basically flips bits - Yes.
Yes.
- to do a calculation.
The larger the calculation, - the more bits you need.
- Bits you need.
TAYLOR: That means bits are a classical computer's building blocks: individual data units represented as a zero or a one that allow computers to display numbers, texts, images, and sounds.
But a quantum computer is different.
A quantum computer qubit, it's a combination of heads or tails.
- Okay.
- And you can, you can visualize it by thinking of spinning.
We call it "superposition.
" TAYLOR: When you go below the atomic level, and into the quantum realm, the physics are, in many ways, wildly different from what we perceive.
One of those unique principles is superposition, and that's what computer makers are trying to harness.
In a quantum computer, the quantum bit, or qubit, uses this principle of superposition to be both a zero and a one at the same time, effectively multitasking, and that's part of what makes a qubit so powerful.
Classical computers run one calculation at a time, but a computer that utilizes quantum effects could run through several calculations simultaneously.
At 300 qubits, you can encode more information than all of the atoms in the universe.
Wow.
Wow.
If we only had to make individual qubits work, - we'd basically be done.
- Yeah.
The fact that we have to make them all work simultaneously, that's make this a really hard, hard problem.
TAYLOR: The engineering needed to harness that kind of power, known as quantum supremacy, has set off a race among computer giants to get the first fully functional quantum computer.
And while a commercially viable quantum computer is likely still years away, the first computing device to tap into quantum principles, called the D-Wave, is now being used by the United States' biggest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin.
(JET ENGINES ROAR) We are looking at the very hardest problems, the problems that are intractable, we say, for classical computers, which just means that we can't solve them with the amount of time and resources that we have.
Yeah.
Problems that would take on the age of the universe, - or something, to compute.
- Exactly.
(ENGINE HUMS) TAYLOR: Senior quantum engineer, Dr.
Kristen Pudenz, has used the D-Wave to ensure that some of Lockheed Martin's weapon systems are error-free.
Advanced weapon systems are using increasingly more complex software, like the F-35, which runs on more than eight million lines of code.
KRISTEN: The software verification problem is something that's particularly difficult.
It's something that consumes a huge amount of resources for Lockheed Martin, and for, really, every other company that's developing systems with computers inside it.
- It costs a lot of money.
- Costs an incredible amount of money.
If we could speed it up even a fraction of a percent, we would probably pay for the entire quantum computing program.
TAYLOR: And so, while the race to be the first to build a commercially viable quantum computer hits a fever pitch, an entirely new computer language is being written to program these powerful machines.
So, once we have quantum hardware that actually works, you're working on how to code it - and how to be ready for that hardware.
- Yeah, exactly.
TAYLOR: Krysta Svore and her team at Microsoft are figuring out exactly how to put the power of a quantum computer to use, once a breakthrough is achieved.
So, how many qubits can this software, kind of, simulate? You can simulate roughly 30 to 32 qubits.
- Okay.
- But if we go larger, let's say we wanted to simulate 250 qubits on this device.
It doesn't sound like a very big number, but that will take you the age of the universe to do one operation.
Let's say we want to understand, - you know, how do the electrons configure - Yeah.
- in a hydrogen gas, right, in that structure.
- Absolutely.
We're gonna run the chemistry solution (KEYSTROKE) And there's a lot of numbers flying by.
TAYLOR: This simulator mimics a quantum computer, only much slower.
A real quantum computer will be able to solve some of the most complex science and engineering problems, almost instantaneously, effectively condensing years worth of manual laboratory testing, to just a few moments.
And that might reshape our world to look a little bit more like the worlds of science fiction.
If we can take, you know, knowledge like this, we can feed that in to ways to actually engineer new materials.
You know, imagine a new paint that could make a plane disappear, you know, from signals, right? From your visible eye.
When we think about how do we - transport power, right? - Yeah.
- Across, say, the United States.
- Yeah.
Phoenix is really sunny a lot of the time.
I live in Seattle, not so sunny a lot of the time.
Maybe we could transport solar power really efficiently from Phoenix to Seattle.
You wanna do drug design, you wanna better produce fertilizer, you wanna find a high-temperature superconductor, or interesting materials.
It's not just a step in computing power.
This is a - a quantum leap in terms of - No pun intended.
- computing power.
- Absolutely.
TAYLOR: And while this leap in computing power opens the door to amazing science, like any new technology, it also introduces problems that we have not yet imagined, or potentially intensifies dangers we already face.
Cyber chaos this morning Chances are, some of your personal, or financial information, - was compromised - Russia launched a sophisticated cyber attack against the Pentagon TAYLOR: In the last five years alone, hackers breached billions of accounts and systems worldwide.
These attacks were all done with the classical computers we use today.
Because of a quantum computer's speed and power, there are no current security methods we employ that can fully protect our banks, identities, and even our infrastructure.
The irony is that a country widely accused of hacking intellectual property is now leading the world in creating it's own impenetrable quantum technology for cyber security.
(HISSING) TAYLOR: At the University of Science and Technology of China, Dr.
Pan Jianwei, known in China as the Father of Quantum, has created the first secure quantum communications network, as a first step in countering the threat that actual quantum computers will pose.
TAYLOR: This is the first quantum satellite in existence? Do you wanna just take us, very basically, through how this process works? Okay.
TAYLOR: But not really.
The scientists are exploiting a principle of quantum physics called "entanglement," a concept so strange, that Albert Einstein even called it spooky.
Entangled photons are essentially linked across time and space and can instantly teleport their quantum information with each other other over incredibly large distances.
(PHONE DIALING) - Hi! - Hi.
(LAUGHS) TAYLOR: So, what Pan's team is doing is linking, or entangling particles, to create a completely safe communication channel between two locations on Earth, and a satellite using a laser.
Two entangled particles are used to create a key to secure a conversation, and because of how fragile keeping a quantum connection is, if a hacker listens in on that conversation, the connection between the entangled photons will fall apart, and the network will close.
TAYLOR: So, the information that's actually going through this teleconference is actually being encrypted through the quantum information system.
TAYLOR: But encrypted communication is just one quantum application Pan Jianwei is pursuing.
China will be spending at least $10 billion over the next three years on quantum technology, including computing, around 13 times more than the US government is spending on quantum research.
TAYLOR: And unraveling the strange nature of quantum mechanics might even take us beyond inventing new, incredible technologies.
It might also play a key part in unlocking one of the greatest questions humanity has ever asked: What is the nature of human consciousness? (PAN JIANWEI SPEAKING) TAYLOR: A computer like this might actually give an answer to it.
(PAN JIANWEI SPEAKING)