If IBM patents this, they're gonna be the richest company in the world (if I can believe you guys about this quantum power)

Time travel

What type of breakthrough? 

A fully functional quantum computer would be a collaboration between several companies, universities, research centres and nations. Not to mention that it is fundamentally based on decades of work by some of the smartest people of the last 100+ years.

I'm thinking it wouldn't be so simple.

Apparently apple filed a sneaky patent a few years back...

Anyway, I was reading an article about this earlier and it said that the rate at which technology progresses would be 1000x faster once they get these working.

You know what they say about nuclear fission?

"Nuclear fusion is the technology of the future. Always was, always will be..."

Same for this quantum computing stuff. You'll never see this on your desk. Maybe one day we will see quantum encrypted data transfer thnrough fibers.. the rest is just wishful thinking.

/sorry for late correction dission -> fusion

In both cases that is plainly wrong.

We know that both technologies operate in natural space. We will figure out how it works and replicate. Just like we have with tons of other tecnologies already.

There was once a time when most people said humans will never fly and all those trying to were insane. There was also a time when people said computers will be as large as a buildings.... now I hold more power in my smartphone than the first space missions combined.

These guys have it at .5 Hz

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7320/full/nature09521.html

It'll get faster though.

As for the second point, with current 3D technology your eyes are focused on the screen, not at the 3D image in front of or behind the screen.

You mean fusion right.

When (practical) fusion is indeed achieved, we will have unlimited energy, zero harmful side effects, and a natural recycling furnace that will strip any material on the planet down to it's constituent atoms.

So this can already be done, but the power yield is negative. Basically (and now I'm rambling cause I'm stoned) they suspend a sphere of liquid plasma in a magnetic box and it heats up to sun-like temperatures.

There are certainly more steps to take, but the major hurdle in this case isn't the difficulty of making a breakthrough; The problem is there isn't enough funding for proper R&D. If they used the Mars budget (which franky seems like a waste of time considering what's happening on our broken planet) only for fusion research then I would guess it would've happened by now.

yep, sorry for the error that somewhat killed the argument.

However, if one adds up all the money that went into tocamacs and the other thingie, one could have built enough solar power plants by now to pretty much run the world (over the day, at least).