14 ms·
Our Long Bets and Predictions about 02020
- lozaning 6y agoCan someone explain to me the reason for including a leading zero? Is that just a stylist choice of the long now foundation?
- mc32 6y agoI had the same thought, but I read though a few articles and I only saw it there. Maybe it's a "thing" for some of their submissions, but yeah it takes a lot of getting used to. That said, they do that because it's _longnow_
- YokoZar 6y ago"Long term thinking" is the whole point of this website, so it's a stylistic choice meant to make you think about the year 10000
- projektfu 6y ago... just to find out that by that time we've gone back to starting the epoch at the beginning of the emperor's reign.
- zaphoyd 6y agoThe goal is awareness of the Y10K problem, and generally awareness of long term thinking and planning.
- sbuttgereit 6y agoIt's an emphasis on their point to think in long periods of time. Remember that their (I believe) first big public splash was the 10,000 year clock project (http://longnow.org/clock http://longnow.org/clock). So in their representation of the year... they're really just playing the long game and avoiding the inevitable year 10,000 problem.... ... I wonder if all those COBOL systems still running will have the developers then to deal with the problem....
- listenallyall 6y agoObviously, it's a constant reminder that they think in the tens of thousands of years. Does it come across as kind of arrogant? Yes. Like the PhD who will go out of his way to correct you if you address him as Mr., not Dr.
- ddeville 6y agoFrom their about page: > The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
- listenallyall 6y agoHuh? They haven't solved it, anymore than reading a thermometer "is to solve" climate change. No need to repeat propaganda.
- taneq 6y agoStill only pushes the problem back for an additional 100k years. If they were really serious they’d use prefix codes. :P
- posnet 6y agoI am more worried about what we will do when we run out of 64 bit seconds for unix time. 500 billion years is barely half way through the star forming age of the universe.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 6y agoWell, timespec does have 34 bits it's not using...
- Arcorann 6y agoRFC 2550 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2550 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2550) remains one of my favourite April Fools' RFCs. It even has support for negative dates.
- iso1210 6y agoThat seems like a needlessly complex way to store datetime Dark era starts in 10^106 years time, or about 10^157 plank times, so any time can be respresented in 20 bytes. Just 44 bytes will allow encoding of any point in spacetime, and they are using far more than that to simply encode years.
- diebeforei485 6y ago> By "bioerror", I mean something which has the same effect as a terror attack, but rises from inadvertance rather than evil intent. [1] It's not clear that covid-19 isn't bioerror. There is a lot of information[2] pointing in that direction, so I wouldn't dismiss the theory outright the way the OP authors did. In any case it hasn't killed a million people. 1. http://longbets.org/9/ http://longbets.org/9/ 2. https://project-evidence.github.io https://project-evidence.github.io
- jnbiche 6y agoAgreed. And by the bet's definition, 1M causalities is defined specifically as "requiring hospitalization", so we'll likely reach that easily in a 6 month period.
- mirimir 6y agoHuh. Maybe Chinese labs were studying SARS-CoV-like viruses because the risk of zoonotic reemergence was so damn obvious. See my comment in another thread.[0] But in any case, doesn't ignoring that risk count as "inadvertence"? 0) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22912763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22912763
- chrisco255 6y agoYeah, but by going out into the wild and collecting bat coronavirus samples to bring back to the lab, they certainly opened Pandora's box. Catch-22? Are we put at greater risk by studying and experimenting with viruses like this?
- mirimir 6y agoI don't think that we know where the pandemic started, whether it was bats for sale in the market, or escape from the lab. Maybe it was both. But I do think that sampling and lab work are important. You just need to be careful. Very, very careful.
- 6y ago
- jnbiche 6y agoNot sure why they're so quick to write off Long Bet #9. It's highly likely we'll reach 1,000,000 worldwide casualties from Covid-19 during a 6-month period before the end of year (defined in the bet's terms as "hospitalizations"). And if the hypothesis turns out to be true that it was an accidental release from one of Wuhan's 2 laboratories doing bat virus research, that's definitely a "bioerror" under the terms of the bet. There's significant circumstantial evidence it could have been a lab accident(early Chinese reporting about the index case, 1 lab location a few blocks away from seafood market, bat species, earlier lab accident, etc), but nothing more at this point. But we may know more by the end of the year. Edit: This is not the wild conspiracy theory about a bioengineered virus in a weapons lab. This is a hypothesis about accidental bat pee on a lab worker conducting routine research, or some similar accident (such accidental releases are confirmed to have happened twice with SARS-Cov-1 virus in a Beijing lab). Laboratory-acquired infections do happen, sometimes with deadly consequences. In my mind, it's the most feasible scenario at this point, given no one has provided proof that bats were even sold at the seafood market that was blamed. And we know that many officials were eager to cover this all up.
- Trasmatta 6y agoDo you think we'll ever conclusively know either way? If that is the truth, China will obviously continue to do everything it can to cover it up. And circumstantial evidence doesn't seem like enough. I'm not taking a stance either way, I really am curious on whether we'll be able to come to a pretty firm conclusion on it.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoHere is the original 10,000 year clock proposal, Danny Hillis with Wired Magazine: https://www.wired.com/1995/12/the-millennium-clock/ https://www.wired.com/1995/12/the-millennium-clock/
- chrisco255 6y agoI fully support this once we reach the year 9000. Then they'll have 1000 years to fix all the Y10K errors that will surely crop up by year 9999.
- Green_man 6y agoThis reminded me of a proposal to add a leading 1 to our year[2020 -> 12020]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs Cesare Emiliani proposed that the Construction of the Göbekli Tepe 12,000 years ago could represent a "start of civilization", creating a "holocene calendar". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Emiliani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Emiliani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar
- Alkhwarizmi 6y agoWatch “The Gift” on Netflix!! Interesting rabbit hole
- zamalek 6y ago> The technology will exist that will allow for the “faxing” (teleportation- sending/receiving) of actual inanimate objects, such as text books, clothing, jewelry and the like. This one has two possible outcomes. Faxing is cloning, not teleportation - so the parentheses are contradictory. We can definitely fax 3D inanimate objects (3D scanning, email and 3D printing).
- jnbiche 6y agoYeah, if "faxing" is the analogy, then 3D scanning and printing along with the internet should win this one. It's an ambiguous definition. As you say, faxing isn't teleportation.
- mkl 6y agoBut not "text books, clothing, jewelry and the like". As stated it sounds delusionally optimistic to me.
- slg 6y agoThe fact they listed text books as one of the objects would seemingly rule out that interpretation of the question since literally faxing a text book was possible decades before the prediction was made.
- emptybits 6y agoImpressive prescience over 27 years ago: """Precocious associate editor and columnist for the Daily Telegraph, 32-year-old [Boris] Johnson has been called the "rising star of the write, not right". After indulging his taste for politics and intrigue as president of the Oxford Union, Boris exercised his "belief in freedom" as a journalist, Eurobashing and penning paeans to British "ordinariness". Not shy in clashing with party lines, Boris would "renegotiate EU membership so Britain stands to Europe as Canada, not Texas, stands to the USA". Pericles, state-builder and negotiator of Athenian autonomy, is his hero."""[1] (February 1997) [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-cabinet-of-tomorrow-1277684.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-cabinet...
- billfruit 6y agoIs Pericles even a good guy? Plutarch found him duplicitious.
- mjw1007 6y agoI don't think it's prescience. I think the cause and effect goes the other way. One of the mechanisms by which Johnson rose to power was by having his well-connected friends talk him up as a future leader from a young age.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stewbrew 6y agoWhich year are they talking about? Is this an octal number?
- ComputerGuru 6y agoIt’s to do with their “long” outlook. They’re thinking of when we’ll be in the five digits and looking back at the fours.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stewbrew 6y agoI get that. But obviously they never programmed in a language where string to int conversion routines interpret such a number as an octal number ... which is quite common.
- ungzd 6y agoSomething that only understandable by the group of 50s scifi freaks that make this website, I think. Barely has any real meaning.
- JimDabell 6y ago> 75% of all incremental new generation will come from renewable/sustainable energy in the U.S. > Predictor: Jigar Shah. > Prediction Duration: 16 years (02004–02020). > Did the Prediction Come True? Yes — 76%, in fact. > In January, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said it expected 76% of new electric generating capacity to come from wind and solar in 02020. What‽ You can't confirm a prediction has come true by citing another prediction!
- cl3m 6y ago12020 is better than 02020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar)
- dmos62 6y agoI guess 01997 is better than 1.99.7.
- ekianjo 6y ago> In 02004, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that food consumption would be on the wane, as “billions of tiny nanobots in the digestive tract and bloodstream could intelligently extract the precise nutrients we require.” Love the fact that Kurzweil is still somewhat taken seriously considering how poor his track record has been.
- vagab0nd 6y agoTangential: I wish we had open betting/prediction markets for everything. At the risk of being naive, I had this idea of matching speculators with insurance buyers on a platform. Example: If I'm hosting an outdoor event in 2 days and I want to hedge against it raining on that day, I can buy insurance (bet against sunny) and get paid if it rains. Speculators can make money by selling insurance. Sort of like options trading but for real world events. Does this exist? Is it even legal?
- PakG1 6y agoJust google "bet on anything". There are a number of websites all listed on the first page.
- longtermd 6y agoThey made a Mistake at Teleportation: "The technology will exist that will allow for the “faxing” (teleportation- sending/receiving) of actual inanimate objects, such as text books, clothing, jewelry and the like." This is TRUE, and can be easily done with 3D printers. Note that "faxing" by definition is not "teleportation", but "copying at a different location", which is exactly what 3D printing is.