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The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

80 点作者 hiddencache超过 3 年前

15 条评论

no_wizard超过 3 年前
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.<p>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
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sam_lowry_超过 3 年前
I thought the article would talk about someone like Stanislav Petrov <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stanislav_Petrov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stanislav_Petrov</a> or Vasily Archipov <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admira...</a><p>Or the latest Future of Life Award lareats <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;futureoflife.org&#x2F;future-of-life-award" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;futureoflife.org&#x2F;future-of-life-award</a>
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Animats超过 3 年前
Some big threats:<p>- Something with the spread rate of COVID-delta, and a high lethality rate after a long incubation period.<p>- 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&#x27;s now a startup in Australia working on this process again.<p>- Long term, a birth rate that&#x27;s below replacement rate. That&#x27;s the current normal in the developed world.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrc.gov&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ML1204&#x2F;ML12045A051.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrc.gov&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ML1204&#x2F;ML12045A051.pdf</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Separation_of_isotopes_by_laser_excitation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Separation_of_isotopes_by_lase...</a>
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GistNoesis超过 3 年前
I&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s already cold and a good enough vacuum, so you just need to maintain in position a few superconducting electromagnets.<p>You collide a few high energy particle to form one and you nurture it to make it grow.<p>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&#x27;s as easy as playing marbles.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t allow them to orbit earth anymore...
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chrononaut超过 3 年前
&gt; 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.<p>Thinking about this, I am curious what the original procedure would&#x27;ve been. How did they plan on retrieving the astronauts, in a capsule on the ocean, without allowing the air inside to escape?
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perihelions超过 3 年前
Does SETI not count? Easy to imagine the first received ETI signal being some world-ending infohazard.<p>[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&#x27;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 <i>Dark Forest</i> hypothesis).<p>Targeting machines: exploting a buffer overflow in the Allen Array&#x27;s signal processing pipeline to upload onto this planet a self-replicating superintelligent AI.<p>Targeting the superior chthonic race living in the Earth&#x27;s mantle that we don&#x27;t know about: friendly instructions on how to terraform the terrestrial surface and become a spacefaring species.
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moritonal超过 3 年前
Shame there wasn&#x27;t a reference to Ian. M. Banks work Excession which dealt with this subject.<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Excession" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Excession</a>
michaelcampbell超过 3 年前
I&#x27;m not sure I agree with these, honestly. Take the first one (opening Apollo 11&#x27;s doors &quot;prematurely&quot;). No matter what decision was made, no ill could come of it, since there weren&#x27;t any microbes to be unleashed.<p>Deciding not to launch a &quot;counterattack&quot; with nuclear weapons based on a hunch that the alert you&#x27;re getting is false; THAT&#x27;S a world-changing decision.
dharma1超过 3 年前
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.<p>Beyond pathogens, perhaps when life (inevitably) learns to change the code that makes up life, the recursion leads to implosion soon after
ncmncm超过 3 年前
The article fails to note reasons why neither apparent existential risk was possible.<p>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&#x27; moons. Maybe even Venus rocks.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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smolder超过 3 年前
If you entertain the MWI (many worlds interpretation) of quantum mechanics, then maybe you could say these moments <i>did</i> 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. :)
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threshold超过 3 年前
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.
axpy906超过 3 年前
I was hoping for something more about asteroids hitting earth. There’s historical examples of this which makes it far more a likely event.
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golemotron超过 3 年前
Rather than having one planet we should have a portfolio.
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sarbaz超过 3 年前
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&#x27;ll never get anywhere.<p>Modern examples, IMO, are:<p>- Kessler Syndrome<p>- Trying to prevent an asteroid hitting the earth<p>- Nuclear war making the entire earth uninhabitable
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