[HN Gopher] The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
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The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
Author : hiddencache
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-09-05 19:48 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| [deleted]
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| I thought the article would talk about someone like Stanislav
| Petrov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov or Vasily
| Archipov
| 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
| ExtraE wrote:
| I figured it would be Vasily Archipov. Very worth reading
| about.
| axpy906 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| An asteroid impact is presumably not a man made disaster
| though, for the foreseeable future at least.
| golemotron wrote:
| Rather than having one planet we should have a portfolio.
| nosianu wrote:
| (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 wrote:
| > 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.
| arglebarglegar wrote:
| we're probably about a thousand years out from having anything
| close to earth, we're squandering a ridiculously good thing
| here and more planets isn't the solution
| dane-pgp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I assume they meant a portfolio of planets?
| dundarious wrote:
| And I assume it was a welcome play on words.
| perihelions wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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#ixz...
| PeterisP wrote:
| I'm sceptical of any notions of "we are just among the first
| of civilizations ever" because as far as I understand from
| the studies of sun-like star sytems that could be hospitable
| to life, Earth is a bit on the late side; close to the
| average, but not an "early" formation, and the time advantage
| or "development head start" that a sizeable fraction other
| stars/planets comparable to ours (I'm not talking about
| "first generation" hydrogen stars here) has had is _immense_
| (e.g. a billion years).
|
| In essence, the idea of us being among the first in our
| galaxy is compatible with the notion that intelligent life
| forming is so scarce that there's only ever going to be just
| a couple civilizations in our galaxy or that we're alone;
| because if life is so common that our galaxy would have (for
| example) a hundred intelligent civilization spawning events,
| then the expectation is that half of them would have been
| before us, and it would be a really, really unlikely that all
| of them are on Earth-like planets younger than us and none
| are on the majority of Earth-like planets older than us.
|
| Also, given all the time-consuming steps required for life to
| form, "around the same time" would optimistically mean
| something on the scale of +/- a million years. Like, if the
| protozoic era took 0.1% more or less, that would be a
| difference of two million years; so if some civilization was
| much older or much younger, then the difference would be much
| more than that, and if we encounter a planet that's +/-
| hundred thousand years of progress, that mean that we really
| progressed at a remarkably coincidentally equal starting
| point and pace; and if we encounter a civilization that's
| just a thousand years of technological development ahead or
| behind, then that would be a _so_ unbelievable coincidence
| that I 'd consider that some kind of intelligent designer is
| required to explain that.
| graycat wrote:
| > we are just among the first of civilizations ever,
|
| Well maybe could say "one of":
|
| We recall that the big bang was ~14 billion years ago.
|
| Our solar system was made ~5 billion years ago (very rough
| arithmetic) out of the results of an exploded star. The star
| may have exploded ~7 billion years ago. In that case it may
| have been a first generation, hydrogen star and took ~6
| billion years to form, make heavy elements, and explode (and
| make more heavy elements).
|
| So, that makes our star a _second generation_ star and our
| solar system, from an exploded first generation star, one of
| the first.
|
| If all that is true, then, okay, "we are just among the first
| of civilizations ever".
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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
| cardosof wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| mpalmer wrote:
| In Nietzsche's words:
|
| > _A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that
| it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that
| it does not exist. According to this view, our existence
| (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the
| pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos - at the same
| time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the
| nihilists._
|
| Where is Nietzsche's nihilism in what you describe? How is
| your peer's worldview nihilistic when they place a high value
| on the effect of your potential actions on the world?
|
| Surely for a nihilist, "to have made an impact" is a non-
| goal.
| amelius wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| gnramires wrote:
| I... have to disagree. Either view is too simple.
|
| You're looking for balance of "saving the world" (i.e. our
| responsibility with civilization and all lifeforms) and
| "enjoy _your_ life ". Clearly if everyone is concerned
| exclusively with enjoying their lives (i.e. hyper-hedonism),
| society collapses; that's deeply irresponsible. If everyone
| is also hyper-focused on self-propagation of our species with
| zero regard to our actual experience as conscious beings with
| rich inner lives, then clearly there's the risk of indeed
| making our inner lives much worse than they could be.
|
| A system I've seen recommended here to think about it is
| (I've seen it related to Ikigai, a Japanese concept): you
| need to find a balance between your needs and experience,
| your skills and potential, and what's good for society at
| large (in a soft max-min).
|
| I think overall, however, if we give it a little thought it's
| easy to find something aligned with our interests and
| potential that can really make a good impact. If you're
| interested I recommend the Effective Altruism community for a
| take on this (they're largely focused on more tangible things
| like Earning to Give) and 80000 hours. In all likelihood,
| just by being a functional member of our society (and giving
| what you can), if you don't work for some obviously evil
| enterprise (idk, making hyper-addictive things, oil field
| discovery, or something like that), you're probably helping
| society.
|
| I encourage a different path as well: if you can program (or
| develop technology) and you're entrepreneurial (many people
| around here?) you can most likely make something that will
| make a good impact on society and even civilization at large.
| Furthering education with online tools, making educational
| games (or otherwise that promote growth and reflection),
| making tools more accessible, ... , improving the robustness
| and reliability of our systems, ..., the list goes on -- why
| not fulfill your potential to the best you can? Invent the
| future, Hack the planet.
| stank345 wrote:
| 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/
|
| 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/
| beckman466 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!)
| Swizec wrote:
| 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.
| basmango wrote:
| Those two things are very different in terms of difficulty.
| That is why you aren't doing them.
| moritonal wrote:
| 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
| sarbaz wrote:
| 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
| tuatoru wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Creating a black hole, with the LHC, that consumes the earth
| eloff wrote:
| > 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| yesenadam wrote:
| In the documentary _The Man Who Saved The World_ , Stanislav
| Petrov travels to meet Kevin Costner, his favourite actor, at
| home. Costner asks him, if he hadn't acted as he did, how many
| people would have died. You expect him to say, many millions,
| or something. He says, _everyone_. _Everyone on earth would 've
| died_. It's a chilling moment. And there's been more than one
| near miss. What kind of crazy species are we that we build a
| system that when it malfunctions (as it did that day) seems
| likely to kill everyone on the planet?!
|
| Now I read on HN that the danger of nuclear war is hyped out of
| proportion to its true severity, and should be considered only
| a little. Sorry, maybe I misunderstand. I have read a similar
| thing on HN a few times though, people that seem to think
| nuclear war really would be no big deal.
|
| But it always seems weird to be how some people are so worried
| to the point of obsession about global warming without
| apparently ever giving a thought to the ever-present risk of
| full-scale nuclear war--something infinitely worse. (Well,
| hardly "war", just a flurry of button-pressing for a few
| minutes.)
| dharma1 wrote:
| 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
| ncmncm wrote:
| 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.
| chrononaut wrote:
| > 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?
| GistNoesis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm afraid the Consumer Product Safety Commission is a serious
| wet blanket on the market potential of generally-relativistic
| desk ornaments.
| titzer wrote:
| 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 cold extend your life by :-)
| perihelions wrote:
| Oh I have that app on my phone!
| Animats wrote:
| 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
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_lase...
| neutronicus wrote:
| I don't think the birth rate thing is an actual existential
| threat
|
| If it goes on long enough there will be opportunities and a
| baby boom
| zzt123 wrote:
| Your first point is something I've wondered as the biotech
| revolution gets under way.
|
| I wonder how many years away we are from home hackers having
| the tools necessary to create a horror. Say, something with the
| spread rate of Covid Delta and which acts as an airborne prion
| disease.
| zh3 wrote:
| Long conjectured, some disillusioned uni student with the
| latest tech combining the R number of measles withe the
| lethality of ebola (and a dash of HIV on the side).
|
| As a twist, "The giving plague" by David Brin is an interesting
| (short) take on it.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
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