The Why Files: Operation Podcast
578: The Quantum Apocalypse: All Your Secrets Revealed
Tue, 14 Jan 2025
A mysterious data transfer lights up NSA monitors at 3 AM. Within hours, hospital records flash across Times Square billboards. Dating app messages spill onto every screen in the city. Bank accounts vanish. Traffic lights freeze. Autonomous vehicles crash through shopping malls. Intelligence agencies scramble as decades of encrypted messages suddenly unlock. Someone has broken the unbreakable - the mathematical foundations that protect everything from banking passwords to nuclear launch codes. The quantum apocalypse arrives years ahead of schedule. But as chaos spreads, patterns start to surface. The timing seems too perfect, the targets too precise. Deep beneath the Pentagon, analysts notice something strange: some messages were decrypted months ago. The chaos isn't random - it's cover for something bigger.
Chapter 1: What are the implications of the quantum apocalypse?
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It's human nature to keep secrets. Throughout history, we've made complex codes to hide our secrets. Most codes are eventually cracked, but not all of them. The Voynich manuscript is a book filled with drawings and symbols nobody can read. The Beale ciphers point to hidden treasure, if someone could decode them. There are entire ancient languages we can't understand because they're encrypted.
Encryption can be simple or very complicated. Either way, it's just running a message through a series of mathematical rules. And for decades, even centuries, some codes used mathematical rules that remain unbreakable, but they're about to be challenged by something new, machines that don't care about math and don't follow any rules. Kate Price's morning started like any other.
Her smart home system woke her at 6 a.m. with her usual playlist. The coffee maker fired up. Her iPhone read her schedule while she brushed her teeth. Normal, routine. She opened her banking app. Something was wrong. Her balance was zero. She blinked and checked again. Her balance was back. Just a temporary error, she thought. She took a sip of coffee and nearly dropped her mug.
The smart speaker was playing someone else's conversation. A couple fighting about credit card debt. She unplugged it. Then her smart TV started cycling through her photos. Private photos. Intimate photos. She pulled the plug. And then her phone rang. Then she heard the sirens. The oldest code we know of isn't written in complex mathematics.
It's carved in stone, in an Egyptian tomb from 4,000 years ago. The scribes simply replaced regular hieroglyphs with ones they made up. They weren't trying to keep secrets. They were showing off. These were prayers carved into tomb walls. The scribes wanted to prove they knew something others didn't.
Oh, those were ancient emojis.
Not exactly.
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Chapter 2: How have humans historically kept secrets?
He wasn't. And the Zodiac Killer was never found. But quantum computers are about to change everything. All these ancient methods, substitutions, patterns, and tricks share one weakness, math. This is a weakness quantum computers can exploit. Soon these machines might reveal every secret message ever written, including yours.
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The quantum computer hissed as liquid helium circulated through the processor. Carl Bishop checked the temperature. Minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit, absolute zero. Quantum bits needed to be that cold to maintain coherence. Stanford's quantum lab was empty at 3 a.m. He'd been running simulations for 12 hours straight. His eyes burned. But CTEC's grant requirements were clear.
Demonstrate quantum error correction or lose funding. quantum computers were terrible at error correction. Quantum states are too fragile, too much noise. If the temperature changes by half a degree, they decohere. If radio waves leak in, they decohere. A truck hits a pothole a mile away, the vibration in the earth makes them decohere.
But Carl noticed something strange in the error correction data. The errors weren't random. Then he realized they weren't errors at all. The quantum computer was cracking encryption keys, millions of them, keys that protect everything from banking passwords to nuclear launch codes. Carl decided to test this. He entered an RSA 4096 security key and ran down the hall for another coffee.
He wasn't in a hurry. Even the world's most powerful supercomputers would need billions or trillions of years to break RSA 4096. But when he returned five minutes later, he couldn't believe it. The key was cracked. Carl now realized his computer was the most powerful and dangerous weapon on Earth. He started to panic.
He tried to delete the data, but it was already uploaded to CTEK's private servers. By sunrise, three intelligence agencies had flagged the data transfer. By 9 a.m., the first bank security system was breached. By noon, every bank went dark. The quantum apocalypse had begun. Your entire digital life depends on two prime numbers. That's it, two numbers.
And they protect everything, your passwords, your messages, your bank accounts, all of it. Modern encryption is based on this simple trick. Take two huge prime numbers and multiply them together. That creates your public key, a number anyone can use to send you secret messages. But only someone who knows those original prime numbers can read those messages.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of encryption?
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When Liz Emery's phone buzzed at 4 a.m., she almost ignored it. After 15 years in cybersecurity, late-night calls usually meant someone at the hospital forgot their password. But caller IDs showed Mount Sinai's emergency line. The first report was in. Patient records appeared on digital billboards in Times Square.
They included blood test results, psychiatric evaluations, and terminal diagnoses that patients had not yet told their families about. Senators, congressmen, CEOs, their private medical data was all over the internet. She was still coordinating the hospital's response when the news reported that every dating app was breached. Then they came back online.
Suddenly, on every device in the city, smartphones, TVs, billboards, was a link to a site where anyone could look up any information that was part of the dating app breach. Direct messages, real names and emails, browser histories, private photos and videos, all revealed. Liz figured the only people celebrating were divorce attorneys. Then an email came in to hospital security.
Pay $1 billion or every pacemaker control system on Earth will go down. Pay another billion or insulin pumps will go down, starting with diabetic children. The city started to crack. Police dispatch systems were offline. Traffic lights went dark. ATMs were dumping cash into the street. Bank balances were set to zero. Autonomous vehicles became killing machines.
Delivery drones crashed into buildings like kamikaze pilots. A fleet of cyber trucks tore through a shopping mall before exploding all at once. News channels tried to cover the chaos, but their broadcasts were hijacked. CNN anchors watched helplessly as their personal emails were displayed on screen. The White House press secretary's private texts appeared during a briefing about the crisis.
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