7 ms·

Feels kind of 1920. War. Inflation and Physics offer's some interesting mysteries. Maybe AGI will solve it all for us;)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Victerius 5y ago
I am equally eager and terrified to know if a new superweapon to surpass nuclear weapons could or will be invented in this century.
- sgt101 5y ago
  We don't need to; nuclear weapons in the giga tonne range are practical. Anything over about 200 kilo tonnes just isn't that useful because cities aren't so big, and aren't circular.
- HughCannon 5y ago
  An interesting thought: A superweapon more powerful than nuclear weapons might with a single use cause the end of life as we know it. As such, you would not test or demonstrate it, therefore the weapon might not be useful.
  - blendergeek 5y ago
    One could always test it on some other planet like the Death Star in _Star Wars_.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Nobody needs a bigger bomb though, it wouldn't be any more of a threat. We can already destroy a whole city with a single weapon or trigger a mass extinction event in somewhere between an hour and a day, being better than that isn't really any more scary. No, the "better" superweapon would be about precision and speed of destruction... like the ability to resolve the whole surface of the planet at sub cm resolution and pick out and destroy any target in moments... imagine a starlink-type constellation but spy satellites with space lasers instead backed by enormous AI facial-and-other recognition to identify where anybody or anything was. Or maybe something like being able to read thoughts at a distance or even influence them. A bigger bomb though is just about doing something we can already do slightly more quickly. We can also already build bigger bombs than we have but there's no strategic advantage.
    - sfink 5y ago
      > Or maybe something like being able to read thoughts at a distance or even influence them. We have that, it just doesn't work quite the way you think. One of its many manifestations is called "Twitter". This isn't a joke. Consider the conventional notion of a mind control device, a magical mind-laser that can target one person at a time from a distance and modify their thoughts or even beliefs. Compare to what a motivated billionaire could accomplish, today, using paid botnets and content farms. Today's version is wildly more influential, can not only change beliefs but also inoculate the targets against future influences in the other direction(s), and operates at a mass scale. It is so successful and effective that it doesn't even need to be kept secret like the usual scifi version. The only thing exaggerated in my description is that it doesn't require the resources of a billionaire. You can operate it for far less. We need an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's "sufficiently advanced technology" quote.
    - 323 5y ago
      We're quite close to the moment where we'll be able to release 1000 drones/robot dogs in a city with the mission to blow up all the tanks or white/blue arm-band soldiers. Possibly with a human in the loop for final confirmation, which receives a target image on the screen for engagement approval. One human could approve hundred of hits per hour if you don't want to go fully autonomous. Of course, the ability to automatically defend against drones/robot dogs will be next. But to the main point, a nuke-like powerful bomb without radiation fallout would be quite valuable.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      > the "better" superweapon would be about precision and speed of destruction... Taking that idea to its extreme (and while we're discussing an article about potentially exotic physics) a superweapon (or superpower) could be simply "teleportation". If you could trigger the creation of two ends of a wormhole to appear at arbitrary points in space (without needing any equipment at either point), you could teleport remote photons from your enemy's territory into your research station, which would effectively give you an invisible spy camera that can view anywhere on Earth in real time, allowing you to track all the military hardware and personnel that the enemy has. An attack would involve (re)moving a few grams of electronics or neurons from the target, and would be almost invisible and unstoppable. Even if the wormhole had to be "sent" using something like a portal gun, that would still dramatically change the dynamics of the battlefield.
  - schmeckleberg 5y ago
    hypothesis: the Great Filter is that every sufficiently long-lived society eventually invents and uses the Deplorable Word from C.S. Lewis's "Narnia" universe.
    - mountainboy 5y ago
      hypothesis: the great filter is simply an adequate understanding of physics. The galaxy (and beyond?) is happily chattering away using physics we do not understand. We are a pre-contact tribe in the jungle completely unaware of the "radio" signals passing all around us. Once we understand the principles, we can build such a radio and participate.
      - kochikame 5y ago
        So "inadequate", not "adequate", right?
      - thrtythreeforty 5y ago
        I for one look forward to chatting on ultrawave and being allied with the Transcend
      - NateEag 5y ago
        Is this falsifiable?
    - pantalaimon 5y ago
      But wasn’t that just a metaphor for the atomic bomb?
      - NateEag 5y ago
        If so, it was a poor one - the Deplorable Word kills every single person on the planet but the speaker. Not a hint of MAD in sight.
- tanto 5y ago
  We will discover some new "dark quantum thingy" energy source which some scientist will want to use to create super cheap energy. Unfortunately because of the third world war someone will first build a bomb. Handheld sized enough to destroy any major city. Someone will than say: I have become death... and after we have destroyed half of the world we will rise from the ashes and fly to the stars. Afterwards we create an organization called The Federation!
  - KrishnaShripad 5y ago
    > I have become death I like the Oppenheimer quote [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac
    - eesmith 5y ago
      An attitude really pissed off Truman: > The meeting between Oppenheimer and Truman did not go well. It was then that Oppenheimer famously told Truman that "I feel I have blood on my hands", which was unacceptable to Truman, who immediately replied that that was no concern of Oppenheimer's, and that if anyone had bloody hands, it was the president. ... > Truman had very little use for Oppenheimer then--little use for his "hand wringing", for his high moral acceptance of question in the use of the bomb, for his second-guessing the decision. Cold must have descended in the meeting, as Truman later told David Lillenthal of Oppenheimer that he "never wanted to see that son of a bitch in this office again". Truman would retell the story in different ways, but with generally the same result, waxing about how he dismissed the "cry-baby scientist".
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        It's probably fair to assume that Truman had more immediate and frequent casualty reports and projections than Oppenheimer. So the former was weighing against alternatives, and the latter was weighing against inaction. In Oppenheimer's defense though, at the time he couldn't have known that (a) the US would refrain from using nuclear weapons in subsequent wars, (b) other countries would rapidly acquire nuclear weapons, (c) MAD would become normalized as the only acceptable use of nuclear arms. None of which were guaranteed to pass, meaning a very different perspective in 1945.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  "Surpass" is a tricky concept. Nuclear weapons won't become less devastating, so they won't stop mattering, even if something more devastating comes along. Maybe being easier to build than nukes would do it, where suddenly everyone had the new superweapon including the old nuclear powers, since even they might as well use the new easier thing if they use anything.
  - stult 5y ago
    Surpass in destructive power doesn’t mean much since we can already destroy all life on the planet with nukes. That’s what makes the doomsday weapon in Dr. Strangelove so ironic and funny. But if a new weapon type that at least approximates nukes in destructive power while also surpassing them in ease of proliferation, cost of production, or detectability? Those are much scarier propositions.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Nukes are several orders of magnitude away from destroying all life on this planet. https://youtu.be/JyECrGp-Sw8 https://youtu.be/JyECrGp-Sw8
      - stult 5y ago
        It’s a distinction without a difference. For human purposes, nukes can effectively destroy us completely. We don’t need to also physically rip the planet apart and destroy all the single celled organisms to ruin the planet for ourselves.
        ben_w 5y ago
        The nukes that actually exist today would reduce us to a medieval or early industrial existence, except with a lot of information about how to rebuild faster — Hiroshima and Nagasaki both got rebuilt and are now thriving, and while modern weapons are higher yield and much of the industry to rebuild with would be destroyed, not all of it would be, and roughly half the global population would still be alive to do it. I wouldn’t count that as “effectively destroy us completely”, even though it would be really bad.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  Lasers and other energy weapons may become practical in this century as an answer to artillery and hypersonic missiles. They will change the balance dramatically. In addition to that we will see more robotic warfare and probably more information warfare.
- postingposts 5y ago
  It already exists and is largely related to time (but not space)
- dqpb 5y ago
  I predict the next super weapon will be an AI that generates content so captivating, that it acquires everyone’s attention, and/or induces unhealthy biological response. Proof of attack vector: https://www.thegamer.com/15-people-who-have-died-playing-video-games/ https://www.thegamer.com/15-people-who-have-died-playing-vid... Imagine, for example, a content generator whose reward function is heart rate.
andrepd 5y ago
More like the 1930s. Don't forget economic crises and democratic backsliding.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

I am equally eager and terrified to know if a new superweapon to surpass nuclear weapons could or will be invented in this century.

sgt101 5y ago
We don't need to; nuclear weapons in the giga tonne range are practical. Anything over about 200 kilo tonnes just isn't that useful because cities aren't so big, and aren't circular.
HughCannon 5y ago
An interesting thought: A superweapon more powerful than nuclear weapons might with a single use cause the end of life as we know it. As such, you would not test or demonstrate it, therefore the weapon might not be useful.
- blendergeek 5y ago
  One could always test it on some other planet like the Death Star in _Star Wars_.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Nobody needs a bigger bomb though, it wouldn't be any more of a threat. We can already destroy a whole city with a single weapon or trigger a mass extinction event in somewhere between an hour and a day, being better than that isn't really any more scary. No, the "better" superweapon would be about precision and speed of destruction... like the ability to resolve the whole surface of the planet at sub cm resolution and pick out and destroy any target in moments... imagine a starlink-type constellation but spy satellites with space lasers instead backed by enormous AI facial-and-other recognition to identify where anybody or anything was. Or maybe something like being able to read thoughts at a distance or even influence them. A bigger bomb though is just about doing something we can already do slightly more quickly. We can also already build bigger bombs than we have but there's no strategic advantage.
  - sfink 5y ago
    > Or maybe something like being able to read thoughts at a distance or even influence them. We have that, it just doesn't work quite the way you think. One of its many manifestations is called "Twitter". This isn't a joke. Consider the conventional notion of a mind control device, a magical mind-laser that can target one person at a time from a distance and modify their thoughts or even beliefs. Compare to what a motivated billionaire could accomplish, today, using paid botnets and content farms. Today's version is wildly more influential, can not only change beliefs but also inoculate the targets against future influences in the other direction(s), and operates at a mass scale. It is so successful and effective that it doesn't even need to be kept secret like the usual scifi version. The only thing exaggerated in my description is that it doesn't require the resources of a billionaire. You can operate it for far less. We need an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's "sufficiently advanced technology" quote.
  - 323 5y ago
    We're quite close to the moment where we'll be able to release 1000 drones/robot dogs in a city with the mission to blow up all the tanks or white/blue arm-band soldiers. Possibly with a human in the loop for final confirmation, which receives a target image on the screen for engagement approval. One human could approve hundred of hits per hour if you don't want to go fully autonomous. Of course, the ability to automatically defend against drones/robot dogs will be next. But to the main point, a nuke-like powerful bomb without radiation fallout would be quite valuable.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > the "better" superweapon would be about precision and speed of destruction... Taking that idea to its extreme (and while we're discussing an article about potentially exotic physics) a superweapon (or superpower) could be simply "teleportation". If you could trigger the creation of two ends of a wormhole to appear at arbitrary points in space (without needing any equipment at either point), you could teleport remote photons from your enemy's territory into your research station, which would effectively give you an invisible spy camera that can view anywhere on Earth in real time, allowing you to track all the military hardware and personnel that the enemy has. An attack would involve (re)moving a few grams of electronics or neurons from the target, and would be almost invisible and unstoppable. Even if the wormhole had to be "sent" using something like a portal gun, that would still dramatically change the dynamics of the battlefield.
- schmeckleberg 5y ago
  hypothesis: the Great Filter is that every sufficiently long-lived society eventually invents and uses the Deplorable Word from C.S. Lewis's "Narnia" universe.
  - mountainboy 5y ago
    hypothesis: the great filter is simply an adequate understanding of physics. The galaxy (and beyond?) is happily chattering away using physics we do not understand. We are a pre-contact tribe in the jungle completely unaware of the "radio" signals passing all around us. Once we understand the principles, we can build such a radio and participate.
    - kochikame 5y ago
      So "inadequate", not "adequate", right?
    - thrtythreeforty 5y ago
      I for one look forward to chatting on ultrawave and being allied with the Transcend
    - NateEag 5y ago
      Is this falsifiable?
  - pantalaimon 5y ago
    But wasn’t that just a metaphor for the atomic bomb?
    - NateEag 5y ago
      If so, it was a poor one - the Deplorable Word kills every single person on the planet but the speaker. Not a hint of MAD in sight.
tanto 5y ago
We will discover some new "dark quantum thingy" energy source which some scientist will want to use to create super cheap energy. Unfortunately because of the third world war someone will first build a bomb. Handheld sized enough to destroy any major city. Someone will than say: I have become death... and after we have destroyed half of the world we will rise from the ashes and fly to the stars. Afterwards we create an organization called The Federation!
- KrishnaShripad 5y ago
  > I have become death I like the Oppenheimer quote [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac
  - eesmith 5y ago
    An attitude really pissed off Truman: > The meeting between Oppenheimer and Truman did not go well. It was then that Oppenheimer famously told Truman that "I feel I have blood on my hands", which was unacceptable to Truman, who immediately replied that that was no concern of Oppenheimer's, and that if anyone had bloody hands, it was the president. ... > Truman had very little use for Oppenheimer then--little use for his "hand wringing", for his high moral acceptance of question in the use of the bomb, for his second-guessing the decision. Cold must have descended in the meeting, as Truman later told David Lillenthal of Oppenheimer that he "never wanted to see that son of a bitch in this office again". Truman would retell the story in different ways, but with generally the same result, waxing about how he dismissed the "cry-baby scientist".
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      It's probably fair to assume that Truman had more immediate and frequent casualty reports and projections than Oppenheimer. So the former was weighing against alternatives, and the latter was weighing against inaction. In Oppenheimer's defense though, at the time he couldn't have known that (a) the US would refrain from using nuclear weapons in subsequent wars, (b) other countries would rapidly acquire nuclear weapons, (c) MAD would become normalized as the only acceptable use of nuclear arms. None of which were guaranteed to pass, meaning a very different perspective in 1945.
andrewflnr 5y ago
"Surpass" is a tricky concept. Nuclear weapons won't become less devastating, so they won't stop mattering, even if something more devastating comes along. Maybe being easier to build than nukes would do it, where suddenly everyone had the new superweapon including the old nuclear powers, since even they might as well use the new easier thing if they use anything.
- stult 5y ago
  Surpass in destructive power doesn’t mean much since we can already destroy all life on the planet with nukes. That’s what makes the doomsday weapon in Dr. Strangelove so ironic and funny. But if a new weapon type that at least approximates nukes in destructive power while also surpassing them in ease of proliferation, cost of production, or detectability? Those are much scarier propositions.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Nukes are several orders of magnitude away from destroying all life on this planet. https://youtu.be/JyECrGp-Sw8 https://youtu.be/JyECrGp-Sw8
    - stult 5y ago
      It’s a distinction without a difference. For human purposes, nukes can effectively destroy us completely. We don’t need to also physically rip the planet apart and destroy all the single celled organisms to ruin the planet for ourselves.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        The nukes that actually exist today would reduce us to a medieval or early industrial existence, except with a lot of information about how to rebuild faster — Hiroshima and Nagasaki both got rebuilt and are now thriving, and while modern weapons are higher yield and much of the industry to rebuild with would be destroyed, not all of it would be, and roughly half the global population would still be alive to do it. I wouldn’t count that as “effectively destroy us completely”, even though it would be really bad.
ivan_gammel 5y ago
Lasers and other energy weapons may become practical in this century as an answer to artillery and hypersonic missiles. They will change the balance dramatically. In addition to that we will see more robotic warfare and probably more information warfare.
postingposts 5y ago
It already exists and is largely related to time (but not space)
dqpb 5y ago
I predict the next super weapon will be an AI that generates content so captivating, that it acquires everyone’s attention, and/or induces unhealthy biological response. Proof of attack vector: https://www.thegamer.com/15-people-who-have-died-playing-video-games/ https://www.thegamer.com/15-people-who-have-died-playing-vid... Imagine, for example, a content generator whose reward function is heart rate.

andrepd 5y ago

More like the 1930s. Don't forget economic crises and democratic backsliding.