Michael Kendall

ECB chief Christine Lagarde warns of possible food rationing due to fertilizer disruptions “A third of fertilizers are shipped through the Strait of Hormuz... that is at risk.”

Thirty years of quantum computing, and we’re still pretending that crawling in a straight line will somehow get us to the stars. Every “breakthrough” trumpeted by the labs — every glossy headline about new qubit counts, improved coherence times, and “quantum supremacy” — is the same old pantomime. What they never say is that the progress has been strictly linear, and the problem itself is exponential. Decoherence isn’t a design flaw to be patched with clever algorithms; it’s the universe reminding physicists that entropy doesn’t negotiate. After three decades, we’ve managed less than an order of magnitude in meaningful decoherence reduction. That’s right — in thirty years, we’ve barely scraped a notch off the noise. Meanwhile, to make quantum computing even remotely capable of decrypting a 256-bit ECDSA key, we need improvements on the order of 10⁴⁷. Not “a little better.” Not “close enough.” Forty-seven powers of ten. Let’s illustrate that mathematically, since numbers don’t lie even when scientists do by omission. To break standard elliptic-curve encryption, you’d need a machine capable of maintaining coherence across millions — realistically, billions — of qubits for billions of sequential operations. The tiniest perturbation destroys the entire computation. The qubit doesn’t care how much funding you’ve raised or which corporation owns your lab; it collapses, every time, with the indifference of physics itself. So, let’s be charitable and assume a lab improves its coherence by tenfold every decade. That’s linear. Meanwhile, the requirement — the climb — is 10⁴⁷. Ten per decade against forty-seven powers of ten. At that rate, we’ll hit “quantum advantage” roughly around the same time the universe experiences heat death. To claim we’re making progress is like saying that throwing a stone at the moon once a year will eventually build a bridge. Here’s what that linear trajectory truly means: every year, they suppress noise by a small factor; they add another layer of error correction; they announce the same tired milestone — “world’s largest quantum processor!” The number of qubits increases, the number of error sources multiplies, and the system’s fragility becomes comical. Crosstalk, stray magnetic fields, gate calibration drift — the entire contraption collapses under its own theoretical weight. Quantum error correction, the supposed saviour of this circus, is a grotesque exercise in recursion. It takes thousands of unstable qubits to produce one “logical” qubit that still can’t survive long enough to compute anything meaningful. Even Google’s much-hyped surface code experiments, which claimed improved scaling, hit an error floor within a few million cycles. Logical qubits that should theoretically outperform their smaller counterparts barely hold their ground. This is not exponential growth. This is patchwork engineering dressed up as destiny. Meanwhile, the fundamental physics remain unmoved. Decoherence times creep from microseconds to milliseconds in certain systems, and the papers call it revolutionary. But what’s required to sustain large-scale quantum computation isn’t a handful of milliseconds; it’s sustained coherence across astronomical systems for hours or days. If you plotted the progress curve, it would be indistinguishable from a flat line, interrupted only by bursts of academic self-congratulation. Let’s be honest: the only thing scaling exponentially in quantum computing is the language of hype. For thirty years, we’ve been told that “quantum advantage” is just a few breakthroughs away. But every claimed advance is offset by the brutal arithmetic of error propagation. Each qubit added is another potential point of failure, another channel for environmental coupling, another hole in a sieve already leaking coherence faster than it can be contained.