Comment by og_kalu
9 days ago
>While I understand what you're saying, you can extend this logic to such things as faster-than-light travel, over-unity devices, time travel etc. They're just "hard" math problems.
No you can't. Those aren't hard math problems. They're Universe breaking assertions.
This is not the problem of flight. They're not engineering problems. They're not, "perhaps in the future, we'll figure out..".
Unless our understanding of physics is completely wrong, then None of those things are ever going to happen.
According to our understanding of physics, which is based on our understanding of maths, the time taken to brute force a modern encryption standard, even with quantum computers, is longer than the expected life of the universe. The likely-hood of "finding a shortcut" to do this is in the same ball-park as "finding a shortcut" to tap into ZPE or "vacuum energy" or create worm-holes. The maths is understood, and no future theoretical advances can change that. It would involve completely new maths to break these. We passed the "if only computers were a few orders of magnitude faster it's feasible" a decade or more ago.
Sorry, I don't think this is true. There is basically no useful proven lower bound on the complexity of breaking popular cryptosystems. The math is absolutely not understood. In fact, it is one of the most poorly understood areas of mathematics. Consider that breaking any classical cryptosystem is in the complexity class NP, since if an oracle gives you the decryption key, you can break it quickly. Well we can't even prove that NP != P, i.e., that there even exists a problem where having such an oracle gives you a real advantage. Actually, we can't even prove that PSPACE != P, which should be way easier than proving NP != P if it's true.