Why PKI failed

I came across an intesting paper that may explain why PKI technology failed. This paper is "Test of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider; A Proposal," by Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya. Nielsen and Ninomiya essentially argue that the LHC may be plagued by problems because if it actually worked it would produce effects that are so ugly that they would actually send ripples of bad luck back through time to thwart the creation of the ugly effects. This may sound like something from a bad science-fiction movie, but this paper appears to be quite serious about this.

Similarly, maybe the possible future in which everything is PKI-enabled and digital certificates are ubiquitous is so horrendous that it actually sent ripples of bad luck back through time that sabotaged the development and deployment of PKI technology. Some things actually seem to make a lot of sense from this point of view.

I'll leave it to someone else to work out the physics of exactly how this could have happened. The paper by Nielsen and Ninomiya is probably a good place to start.