GPG's vulnerability to quantum cryptography

[Michael Anders]

On Wed, 2014-05-14 at 22:26 +0200, gnupg-users-request at gnupg.org wrote:
> If you want to run the temperature lower than the ambient
> temperature  
> of the cosmos (3.2K), you have to add energy to run the heat pump --  
> and the amount of energy required to run that heat pump will bring  
> your energy usage *above* that which you would've had if you'd just  
> run it in deep space at 3.2K.

Now where did you calculate that from?
In fact arriving at a realistic estimate for the energy needed to brute
force AES is really hard work. (Besides: Who can say for sure that we
cannot get some bits from cryptoanalytic progress(two bits already
crumbled). The cracking of DES was indeed a combination of analyzing
some bits and the finishing up the rest by brute force.)

IMHO you can run the calculations entirely at low temperature, whatever
technology you use to get there. Then you only need contact to the warm
world once to transmit the result(for negligible effort!).

Look at it this way: A hypothetical nuclear organism in the sun might
communicate with us about a result we calculate for it in order to crack
some stellar cryptosystem. 
This doesn't force us to heat our computers to 10000 K and burn all this
energy needed for calculating at high temperature. We could e.g.
communicate the result to that being via pulsed gamma rays....

These discussions tend to get an interesting quasi-religious setting:

1.) We don't have anything other than AES (At least many people think
so.)

so one type of character says: We don't have anything else so it must be
safe and we must defend that conviction against heresy.

the other type (me) is equally mazed and says: They don't want to give
us anything else, so it must be unsafe. Relying on them is heresy...

May be I should switch sides entirely and go with the very practical
asbestos longjohns. I really like the picture :-)