7 ms·

> and longevity The recent funeral of Queen Elizabeth II was an opportunity to read up on the many trivias of British royalty. (PS: the British royalty is defi

by 2143 4y ago

> and longevity The recent funeral of Queen Elizabeth II was an opportunity to read up on the many trivias of British royalty. (PS: the British royalty is definitely not the head of my country). One thing that struck me was that thay still have plenty of things (actual physical objects) from the middle ages that has survived to the modern day. I think it's awesome that something from the middle ages has been immaculately maintained to the modern day. So perhaps, by the time it's the year 7298 Linux kernel would still be in use, immaculately maintained over thousands of years. Wouldn't that just be great? (I wonder how intergalactic pull requests are gonna work out...)

asddubs 4y ago
It would be cool, but the thought of maintaining any kind of code with more than 5000 years of legacy scares me deeply
- nkuttler 4y ago
  Keeping legacy code around is a choice.
  - Huh1337 4y ago
    Not even Pham Nuwen could avoid it... (for context, read A Deepness in the Sky - but it's better to begin with A Fire Upon the Deep)
Aperocky 4y ago
We're not going to be intergalactic by year 7298 for the simple fact that the Milky Way is 100000 light years across and traveling faster than light is physically forbidden
- colordrops 4y ago
  You really think our model of reality and what is possible will apply in 5,276 years? What did we understand 5,276 years ago? Most certainly countless things that we have now would be considered impossible or witchcraft back then.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    If faster than light travel was possible any single species who discovered it would be able to cover an appreciable portion of the galaxy in only a few thousand years out of billions. Either life is virtually non-existent thus far, virtually always suicidal, or discovering it is tremendously unlikely. Neither of the last two bode well for us. It seems to me most likely that ftl suggestions an empty universe or one in which we too are likely to die without learning it.
    - shepherdjerred 4y ago
      You’re assuming that all species seek to grow infinitely. What’s wrong with a species of sentient house cats that just want to nap all day?
      - geertj 4y ago
        > What’s wrong with a species of sentient house cats that just want to nap all day? Nothing wrong with that, but if life is common, you’d need all life to be like that to explain the Fermi paradox, which seems unlikely.
        colordrops 4y ago
        It could also be that the technology to achieve FTL is just over a threshold where the civilization would be unrecognizable to us as humans. We aren't far from such technology already. For instance imagine just a few generations of biotech and computational technology - it may already be enough for us to transform and evolve into some biomechanical hive that bears little resemblance to our current selves. It could also be that once you are advanced enough, you transcend this physical universe. For example, the entire universe to a deep sea squid is cold dark water without much other life. They have no way to comprehend that there is so much more to reality. They just aren't capable of it. We are not special and also likely not able to detect or comprehend other levels of reality that would be more vast and interesting to advanced beings than simple FTL leaps around the galaxy. Perhaps they just aren't interested in our little ant hill the milky way. The lack of imagination around what is possible and the supposed paradox posited by Fermi is disheartening.
- kmarc 4y ago
  What if we don't want to travel faster than light, just warp space around us (Sorry, I finished the third book of the Three Body Problem series literally an hour ago, and, well, curvature propulsion [1]) [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/6lj9df/can_anyone_explain_how_curvature_propulsion_works/ https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/6lj9df/ca...
- sidkshatriya 4y ago
  [Caution: vague speculation follows] Apparently exotic objects like wormholes may exist which can "teleport" one from one part of the universe to another while never violating the faster than light principle. [See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole ] In other words, we could have intergalactic messages. Our understanding of Physics is still evolving and things considered impossible today may become possible tomorrow without necessarily bringing the whole edifice of Physics down by taking paths that are not known so far. Grand as the achievements of modern Physics, we should still remain humble about what is possible and impossible.
  - immmmmm 4y ago
    it's not easy keeping a wormhole open, while they are correct solutions to the General Relativity equation, they are widely unstable, if memory serves. also gravity is very weak and need a significant amount of mass/energy to source it, a black hole of the mass of the earth is a centimeter in diameter. and yes smaller black holes are in theory possible to make (in some theories at least) but they tend to evaporate very very quickly by hawking radiation (and none was observed at cern). then there's the ER=EPR conjecture that quantum entanglement is due to microscopic wormholes connecting the states but again doesn't seem you can shove a photon in there and get super luminal communication as quantum entanglement cannot transfer information faster than light. in the end Lorentz invariance and thus the speed of light is deeply embedded in the fabric of spacetime (we never seen any violations, and i saw the super luminal neutrino drama first hand as i was doing my phd in Bern) they are a bit like warp drives, possible in some theory, wildly impractical, certainly lethal and requires infinite energy and/or destroys the arrival galaxy. more realistically speaking, and i know ppl will hate me for this: we have a decline in biodiversity probably unprecedented since the dinosaurs went exciting, a near vertical climate trip to tackle (not making the first even worst), limited ressources to that mitigate it but more importantly: very few people paying attention. at this rate(s) i doubt the successor to the Large Hadron Collider will be ready before collapse of our civilization. i get it's nice to dream but we are tripping all regulation mechanisms on this planet and that's not something that's good for survival, fossil records show. maybe im wrong, im a physicist after all, and SuperElon FromTheFuture will ride a closed timelike curve and come Save Us All (TM) with electric rockets and SmartTechnology (C). (edit: added a pinch of dark humor.)
p-e-w 4y ago
There is essentially zero chance that Linux will still be in development 50 years from now, never mind 5000. We might have strong AI by then, and surely one of its first tasks (assuming it doesn't wipe out humanity) would be to redesign our entire information technology stack from the ground up, which would make any software built by humans instantly obsolete. But even if that somehow doesn't happen, I fully expect an operating system to emerge in the next few decades that is built around a formally verifiable safety and security model. Once it is production ready, it will dominate the market soon afterwards. The stakes associated with information technology are ever-increasing, and relying on a system written in a language where "off by one" can mean "privilege escalation" isn't sustainable in the long term.
- kijin 4y ago
  Except, forces that be won't be particularly thrilled about letting a formally verifiable, safe and secure operating system dominate the market. There's going to be serious resistance as long as humans are at the top. Maybe strong AI can help in this regard. Or maybe it will just emulate the prejudices of its creators.
- skilled 4y ago
  Hundreds of thousands of people Google "how to center a div" monthly and you're talking about AI wiping out humanity or becoming a omni sentient coder? Okay....
  - cjonas 4y ago
    AI has no problem centering a div https://youtu.be/DdAhRpXE_ww https://youtu.be/DdAhRpXE_ww
    - sanroot99 4y ago
      We are doomed
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    People google "how to center a div" because CSS is garbage and makes such basic things incredibly difficult and unintuitive. Just because the question seems simple doesn't mean it is. Either way, I don't understand how these two issues are related.
Huh1337 4y ago
Where are you from? In Europe you walk along medieval era buildings all the time, and seeing something 1000+ years old (or few times that) is just a museum visit away... I grew up near a church built in the 11th century, for example. The interior is newer but the building itself is original. My own family inherited things from cca 16th-17th century (useless junk but anyways).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 2143 4y ago
  > seeing something 1000+ years old (or few times that) is just a museum visit away That's terrific! Facepalm. My country got plundered, conquered, and colonized; they took away everything they could possibly take away. Some of those objects are in some European museums and palaces ;) (Don't take this the wrong way. I'm not blaming anybody. What has happened has happened.)
  - Huh1337 4y ago
    Well, same here, most of the oldest artefacts are away. Europe is a big place, your fate is shared even here. But even the stuff that remains at home is interesting - just doesn't have so much gold on it.
skywal_l 4y ago
Checkout this book: A deepness in the sky. In the far future, humanity has ships which are mostly automated and don't need actual pilots. However they need tech guys to constantly fix and patch the software. They have to know a lot of the history of the software to be good at their job. The hero is basically the last member of humanity who knows what the unix epoch means.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  "Software archaeology"

by 2143 4y ago

asddubs 4y ago

It would be cool, but the thought of maintaining any kind of code with more than 5000 years of legacy scares me deeply

nkuttler 4y ago
Keeping legacy code around is a choice.
- Huh1337 4y ago
  Not even Pham Nuwen could avoid it... (for context, read A Deepness in the Sky - but it's better to begin with A Fire Upon the Deep)

Aperocky 4y ago

We're not going to be intergalactic by year 7298 for the simple fact that the Milky Way is 100000 light years across and traveling faster than light is physically forbidden

colordrops 4y ago
You really think our model of reality and what is possible will apply in 5,276 years? What did we understand 5,276 years ago? Most certainly countless things that we have now would be considered impossible or witchcraft back then.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  If faster than light travel was possible any single species who discovered it would be able to cover an appreciable portion of the galaxy in only a few thousand years out of billions. Either life is virtually non-existent thus far, virtually always suicidal, or discovering it is tremendously unlikely. Neither of the last two bode well for us. It seems to me most likely that ftl suggestions an empty universe or one in which we too are likely to die without learning it.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    You’re assuming that all species seek to grow infinitely. What’s wrong with a species of sentient house cats that just want to nap all day?
    - geertj 4y ago
      > What’s wrong with a species of sentient house cats that just want to nap all day? Nothing wrong with that, but if life is common, you’d need all life to be like that to explain the Fermi paradox, which seems unlikely.
      - colordrops 4y ago
        It could also be that the technology to achieve FTL is just over a threshold where the civilization would be unrecognizable to us as humans. We aren't far from such technology already. For instance imagine just a few generations of biotech and computational technology - it may already be enough for us to transform and evolve into some biomechanical hive that bears little resemblance to our current selves. It could also be that once you are advanced enough, you transcend this physical universe. For example, the entire universe to a deep sea squid is cold dark water without much other life. They have no way to comprehend that there is so much more to reality. They just aren't capable of it. We are not special and also likely not able to detect or comprehend other levels of reality that would be more vast and interesting to advanced beings than simple FTL leaps around the galaxy. Perhaps they just aren't interested in our little ant hill the milky way. The lack of imagination around what is possible and the supposed paradox posited by Fermi is disheartening.
kmarc 4y ago
What if we don't want to travel faster than light, just warp space around us (Sorry, I finished the third book of the Three Body Problem series literally an hour ago, and, well, curvature propulsion [1]) [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/6lj9df/can_anyone_explain_how_curvature_propulsion_works/ https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/6lj9df/ca...
sidkshatriya 4y ago
[Caution: vague speculation follows] Apparently exotic objects like wormholes may exist which can "teleport" one from one part of the universe to another while never violating the faster than light principle. [See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole ] In other words, we could have intergalactic messages. Our understanding of Physics is still evolving and things considered impossible today may become possible tomorrow without necessarily bringing the whole edifice of Physics down by taking paths that are not known so far. Grand as the achievements of modern Physics, we should still remain humble about what is possible and impossible.
- immmmmm 4y ago
  it's not easy keeping a wormhole open, while they are correct solutions to the General Relativity equation, they are widely unstable, if memory serves. also gravity is very weak and need a significant amount of mass/energy to source it, a black hole of the mass of the earth is a centimeter in diameter. and yes smaller black holes are in theory possible to make (in some theories at least) but they tend to evaporate very very quickly by hawking radiation (and none was observed at cern). then there's the ER=EPR conjecture that quantum entanglement is due to microscopic wormholes connecting the states but again doesn't seem you can shove a photon in there and get super luminal communication as quantum entanglement cannot transfer information faster than light. in the end Lorentz invariance and thus the speed of light is deeply embedded in the fabric of spacetime (we never seen any violations, and i saw the super luminal neutrino drama first hand as i was doing my phd in Bern) they are a bit like warp drives, possible in some theory, wildly impractical, certainly lethal and requires infinite energy and/or destroys the arrival galaxy. more realistically speaking, and i know ppl will hate me for this: we have a decline in biodiversity probably unprecedented since the dinosaurs went exciting, a near vertical climate trip to tackle (not making the first even worst), limited ressources to that mitigate it but more importantly: very few people paying attention. at this rate(s) i doubt the successor to the Large Hadron Collider will be ready before collapse of our civilization. i get it's nice to dream but we are tripping all regulation mechanisms on this planet and that's not something that's good for survival, fossil records show. maybe im wrong, im a physicist after all, and SuperElon FromTheFuture will ride a closed timelike curve and come Save Us All (TM) with electric rockets and SmartTechnology (C). (edit: added a pinch of dark humor.)

p-e-w 4y ago

There is essentially zero chance that Linux will still be in development 50 years from now, never mind 5000. We might have strong AI by then, and surely one of its first tasks (assuming it doesn't wipe out humanity) would be to redesign our entire information technology stack from the ground up, which would make any software built by humans instantly obsolete. But even if that somehow doesn't happen, I fully expect an operating system to emerge in the next few decades that is built around a formally verifiable safety and security model. Once it is production ready, it will dominate the market soon afterwards. The stakes associated with information technology are ever-increasing, and relying on a system written in a language where "off by one" can mean "privilege escalation" isn't sustainable in the long term.

kijin 4y ago
Except, forces that be won't be particularly thrilled about letting a formally verifiable, safe and secure operating system dominate the market. There's going to be serious resistance as long as humans are at the top. Maybe strong AI can help in this regard. Or maybe it will just emulate the prejudices of its creators.
skilled 4y ago
Hundreds of thousands of people Google "how to center a div" monthly and you're talking about AI wiping out humanity or becoming a omni sentient coder? Okay....
- cjonas 4y ago
  AI has no problem centering a div https://youtu.be/DdAhRpXE_ww https://youtu.be/DdAhRpXE_ww
  - sanroot99 4y ago
    We are doomed
- p-e-w 4y ago
  People google "how to center a div" because CSS is garbage and makes such basic things incredibly difficult and unintuitive. Just because the question seems simple doesn't mean it is. Either way, I don't understand how these two issues are related.

Huh1337 4y ago

Where are you from? In Europe you walk along medieval era buildings all the time, and seeing something 1000+ years old (or few times that) is just a museum visit away... I grew up near a church built in the 11th century, for example. The interior is newer but the building itself is original. My own family inherited things from cca 16th-17th century (useless junk but anyways).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
2143 4y ago
> seeing something 1000+ years old (or few times that) is just a museum visit away That's terrific! Facepalm. My country got plundered, conquered, and colonized; they took away everything they could possibly take away. Some of those objects are in some European museums and palaces ;) (Don't take this the wrong way. I'm not blaming anybody. What has happened has happened.)
- Huh1337 4y ago
  Well, same here, most of the oldest artefacts are away. Europe is a big place, your fate is shared even here. But even the stuff that remains at home is interesting - just doesn't have so much gold on it.

skywal_l 4y ago

Checkout this book: A deepness in the sky. In the far future, humanity has ships which are mostly automated and don't need actual pilots. However they need tech guys to constantly fix and patch the software. They have to know a lot of the history of the software to be good at their job. The hero is basically the last member of humanity who knows what the unix epoch means.

ncmncm 4y ago
"Software archaeology"