578: The Quantum Apocalypse: All Your Secrets Revealed

The Why Files: Operation Podcast

Science, Life Sciences, Fiction, Society & Culture, Documentary, Science Fiction

4.8 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's human nature to keep secrets.
0:03.0	Throughout history, we've made complex codes to hide our secrets.
0:06.0	Most codes are eventually cracked, but not all of them.
0:09.0	The Voidage Manuscript is a book filled with drawings and symbols nobody can read.
0:14.0	The Beal ciphers point to hidden treasure, if someone could decode them.
0:18.0	There are entire ancient languages we can't understand because they're encrypted.
0:22.6	Encryption can be simple or very complicated.
0:25.6	Either way, it's just running a message through a series of mathematical rules.
0:29.6	For decades, even centuries, some codes used mathematical rules that remain unbreakable,
0:34.6	but they're about to be challenged by something new,
0:40.9	machines that don't care about math, and don't follow any rules.
0:55.5	Kate Bryce's morning started like any other. Her smart home system will occur at 6am with her usual playlist. The coffee maker fired up.
0:57.2	Her iPhone read her schedule while she brushed her teeth,
1:00.0	normal, routine.
1:01.5	She opened her banking app.
1:03.2	Something was wrong.
1:04.7	Her balance was zero.
1:07.0	She blinked and checked again.
1:08.3	Her balance was back.
1:09.7	Just a temporary error, she thought.
1:11.6	She took a sip of coffee and nearly dropped her mug.
1:18.6	The smart speaker was playing someone else's conversation.
	...

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