CHINA CREATES COMPUTER TEN BILLION TIMES FASTER THAN AMERICA'S TOP COMPUTER (REALLY)

While America is wrapped up in its petty internal squabbles about which old Boomer is going to park his butt in the White House for the next four years, its main global rival China has dramatically pulled ahead in the tech arms race between the two Superpowers.

According to a research paper published in the journal Science, a Chinese team from the University of Science and Technology of China have now created a quantum supercomputer that is....wait for it...10 billion times faster than anything the Americans have got. 

This is the tech equivalent of the US inventing the atom bomb in WWII, when its enemies were still limited to conventional arms. 

As reported by the Independent:

China has achieved a major breakthrough in quantum computing, performing a calculation that would take a modern-day supercomputer billions of years to complete.

The milestone, known as quantum supremacy, comes just over a year after Google became the first in the world to achieve the same feat. 

But the Chinese quantum computer is light years ahead of Google's already backward device:

China’s leading quantum computing researchers revealed that their next-generation machine used a completely different set up compared to Google, proving that there are multiple approaches to this nascent technology.

The researchers claimed their prototype was 10 billion times faster than Google’s machine, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Quantum computers work by replacing traditional bits – the ‘1s’ and ‘0s’ used to encode digital information – with quantum bits, or qubits. These can function as both a ‘1’ and a ‘0’ at the same time by existing in a state of "superposition," meaning each new qubit added to the computer increases its power exponentially rather than linearly.

This means that China could soon have enough computing power to decode all forms of encryption that the global systems of finance, communication, and government all rely upon. In other words, the United States could be reduced to a state of zero national security without a single shot being fired.

In fact, the only way the US can survive this threat is to create a total tech quarantine by shutting down all internet traffic with China, but it may already be too late to do that.

On the plus side we might find out if the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything really is 42 or not.