9 ms·

The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

80 points by hiddencache 5y ago

no_wizard 5y ago
It’s moments that I read articles like this that make me wonder why I’m putting so much energy into making a better SPA or trying to engineer solutions to faster more performant web animations. I feel like I’m not using any of my technical acumen to advance human civilization but instead to line my own coffers and those of the corporation I work for. With that said, it is always good to keep in mind just how fragile civilization as a whole can be to things like global catastrophic events, as this article highlighted these are events that could have happened but did not, thankfully, however if they did the world would be very different today
- beckman466 5y ago
  > I feel like I’m not using any of my technical acumen to advance human civilization What would you rather be working on?
  - no_wizard 5y ago
    I’m not saying I’m going to crack some crazy software problem like general AI or something, but theoretically I’d love to be working on something that pushes renewable energy forward. In what capacity I don’t know. I’m pretty convinced we are overlooking geothermal energy in the USA at least. I often wonder if we could both relieve potentially dangerous pressure bellowing Yellowstone while simultaneously harnessing its geothermal energy for example But alas, I think the reality is I lack the expertise to even talk about this with any authority
    - finfinfin 5y ago
      Not saying you should but it is possible to gain a pretty respectable level of knowledge in almost any area within just a couple of years. Take online classes or even complete a fully online MS program. There are many examples of engineers and entrepreneurs who started in CS and then transitioned to more personally meaningful areas. (that’s my plan anyway!)
- basmango 5y ago
  Those two things are very different in terms of difficulty. That is why you aren't doing them.
- cardosof 5y ago
  I share the same thoughts - and I hope one day we reach a level of automation/AI/cheap energy that everyone gets "for free" some sort of living allowance to pursue their own objectives in science or art.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  I mean .. do you enjoy the work? I write Haskell, I make computer games, I make web apps. Mostly because it's fun and satisfying. I'm also quite good at it and it comes easily to me. I remember when I decided to go into engineering, a peer of mine from high school said "whateveracct, you're top of your class. Why aren't you going into medicine in order to do something more Worthwhile with your life?" Stuck with me ever since. I was repulsed by the mindset but I couldn't word why at the time. I later realized that it smelled of a deeply nihilistic (as in Nietzsche's ideas) view of the world. Ressentiment comes to mind. Spending my conscious hours working with computers is a less nihilistic use of my time. I am not deferring this life's happiness and agency in order to "have made an impact" when my life is over and useless to me. If you want more philosophy, consider Plato's Republic. An ideal society doesn't necessarily have everyone doing Most Important and Dire Work. It doesn't even have them doing what they're most "skilled" at! Instead, it has everyone living in alignment with their souls' desires and preferences. (e.g. A frail person with a Warrior's Soul should be a soldier before a strong person with an Artisan's Soul.)
  - amelius 5y ago
    > I later realized that it smelled of a deeply nihilistic (as in Nietzsche's ideas) view of the world. Who says you can't enjoy work in a different field, e.g. medicine? Perhaps you can even combine those skills with computer programming. E.g. build an exoskeleton that makes partially paralyzed people walk again.
  - no_wizard 5y ago
    Yes, I genuinely do enjoy the work and I derive happiness in my field, in fact I want to do more not less to drive the field forward. That does not mean I don’t sometimes feel the guilt of not being apart of something that drives humanity forward, though, even if all I could contribute was working the website that raises awareness instead! I just know what I’m capable of, but the reality vs the ideal is the philosophical struggle here for me. I instead try to make conscious investments to try and move things forward and make personal choices consciously to issues like this as best as I reasonably can. I still feel guilty sometimes I’m not working on something like raising the perception of the safety of nuclear energy ya know
- stank345 5y ago
  I know how you feel. You might be interested in the 80,000 hours podcast as a way to gain a better understanding of the problems humanity faces: https://80000hours.org/podcast/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/ In terms of what to _do_ about it as a software developer, I'm still trying to figure that one out. I currently work at a BCorp which tends to make me feel better about the work I'm doing which at a minimum isn't doing harm to the world. You could try looking for a meaningful job at https://techjobsforgood.com/ https://techjobsforgood.com/
- Swizec 5y ago
  Easiest solution to this is finding a company that can put your skills towards something that advances humanity. If no such company exists in your view, you can make one. SPAs and code are tools. You can use them for all sorts of endeavours.
sarbaz 5y ago
The article has some great examples of risks that were hyped out of proportion to their true severity. Should these things be considered? Yes. But only a little. If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere. Modern examples, IMO, are: - Kessler Syndrome - Trying to prevent an asteroid hitting the earth - Nuclear war making the entire earth uninhabitable
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  > If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere. If that "tail risk" though is "complete destruction of the planet", you only get to be wrong once.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    Every action carries that risk somewhere in its very long tail. You have to assess the likelihood of the bad event occurring, and there is a point where it is so unlikely that it need not be considered at all. I don't think humanity is quite stupid enough to knowingly release its Ice-9 just yet.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  I think you mean "probability" rather than severity. The severity of setting the atmosphere on fire is extreme, but the probability turned out to be vanishingly small. Or perhaps you mean risk, probability times severity. Which also turned out to be negligible for the events in the article. Some other hyped risks: - - Artificial General Intelligence - CRISPR gene editing - Gain-of-function work with viruses I have no way of assessing the risks, and there is a lot of hyperventilation in some circles
  - efitz 5y ago
    Creating a black hole, with the LHC, that consumes the earth
- eloff 5y ago
  > If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere. If your tail risk is the end of civilization then it doesn't matter how small the probability. You'd be fucked with certainty on any long enough timeframe. Some tail risks are to large to take. Eventually your number comes up.
Animats 5y ago
Some big threats: - Something with the spread rate of COVID-delta, and a high lethality rate after a long incubation period. - Enriching uranium in a rather small facility. This may already have happened and been kept quiet. Laser enrichment was talked about a lot in the early 1990s, and then suddenly, after some announcements from Lawrence Livermore, things got much quieter.[1][2] As high-powered lasers get better, this gets easier. There's now a startup in Australia working on this process again. - Long term, a birth rate that's below replacement rate. That's the current normal in the developed world. [1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A051.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A051.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_laser_excitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_lase...
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  > Something with the spread rate of COVID-delta, and a high lethality rate after a long incubation period. I sometimes think how "lucky" (obviously, luck is relative) humanity is that HIV is an STD and not an airborne virus with the transmissibility of Delta.
  - forty 5y ago
    For some reasons I feel HIV treatments would have been found much more quickly had it been the case. Just like I'm pretty sure mosquitos would have been eradicated (or another solution would have been found) if it had killed so many people in developed countries.
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      I think that's a good and fair point. Reagan famously didn't even mention AIDS publicly until 1985, 4 years after it was discovered. Urban gay ghettos in NY and SF were basically experiencing a plague with young, otherwise healthy men dropping like flies, and the world at large either (a) didn't care, or (b) was glad that AIDS was "killing all the right people".
- zzt123 5y ago
golemotron 5y ago
Rather than having one planet we should have a portfolio.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  I know what you're saying, but part of the reason we're in this mess is that too many people care more about their portfolio than the planet.
  - ExtraE 5y ago
    I assume they meant a portfolio of planets?
    - dundarious 5y ago
      And I assume it was a welcome play on words.
- nosianu 5y ago
  (I'm interpreting your comment as "portfolio of planets") But the corporations would want to spread to all of them. Just like big cities all over the globe look the same, you can buy the same stuff. Trade is good, and I love corporations (never understood why anyone on the left would be against the concept - it's ideally suited to create a "container" for cooperating individuals), but even on our own main planet we can see that we have strong forces of equalization and winner takes all. You would have to somewhat isolate the places if you want diversity. Same thing that helps with biological diversity. Otherwise it will all just be near-copies of sameness. In that sense, it would just be like distributed storage of the same content. It helps when one place gets wiped out by accident, but it does not provide true robustness against the "unknown unknowns" (to quote Rumsfeld) that the universe occasionally throws at us.
  - golemotron 5y ago
    > You would have to somewhat isolate the places if you want diversity Space is very good at that. Easy to end up in places that are not practical to reach. Over time things change.
perihelions 5y ago
Does SETI not count? Easy to imagine the first received ETI signal being some world-ending infohazard. [edit]: Targeting humans: a viral ideological, philosophical, or religious meme that causes us to self-destruct. A technological gift with insidious Trojan Horse functionality (a biotechnological machine with subtle side effects; a physics device that touches physics we haven't discovered). Irresistible instructions on how to join the friendly galactic internet -- which actually route to a paranoid deviant ETI that destroys anything that transmits (ala Dark Forest hypothesis). Targeting machines: exploting a buffer overflow in the Allen Array's signal processing pipeline to upload onto this planet a self-replicating superintelligent AI. Targeting the superior chthonic race living in the Earth's mantle that we don't know about: friendly instructions on how to terraform the terrestrial surface and become a spacefaring species.
- no_wizard 5y ago
  I myself think if any theory beyond that of the Fermi Paradox holds water it’s likely the Aurora Hypothesis which simply states that colonizing space is incredibly dangerous and therefore hard to do at scale beyond your immediate solar system, hence why we haven’t seen anything in ours I don’t quite buy it but it feels the most plausible of all the alternative explanation for Fermi Because of phenomenons like Simultaneous Discovery[0] I feel that we are the first of the many civilizations in the Type I to Type II transition I personally believe we are on the precipice of finally colonizing another planet or planets long term), and therefore given the distinct possibility that life all basically started around the same time (simultaneous discovery) we are just among the first of civilizations ever, I don’t believe currently that other galactic civilizations existed or currently exist that are not at the same pace as us, as I (and I admit I have little evidence here) that simultaneous discovery applies beyond just ideas, but there may be some kind of this phenomenon in natural evolution, and making (albeit big) assumption that is true and evolution follows certain paths like our own, we just happen to be among the first civilizations to be at our level, and in fact other alien life is likely to be similarly or less advanced than us I’m either very right or very very very wrong, I figure [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air#ixzz1gICdb3SJ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air#ixz...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dharma1 5y ago
Feels like gene editing is at a point where more frequent lab escapes of self-replicating airborne pathogens is just a question of time. Not to mention the speed of progress in biotech and synthetic biology means soon this stuff can be done in a garage. Beyond pathogens, perhaps when life (inevitably) learns to change the code that makes up life, the recursion leads to implosion soon after
sam_lowry_ 5y ago
I thought the article would talk about someone like Stanislav Petrov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov or Vasily Archipov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admira... Or the latest Future of Life Award lareats https://futureoflife.org/future-of-life-award https://futureoflife.org/future-of-life-award
- ExtraE 5y ago
  I figured it would be Vasily Archipov. Very worth reading about.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Exactly, this article is pretty goofy. There was never a real possibility that the Trinity test would ignite the atmosphere; the idea was proposed largely in jest and dismissed with the briefest of calculations. The modern-day equivalent would be the protesters who argued that the LHC (and before it, the RHIC at Brookhaven) shouldn't be powered up because it might create a black hole that swallows the Earth. Or those who argued that the RTG on the Cassini probe might break apart in a launch accident and poison vast swathes of life on Earth. Why didn't the author mention those concerns? They had just as much merit. The Cuban Missile Crisis, on the other hand, was no joke. We were amazingly lucky that Murphy was on vacation that month. Our reliance on luck to avoid destroying humanity is much, much scarier than our reliance on reason.
axpy906 5y ago
I was hoping for something more about asteroids hitting earth. There’s historical examples of this which makes it far more a likely event.
- phpnode 5y ago
  An asteroid impact is presumably not a man made disaster though, for the foreseeable future at least.
ncmncm 5y ago
The article fails to note reasons why neither apparent existential risk was possible. We already had moon rocks on Earth, blasted off of the moon by bolide strikes. Likewise Mars rocks, and bits of asteroids and of other planets' moons. Maybe even Venus rocks. Relatedly, the energy released in certain bolide strikes on Earth far exceeds anything achieved even in Tsar Bomba, itself thousands of times more powerful than Fat Man. I have not seen any analysis of whether a bolide strike might incidentally produce substantial fusion activity. At the pressure and temperature produced, it is hard to imagine it not occurring. It seems like there ought to be long-lived products of such fusion detectable in the K-T layer, alongside whatever the bolide carried. Some might be weakly radioactive and thus detectable at very tiny concentration.
- mcswell 5y ago
  "We already had moon rocks on Earth, blasted off of the moon by bolide strikes." True, but they (and any other meteorites) were likely sterilized during passage through the Earth's atmosphere.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    It only takes a few minutes to get from the top of the atmosphere to the ground, not long enough to sterilize more than the surface.
GistNoesis 5y ago
I've always wanted to have a black-hole file-shredder on display on my desk. Not a big one, just a tiny speck that would generate crazy space-time distortion effects. I figured that it would be hard to contain on earth because it would fall to the center of the earth. So the trick is to build it in orbit. It seem far fetch but once you decide to work in space it opens plenty of engineering shortcuts to scale-up the LHC. Space is very big, and it's already cold and a good enough vacuum, so you just need to maintain in position a few superconducting electromagnets. You collide a few high energy particle to form one and you nurture it to make it grow. Initially you move it by shining light or throwing things in it when the black-hole is less than 1kg, thanks to momentum conservation it's as easy as playing marbles. Once it is in position you feed it anything you want and you build your space station and desk around the black hole. The more you shred things in it, the more mass it gets and the harder it will be to move around, but the greater the space-time distortion. Funds you ask ? Price per kg in orbit has gone down tremendously. And there are plenty of rich people ready to use cryonics to attain immortality, so it didn't took much to convince one of them to hedge on a safer alternative to gain time. Because you see time pass slower near a black hole, and thanks to Einstein's General Relativity that has been known for more than a century. So instead of dying you get closer to your personal black-hole and you fast forward the future until the tech is ready to save you. How could have I predicted that another stealth start-up (sponsored by the same guy ! as I later discovered) would have exactly the same idea, and now there are two black-holes orbiting earth and no way to divert them. Once they collide in exactly 1337 days their combined momentum won't allow them to orbit earth anymore...
- perihelions 5y ago
  I'm afraid the Consumer Product Safety Commission is a serious wet blanket on the market potential of generally-relativistic desk ornaments.
  - titzer 5y ago
    I imagine the first thing we would use programmable time dilation for would be to skip build times. Sure, it doesn't make you any more productive in non-dilated time, but just think how much you could extend your life by :-)
moritonal 5y ago
Shame there wasn't a reference to Ian. M. Banks work Excession which dealt with this subject. "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession
chrononaut 5y ago
> Officials decided instead to open the door, and retrieve the men by raft and helicopter (see picture at the top of this article). While they wore biocontamination suits and entered the quarantine facility on the ship, as soon as the capsule was opened at sea, the air inside flooded out. ... that decision to prioritise the short-term comfort of the men could have released it into the ocean during that brief window. Thinking about this, I am curious what the original procedure would've been. How did they plan on retrieving the astronauts, in a capsule on the ocean, without allowing the air inside to escape?
- yencabulator 5y ago
  Lift it on a boat, connect a tunnel between the hatch and the quarantine area, leave that in place until end of quarantine?
smolder 5y ago
If you entertain the MWI (many worlds interpretation) of quantum mechanics, then maybe you could say these moments did end humanity on other branches of spacetime. The idea is useless in practice, but fun to think about, if the popular fiction of the day is any indication. :)
- mcswell 5y ago
  In some of these universes, the LHC did indeed spawn a world-destroying black hole. And in our universe, the LHC failed several times when they were first starting it up (the Quench Incident, for example), causing a year's delay--which seemed so unlikely at the time that I really wondered...
michaelcampbell 5y ago
I'm not sure I agree with these, honestly. Take the first one (opening Apollo 11's doors "prematurely"). No matter what decision was made, no ill could come of it, since there weren't any microbes to be unleashed. Deciding not to launch a "counterattack" with nuclear weapons based on a hunch that the alert you're getting is false; THAT'S a world-changing decision.
threshold 5y ago
I take it for granted that human beings won’t last forever as a species, and that’s probably a good thing. It would appear we have the unique privilege of creating our replacements from scratch. Hopefully we don’t screw that up and finish with a gray goo scenario.

80 points by hiddencache 5y ago

It’s moments that I read articles like this that make me wonder why I’m putting so much energy into making a better SPA or trying to engineer solutions to faster more performant web animations. I feel like I’m not using any of my technical acumen to advance human civilization but instead to line my own coffers and those of the corporation I work for. With that said, it is always good to keep in mind just how fragile civilization as a whole can be to things like global catastrophic events, as this article highlighted these are events that could have happened but did not, thankfully, however if they did the world would be very different today

beckman466 5y ago
> I feel like I’m not using any of my technical acumen to advance human civilization What would you rather be working on?
- no_wizard 5y ago
  I’m not saying I’m going to crack some crazy software problem like general AI or something, but theoretically I’d love to be working on something that pushes renewable energy forward. In what capacity I don’t know. I’m pretty convinced we are overlooking geothermal energy in the USA at least. I often wonder if we could both relieve potentially dangerous pressure bellowing Yellowstone while simultaneously harnessing its geothermal energy for example But alas, I think the reality is I lack the expertise to even talk about this with any authority
  - finfinfin 5y ago
    Not saying you should but it is possible to gain a pretty respectable level of knowledge in almost any area within just a couple of years. Take online classes or even complete a fully online MS program. There are many examples of engineers and entrepreneurs who started in CS and then transitioned to more personally meaningful areas. (that’s my plan anyway!)
basmango 5y ago
Those two things are very different in terms of difficulty. That is why you aren't doing them.
cardosof 5y ago
I share the same thoughts - and I hope one day we reach a level of automation/AI/cheap energy that everyone gets "for free" some sort of living allowance to pursue their own objectives in science or art.
whateveracct 5y ago
I mean .. do you enjoy the work? I write Haskell, I make computer games, I make web apps. Mostly because it's fun and satisfying. I'm also quite good at it and it comes easily to me. I remember when I decided to go into engineering, a peer of mine from high school said "whateveracct, you're top of your class. Why aren't you going into medicine in order to do something more Worthwhile with your life?" Stuck with me ever since. I was repulsed by the mindset but I couldn't word why at the time. I later realized that it smelled of a deeply nihilistic (as in Nietzsche's ideas) view of the world. Ressentiment comes to mind. Spending my conscious hours working with computers is a less nihilistic use of my time. I am not deferring this life's happiness and agency in order to "have made an impact" when my life is over and useless to me. If you want more philosophy, consider Plato's Republic. An ideal society doesn't necessarily have everyone doing Most Important and Dire Work. It doesn't even have them doing what they're most "skilled" at! Instead, it has everyone living in alignment with their souls' desires and preferences. (e.g. A frail person with a Warrior's Soul should be a soldier before a strong person with an Artisan's Soul.)
- amelius 5y ago
  > I later realized that it smelled of a deeply nihilistic (as in Nietzsche's ideas) view of the world. Who says you can't enjoy work in a different field, e.g. medicine? Perhaps you can even combine those skills with computer programming. E.g. build an exoskeleton that makes partially paralyzed people walk again.
- no_wizard 5y ago
  Yes, I genuinely do enjoy the work and I derive happiness in my field, in fact I want to do more not less to drive the field forward. That does not mean I don’t sometimes feel the guilt of not being apart of something that drives humanity forward, though, even if all I could contribute was working the website that raises awareness instead! I just know what I’m capable of, but the reality vs the ideal is the philosophical struggle here for me. I instead try to make conscious investments to try and move things forward and make personal choices consciously to issues like this as best as I reasonably can. I still feel guilty sometimes I’m not working on something like raising the perception of the safety of nuclear energy ya know
stank345 5y ago
I know how you feel. You might be interested in the 80,000 hours podcast as a way to gain a better understanding of the problems humanity faces: https://80000hours.org/podcast/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/ In terms of what to _do_ about it as a software developer, I'm still trying to figure that one out. I currently work at a BCorp which tends to make me feel better about the work I'm doing which at a minimum isn't doing harm to the world. You could try looking for a meaningful job at https://techjobsforgood.com/ https://techjobsforgood.com/
Swizec 5y ago
Easiest solution to this is finding a company that can put your skills towards something that advances humanity. If no such company exists in your view, you can make one. SPAs and code are tools. You can use them for all sorts of endeavours.

sarbaz 5y ago

The article has some great examples of risks that were hyped out of proportion to their true severity. Should these things be considered? Yes. But only a little. If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere. Modern examples, IMO, are: - Kessler Syndrome - Trying to prevent an asteroid hitting the earth - Nuclear war making the entire earth uninhabitable

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere. If that "tail risk" though is "complete destruction of the planet", you only get to be wrong once.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  Every action carries that risk somewhere in its very long tail. You have to assess the likelihood of the bad event occurring, and there is a point where it is so unlikely that it need not be considered at all. I don't think humanity is quite stupid enough to knowingly release its Ice-9 just yet.
tuatoru 5y ago
I think you mean "probability" rather than severity. The severity of setting the atmosphere on fire is extreme, but the probability turned out to be vanishingly small. Or perhaps you mean risk, probability times severity. Which also turned out to be negligible for the events in the article. Some other hyped risks: - - Artificial General Intelligence - CRISPR gene editing - Gain-of-function work with viruses I have no way of assessing the risks, and there is a lot of hyperventilation in some circles
- efitz 5y ago
  Creating a black hole, with the LHC, that consumes the earth
eloff 5y ago
> If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere. If your tail risk is the end of civilization then it doesn't matter how small the probability. You'd be fucked with certainty on any long enough timeframe. Some tail risks are to large to take. Eventually your number comes up.

Animats 5y ago

Some big threats: - Something with the spread rate of COVID-delta, and a high lethality rate after a long incubation period. - Enriching uranium in a rather small facility. This may already have happened and been kept quiet. Laser enrichment was talked about a lot in the early 1990s, and then suddenly, after some announcements from Lawrence Livermore, things got much quieter.[1][2] As high-powered lasers get better, this gets easier. There's now a startup in Australia working on this process again. - Long term, a birth rate that's below replacement rate. That's the current normal in the developed world. [1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A051.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A051.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_laser_excitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_lase...

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> Something with the spread rate of COVID-delta, and a high lethality rate after a long incubation period. I sometimes think how "lucky" (obviously, luck is relative) humanity is that HIV is an STD and not an airborne virus with the transmissibility of Delta.
- forty 5y ago
  For some reasons I feel HIV treatments would have been found much more quickly had it been the case. Just like I'm pretty sure mosquitos would have been eradicated (or another solution would have been found) if it had killed so many people in developed countries.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I think that's a good and fair point. Reagan famously didn't even mention AIDS publicly until 1985, 4 years after it was discovered. Urban gay ghettos in NY and SF were basically experiencing a plague with young, otherwise healthy men dropping like flies, and the world at large either (a) didn't care, or (b) was glad that AIDS was "killing all the right people".
zzt123 5y ago

golemotron 5y ago

Rather than having one planet we should have a portfolio.

dane-pgp 5y ago
I know what you're saying, but part of the reason we're in this mess is that too many people care more about their portfolio than the planet.
- ExtraE 5y ago
  I assume they meant a portfolio of planets?
  - dundarious 5y ago
    And I assume it was a welcome play on words.
nosianu 5y ago
(I'm interpreting your comment as "portfolio of planets") But the corporations would want to spread to all of them. Just like big cities all over the globe look the same, you can buy the same stuff. Trade is good, and I love corporations (never understood why anyone on the left would be against the concept - it's ideally suited to create a "container" for cooperating individuals), but even on our own main planet we can see that we have strong forces of equalization and winner takes all. You would have to somewhat isolate the places if you want diversity. Same thing that helps with biological diversity. Otherwise it will all just be near-copies of sameness. In that sense, it would just be like distributed storage of the same content. It helps when one place gets wiped out by accident, but it does not provide true robustness against the "unknown unknowns" (to quote Rumsfeld) that the universe occasionally throws at us.
- golemotron 5y ago
  > You would have to somewhat isolate the places if you want diversity Space is very good at that. Easy to end up in places that are not practical to reach. Over time things change.

perihelions 5y ago

Does SETI not count? Easy to imagine the first received ETI signal being some world-ending infohazard. [edit]: Targeting humans: a viral ideological, philosophical, or religious meme that causes us to self-destruct. A technological gift with insidious Trojan Horse functionality (a biotechnological machine with subtle side effects; a physics device that touches physics we haven't discovered). Irresistible instructions on how to join the friendly galactic internet -- which actually route to a paranoid deviant ETI that destroys anything that transmits (ala Dark Forest hypothesis). Targeting machines: exploting a buffer overflow in the Allen Array's signal processing pipeline to upload onto this planet a self-replicating superintelligent AI. Targeting the superior chthonic race living in the Earth's mantle that we don't know about: friendly instructions on how to terraform the terrestrial surface and become a spacefaring species.

no_wizard 5y ago
I myself think if any theory beyond that of the Fermi Paradox holds water it’s likely the Aurora Hypothesis which simply states that colonizing space is incredibly dangerous and therefore hard to do at scale beyond your immediate solar system, hence why we haven’t seen anything in ours I don’t quite buy it but it feels the most plausible of all the alternative explanation for Fermi Because of phenomenons like Simultaneous Discovery[0] I feel that we are the first of the many civilizations in the Type I to Type II transition I personally believe we are on the precipice of finally colonizing another planet or planets long term), and therefore given the distinct possibility that life all basically started around the same time (simultaneous discovery) we are just among the first of civilizations ever, I don’t believe currently that other galactic civilizations existed or currently exist that are not at the same pace as us, as I (and I admit I have little evidence here) that simultaneous discovery applies beyond just ideas, but there may be some kind of this phenomenon in natural evolution, and making (albeit big) assumption that is true and evolution follows certain paths like our own, we just happen to be among the first civilizations to be at our level, and in fact other alien life is likely to be similarly or less advanced than us I’m either very right or very very very wrong, I figure [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air#ixzz1gICdb3SJ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air#ixz...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dharma1 5y ago

Feels like gene editing is at a point where more frequent lab escapes of self-replicating airborne pathogens is just a question of time. Not to mention the speed of progress in biotech and synthetic biology means soon this stuff can be done in a garage. Beyond pathogens, perhaps when life (inevitably) learns to change the code that makes up life, the recursion leads to implosion soon after

sam_lowry_ 5y ago

I thought the article would talk about someone like Stanislav Petrov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov or Vasily Archipov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admira... Or the latest Future of Life Award lareats https://futureoflife.org/future-of-life-award https://futureoflife.org/future-of-life-award

ExtraE 5y ago
I figured it would be Vasily Archipov. Very worth reading about.
CamperBob2 5y ago
Exactly, this article is pretty goofy. There was never a real possibility that the Trinity test would ignite the atmosphere; the idea was proposed largely in jest and dismissed with the briefest of calculations. The modern-day equivalent would be the protesters who argued that the LHC (and before it, the RHIC at Brookhaven) shouldn't be powered up because it might create a black hole that swallows the Earth. Or those who argued that the RTG on the Cassini probe might break apart in a launch accident and poison vast swathes of life on Earth. Why didn't the author mention those concerns? They had just as much merit. The Cuban Missile Crisis, on the other hand, was no joke. We were amazingly lucky that Murphy was on vacation that month. Our reliance on luck to avoid destroying humanity is much, much scarier than our reliance on reason.

axpy906 5y ago

I was hoping for something more about asteroids hitting earth. There’s historical examples of this which makes it far more a likely event.

phpnode 5y ago
An asteroid impact is presumably not a man made disaster though, for the foreseeable future at least.

ncmncm 5y ago

The article fails to note reasons why neither apparent existential risk was possible. We already had moon rocks on Earth, blasted off of the moon by bolide strikes. Likewise Mars rocks, and bits of asteroids and of other planets' moons. Maybe even Venus rocks. Relatedly, the energy released in certain bolide strikes on Earth far exceeds anything achieved even in Tsar Bomba, itself thousands of times more powerful than Fat Man. I have not seen any analysis of whether a bolide strike might incidentally produce substantial fusion activity. At the pressure and temperature produced, it is hard to imagine it not occurring. It seems like there ought to be long-lived products of such fusion detectable in the K-T layer, alongside whatever the bolide carried. Some might be weakly radioactive and thus detectable at very tiny concentration.

mcswell 5y ago
"We already had moon rocks on Earth, blasted off of the moon by bolide strikes." True, but they (and any other meteorites) were likely sterilized during passage through the Earth's atmosphere.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  It only takes a few minutes to get from the top of the atmosphere to the ground, not long enough to sterilize more than the surface.

GistNoesis 5y ago

I've always wanted to have a black-hole file-shredder on display on my desk. Not a big one, just a tiny speck that would generate crazy space-time distortion effects. I figured that it would be hard to contain on earth because it would fall to the center of the earth. So the trick is to build it in orbit. It seem far fetch but once you decide to work in space it opens plenty of engineering shortcuts to scale-up the LHC. Space is very big, and it's already cold and a good enough vacuum, so you just need to maintain in position a few superconducting electromagnets. You collide a few high energy particle to form one and you nurture it to make it grow. Initially you move it by shining light or throwing things in it when the black-hole is less than 1kg, thanks to momentum conservation it's as easy as playing marbles. Once it is in position you feed it anything you want and you build your space station and desk around the black hole. The more you shred things in it, the more mass it gets and the harder it will be to move around, but the greater the space-time distortion. Funds you ask ? Price per kg in orbit has gone down tremendously. And there are plenty of rich people ready to use cryonics to attain immortality, so it didn't took much to convince one of them to hedge on a safer alternative to gain time. Because you see time pass slower near a black hole, and thanks to Einstein's General Relativity that has been known for more than a century. So instead of dying you get closer to your personal black-hole and you fast forward the future until the tech is ready to save you. How could have I predicted that another stealth start-up (sponsored by the same guy ! as I later discovered) would have exactly the same idea, and now there are two black-holes orbiting earth and no way to divert them. Once they collide in exactly 1337 days their combined momentum won't allow them to orbit earth anymore...

perihelions 5y ago
I'm afraid the Consumer Product Safety Commission is a serious wet blanket on the market potential of generally-relativistic desk ornaments.
- titzer 5y ago
  I imagine the first thing we would use programmable time dilation for would be to skip build times. Sure, it doesn't make you any more productive in non-dilated time, but just think how much you could extend your life by :-)

moritonal 5y ago

Shame there wasn't a reference to Ian. M. Banks work Excession which dealt with this subject. "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession

chrononaut 5y ago

> Officials decided instead to open the door, and retrieve the men by raft and helicopter (see picture at the top of this article). While they wore biocontamination suits and entered the quarantine facility on the ship, as soon as the capsule was opened at sea, the air inside flooded out. ... that decision to prioritise the short-term comfort of the men could have released it into the ocean during that brief window. Thinking about this, I am curious what the original procedure would've been. How did they plan on retrieving the astronauts, in a capsule on the ocean, without allowing the air inside to escape?

yencabulator 5y ago
Lift it on a boat, connect a tunnel between the hatch and the quarantine area, leave that in place until end of quarantine?

smolder 5y ago

If you entertain the MWI (many worlds interpretation) of quantum mechanics, then maybe you could say these moments did end humanity on other branches of spacetime. The idea is useless in practice, but fun to think about, if the popular fiction of the day is any indication. :)

mcswell 5y ago
In some of these universes, the LHC did indeed spawn a world-destroying black hole. And in our universe, the LHC failed several times when they were first starting it up (the Quench Incident, for example), causing a year's delay--which seemed so unlikely at the time that I really wondered...

michaelcampbell 5y ago

I'm not sure I agree with these, honestly. Take the first one (opening Apollo 11's doors "prematurely"). No matter what decision was made, no ill could come of it, since there weren't any microbes to be unleashed. Deciding not to launch a "counterattack" with nuclear weapons based on a hunch that the alert you're getting is false; THAT'S a world-changing decision.

threshold 5y ago

I take it for granted that human beings won’t last forever as a species, and that’s probably a good thing. It would appear we have the unique privilege of creating our replacements from scratch. Hopefully we don’t screw that up and finish with a gray goo scenario.