I don't know how many people have ever listened to the Arapahoe (spelling) High School futurist projection of the graduating class of 2020. But their is direct mention of the invention of a quantum computer capable of running by simply extracting water vapor from the atmosphere and using it as some type of condensed hydraulic power. This might seem pretty far fetched, but is it really? What actually goes into quantum computing? Even recently a group of scientists won the Nobel prize for their creation of a type of quantum memory. I don't know too much more about it than that.
In a normal computer bits are stored inside of registers that make up different functional units of the computer. These bits are processed through various methods of logic and routing that can either perform calculations or manipulate the bits further. We usually think of a bit as a 1 or a 0, cycle between high or low, or even 0 or not zero. Generally the bits are representations of patterns of electrons. In quantum computing it might be possibly for the electron itself to store bit information. Which is an incredibly complicated and abstract few of bit processing if a single sub atomic particle can contain all of the bit information for a single instruction. Bits in quantum mechanics are referred to as qubits (quantum bits) [WIkipedia: quantum computing].
As you could imagine the hardware that might need to handle the qubits would quickly become complicated since electrons have so many varying properties. I've always thought the the computer age should really be the age of the electron. We've basically conquered fire and the rest of our Earthly environment so why not go a step further to say that with modern computing we've actually conquered the electron? I honestly wish I knew more about quantum computing to really give a good post about it, but I don't. This is really just meant as food for thought in the next step in computing. After all, 2020 really isn't that far away.
