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Centre for Applied Eschatology
- theresistor 6y agoReference to Neal Stephenson's "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell"?
- tempodox 6y agoThis brings a whole new perspective to “Move fast and break things”! Disruption at its finest.
- OliverBoettger 6y agoLooks like despair.com spawned a new website.
- nynx 6y agoThis is extremely important work.
- macawfish 6y agoDonate now
- fny 6y agoThe messaging here is extremely confusing. Are these guys promoting the world's end, predicting it, or preventing it?
- Ygg2 6y agoI think it is a play on corporate or NGO messaging. Hence the focus on agnostic, diversity and non-partisan in their materials. Basically, Doomer Corp.
- andrewflnr 6y agoCheck out the faq, especially starting at question 5. https://www.appliedeschatology.com/faqs https://www.appliedeschatology.com/faqs
- jsmith99 6y agoMy favourite was 'How can I help?' with response 'You are surely helping already'.
- closeparen 6y ago>dedicated to ending the world >OUR MISSION: To accelerate the world's transition to non-being.
- bottlenecked 6y agoReminds of this[0] so not so sure it’s not made tongue in cheek [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16953005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16953005
- robocat 6y ago“We’re working for no tomorrow, today.” “These and other factors make us confident that CAE and its partners can reduce uncertainty and accelerate the world to its ultimate end.” “CAE pursues applied and transdisciplinary research into several areas of global and existential catastrophe, focusing on those most likely to produce rapid and broad-based impact.” They sat they are not terrorists, not a religious group, not nihilists, not anti-natalists, not negative utilitarians, not misanthropes, and not eco-radicals. I really like their broad dedication to not-ness: https://www.appliedeschatology.com/faqs https://www.appliedeschatology.com/faqs
- andrewflnr 6y ago> broad dedication to not-ness Ah, being the change they want to see.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago:-) I had to look this up : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology My favourite quote from the FAQ: - How can I help? - You are surely helping already. Sadly likely to be true
- hezag 6y ago> "Why do you want to end the world?" > "CAE is devoted to practical, pragmatic solutions. We’re interested in the how, not the why." I don't know why, but it reminded me Facebook.
- Kosirich 6y agoI like the sharp contrast between the content of the page and the design of the page. Similar example that came to mind is South Parts Christmas Critters.
- andbberger 6y agoWas really hope this would be about Eschaton (the Infinite Jest varietal)
- asplake 6y agoTo me it looks like TRIZ (in the Liberating Structures sense) on the whole world. Make something better by conceiving of all the ways we could screw it up, then noticing how much of those we’re doing already
- cjtrowbridge 6y agoApplied eschatology just means mass suicide, literally. Eschatology is everything religious that happens after you're dead.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cjtrowbridge 6y agoTheir facebook page's about me says, "The Centre for Applied Eschatology is a transdisciplinary research center dedicated to ending the world."
- flobosg 6y agoAh, good ol' immanentizing the escathon.
- thret 6y agoThis reminded me of: QuantumBogoSort a quantum sorting algorithm which can sort any list in O(1), using the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. It works as follows: 1. Quantumly randomise the list, such that there is no way of knowing what order the list is in until it is observed. This will divide the universe into O(n!) universes; however, the division has no cost, as it happens constantly anyway. 2. If the list is not sorted, destroy the universe. (This operation is left as an exercise to the reader.) 3. All remaining universes contain lists which are sorted. - http://wiki.c2.com/?QuantumBogoSort http://wiki.c2.com/?QuantumBogoSort
- mckirk 6y agoAs a fall-back (in case the universe-destroying resources are busy), you could also sort the list classically if the quantum randomization didn't do it. There'd still be that one lucky-bastard-universe that gets all the sorting done in O(1)... As a side note though, please never do this. Our simulators would pull the plug really quickly if we deliberately caused state explosions like that.
- karl-j 6y agoSo let’s say I’ve got step 2. figured out with vacuum decay or similar, how do I check if the list is sorted in O(1) to determine if I destroy the universe or not? And given that the list being sorted is a one in n! chance, often enormously less likely than than hardware malfunction, wouldn’t the algorithm mostly produce malfunctions rather than sorted lists? (Genuinely curious if I’ve got the right understanding of the CS and potential physics.)
- WJW 6y agoChecking if a list is sorted is O(N) if you do it in a single thread since you'd have to check all the elements. If you can do it with a prefix sum or something, it should be possible to do it in O(log N) over many cores. Btw, the quantum bogosort also assumes that destroying the universe is O(1), which seems unlikely. Clearly, when sorting a bigger list there is more information in the universe (ie the list). Since information and energy seem to have some equivalence in quantum dynamics, is does not seem unreasonable that destroying a universe with more information in it would take longer and so destroying the universe cannot be O(1).
- ggm 6y agoThe "we will look after your pets, when you go to heaven" was also brilliantly done.
- ineedasername 6y agoAs with most technical challenges, scale is always an issue. Depopulating a city is relatively easy and achievable with conventional bombs. A small country would only be moderately more difficult with nuclear weapons. After this, things get much harder. Sure, enough nukes could finish off the human race, but that's out of the price range for most shoppers in this market. In the long term, climate change might do it, but who's got that sort of time? You're probably left with something like a biological agent, a pathogen of some sort, and still run the risk of pockets of people hiding away or being immune. Still, let's say you did it, it worked, humans are gone. Yay! You destroyed the world! Right? No. You extinguished one species. You have a long way to go on the entire world. So you put your mind to it. Defoliation agents for the plants, the cast of Deadliest Catch to get the crabs (you planned ahead and saved them from the nuclear fallout), a few billion tons of boric acid for the roaches-- get it all covered. Yay, party time? Again, no. If you were meticulously thorough, you killed all life, but really the project has just begun. Everything is dead, but it's all still here. The Earth is still here. And if you thought rooting out the last extremophiles was hard work, you've never had to try & sweep 6 * 10^24 kg of mass under the rug. Do you break it up? Is that enough? Technically it's still there and if you leave it it will all just accrete back together. So maybe you decide to push it into the Sun, either piece by piece or all at once, depending on on your level of godhood. Finally, you can relax. Cut yourself a nice piece of "I destroyed the world" cake. Have a beer... ... ... Ehh, maybe don't eat the cake or drink the beer. You didn't really destroy the world, of it's matter sti exists. It's not gone, it's just molten. So no cake for you. In fact, it will be a long long time before you see any cake coming your way.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago> Sure, enough nukes could finish off the human race, but that's out of the price range for most shoppers in this market. I dunno, there's plenty of nukes that are ready and waiting and have been paid for. I wonder what would be more effective; nuking the targets that have been designated by various states already since the cold war, or piling up all the nukes, maybe a few km underground, and trigger a cataclysmic event (like a supervolcano as mentioned on the page). Re: climate change, they could accellerate the process a bit and nuke the north and south pole ice, maybe. Or spread a darkening agent on any exposed ice to increase heat absorption. But anyway, I don't think any of these would completely sterilize the earth, possibly only humanity and other large animals. To sterilize it, we need to get rid of the atmosphere and most of the earth's crust. I guess a big enough asteroid could do it (think moon-sized), something whose impact is so big it breaks up the whole ball.
- ineedasername 6y agoAs with most technical challenges, scale is always an issue. Depopulating a city is relatively easy and achievable with conventional bombs. A small country would only be moderately more difficult with nuclear weapons. After this, things get much harder. Sure, enough nukes could finish off the human race, but that's out of the price range for most shoppers in this market. In the long term, climate change might do it, but who's got that sort of time? You're probably left with something like a biological agent, a pathogen of some sort, and still run the risk of pockets of people hiding away or being immune. Still, let's say you did it, it worked, humans are gone. Yay! You destroyed the world! Right? No. You extinguished one species. You have a long way to go on the entire world. So you put your mind to it. Defoliation agents for the plants, the cast of Deadliest Catch to get the crabs (you planned ahead and saved them from the nuclear fallout), a few billion tons of boric acid for the roaches-- get it all covered. Yay, party time? Again, no. If you were meticulously thorough, you killed all life, but really the project has just begun. Everything is dead, but it's all still here. The Earth is still here. And if you thought rooting out the last extremophiles was hard work, you've never had to try & sweep 6 * 10^24 kg of mass under the rug. Do you break it up? Is that enough? Technically it's still there and if you leave it it will all just accrete back together. So maybe you decide to push it into the Sun, either piece by piece or all at once, depending on on your level of godhood. Finally, you can relax. Cut yourself a nice piece of "I destroyed the world" cake. Have a beer... ... ... Ehh, maybe don't eat the cake or drink the beer. You didn't really destroy the world, of it's matter sti exists. It's not gone, it's just molten. So no cake for you. In fact, it will be a long long time before you see any cake coming your way.
- Shmebulock 6y agoAre they serious about pursuing the goal of ending the world? Or is this a joke? The response to 'How can I help?', namely 'You are surely helping already' seems like the biggest clue to me that this is a joke.
- stareatgoats 6y agoIt is a joke. Some people may find it difficult to joke about (the desensitization problem), but not everyone evidently. As a joke, it has some sinister merit IMO.
- mcint 6y agoAnti-natalists going a step further
- progre 6y agoI liked this one: Q: Why do you want to end the world? A: CAE is devoted to practical, pragmatic solutions. We’re interested in the how, not the why.
- damnencryption 6y agoNo mention of biological terrorism?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cholmon 6y agoThere's an interesting scifi book called Manifold:Time by Stephen Baxter, that features an organization called Eschatology, Inc. It presents a very unique perspective on (hastening) Doomsday. Side note: I was convinced at first that the author patterned the main character, Reid Malenfant, after Elon Musk, until I checked and saw the thing was published back in 1999.
- nurettin 6y agoI suspect this is a honeypot for capturing psychopaths.
- bawana 6y agodon't know why, but i was thinking this was 'scatology'. My brain is in the gutter.
- ethbr0 6y agoI upvoted this, along with the story below it. "The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse (theatlantic.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081438 When life gives you lemons... sometimes the only solution is to trade sides and play for Team Lemon. Are you doing your part to change could into will?
- jdennah 6y agoCan't take it serious because it didn't list the primary cause of our extinction in my eyes. Its going to be the antibiotic winter, antibiotic resistant bacteria. I'm very sure some people who got ventilated for covid actually died to this, given its prevalence its a virtual certainty. There are no new antibiotics coming and the half life on new ones before resistance is developed is less than 5 years. They want you to focus on the "virus," we know how to deal with viruses, they aren't the issue for long periods of time, only decades. Bacteria will cause extinction.
- drdeca 6y agoThey?
- ardy42 6y ago> Its going to be the antibiotic winter, antibiotic resistant bacteria.... Bacteria will cause extinction. They didn't cause humanity to go extinct before antibiotics were invented. If they all lost effectiveness, we'd just return to the status quo ante (not extinct, with more sickness).
- R0b0t1 6y agoCalm down, antibiotic resistance is a systemic problem in hospitals and factory farms. If you remove the constant presence of antibiotics the bacteria seem to drop the relevant gene expressions readily. There are enough antibiotics that they could be cycled, with some kept in reserve for emergencies only (e.g. sepsis).
- panzagl 6y agoThey want to Immanentize the Eschaton? Luckily we fnord know how to deal with that. Hail Eris.
- liminal 6y agoThis is like the PR version of a comic book super-villian. Similar I suppose to VHEMT (voluntary human extinction movement - http://vhemt.org/ http://vhemt.org/) that has been around for decades, but this one seems to be moving beyond voluntary to forced extinction. Regardless, they should really get an underground lair.
- thelastwave 6y agoIf ever there was a year the eschaton needed to be immanentized, it would be 2020.