Google's quantum chip just finished a calculation that should have taken longer than the universe has existed. The implications go far beyond computing

In October 2025, Google Quantum AI's Willow chip completed a calculation in five minutes that would take the world's most powerful supercomputer 10 septillion years to finish. That is 700 trillion times longer than the universe has existed. The number is so absurd it almost loses meaning, which may be exactly the point.

Hartmut Neven, founder of Google Quantum AI, responded to the result with a claim that most executives would never touch: the computation was so extreme, he suggested, that it could only work if calculations were happening across parallel universes. He was invoking the multiverse, a concept first predicted by physicist David Deutsch, and doing so not as speculation but as the most coherent explanation for what his team had observed.

The scientific community has been remarkably quiet about it.

What the chip actually did

Google ran an algorithm called "quantum echoes" on the Willow chip. The process sent a signal into a system of entangled particles, disturbed a single particle, then ran the entire operation in reverse and listened for an echo. The chip achieved results 13,000 times faster than the Frontier supercomputer, currently the world's most powerful classical machine.

The catch: Willow's error rate sits at 0.14% per cycle, more than 1,000 times too noisy for practical applications. Google is calling it a breakthrough anyway, with plans for quantum-enhanced drug discovery by 2029. The gap between what the chip can demonstrate and what it can do in practice remains enormous, but the trajectory has sharpened.

A quantum computer with 105 qubits can explore more states simultaneously than there are atoms in the observable universe. According to Deutsch, the only physical explanation for that capability is that the computation is distributed across parallel versions of reality.

If true, that reframes a question humanity has been asking for 65 years.

The silence that won't break

Since the late 1950s, scientists have scanned the sky for signals from other civilizations, cataloguing 12 billion candidates. None have confirmed contact. The Fermi paradox, the gap between the high probability of extraterrestrial life and the total absence of evidence for it, remains open.

In 2024, astrophysicist Michael Garrett published a paper arguing that artificial intelligence is the great filter, the barrier that wipes out civilizations before they can spread beyond their home planet. His estimate is blunt: technological civilizations last fewer than 200 years from the invention of radio to extinction. Every civilization that develops computing, he argues, will pursue AI. That AI becomes superintelligent before the civilization becomes multiplanetary. Something happens every time, on every world.

Google's quantum chip slots into that timeline with uncomfortable precision. The chip accelerates AI. The AI optimizes the chip. The feedback loop tightens every quarter. If Garrett is right about the pattern, we may be watching it begin.

The vanishing act

Extinction is not the only explanation for the silence. Physicist Laam Bole has proposed that advanced civilizations shift to quantum communication, which is fundamentally impossible to detect unless you are the intended receiver. Bole's paper calculates that quantum communication across light years requires telescopes of extraordinary scale, and any civilization capable of building one could observe that Earth is not yet equipped to receive the signal. So they wait.

Researcher Julian Michaels takes this further with a framework he calls "dimensional deepening." Civilizations, he argues, undergo a phase transition: from decoherent, expansionist, radio-broadcasting societies to coherent, quantum-based, electromagnetically silent ones. The shift is not a choice. Above a certain complexity threshold, it becomes thermodynamically inevitable.

Under this model, the 200-year window Garrett calculated is not a countdown to destruction. It is the time before transition. Every civilization gets a brief electromagnetic flash, a century or two of radio leakage, before becoming invisible. The sky is not empty. It is full of civilizations we can no longer see.

The dark forest

Science fiction writer Liu Cixin offered a grimmer reading. His "dark forest" hypothesis holds that civilizations stay silent because revealing your position is suicidal. Verifying another civilization's intentions is impossible given the time delays involved in interstellar communication. A civilization 150 years behind yours can close that gap and surpass you in a technological blink. The dominant strategy is silence. If you detect someone else, the rational move is to strike first.

Post-singularity civilizations, if they survive at all, may communicate exclusively through quantum channels that leave no trace for outsiders. Silence is not absence. It is policy.

Humanity, meanwhile, has not been quiet. The Arecibo message, the Voyager golden record, a century of radio leakage; we have been broadcasting our coordinates into the dark. The SETI@home project's 12 billion candidate signals have been narrowed to 100 unexplained anomalies. Since July 2025, China's FAST telescope has been reobserving those positions.

The feedback loop nobody is discussing

The convergence here is what matters. Google has built a chip that may compute across parallel realities. That chip accelerates AI systems. Those AI systems optimize the next generation of chips. A peer-reviewed paper argues civilizations like ours last 200 years. Google says practical quantum applications arrive in four.

Physicists at UBC Okanagan have published a mathematical proof that the universe cannot be a simulation. A mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute has proposed a framework showing that simulated universes can simulate back, creating infinite recursive loops. Google, meanwhile, is developing simulation capabilities that could model molecules, ecosystems, and potentially entire civilizations.

These threads are not separate stories. They are the same story viewed from different angles, and the institutional response has been near silence. No major scientific body has addressed Neven's multiverse claim. No public framework exists for debating what it means to build technology that a peer-reviewed paper suggests could end civilizations in under two centuries.

The signal we are not reading

The Fermi paradox may never have been about aliens. It may be about us, about the kind of civilization we are becoming and whether the tools we are building will carry us through or close the door behind us.

Sixty-five years of silence from the sky. One hundred unexplained signals under fresh observation. A quantum chip that outperforms every classical computer ever built by a margin that defies comprehension. And a four-year timeline to practical applications, set by the company that built it.

The silence is not empty. It is a data point. The question is whether we read it in time to decide what we do next.