61–70 of 73 posts
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So let’s say I’ve got step 2. figured out with vacuum decay or similar, how do I check if the list is sorted in O(1) to determine if I destroy the universe or not? And given that the list being sorted is a one in n! chance, often enormously less likely than than hardware malfunction, wouldn’t the algorithm mostly produce malfunctions rather than sorted lists? (Genuinely curious if I’ve got the right understanding of…
Checking if a list is sorted is O(N) if you do it in a single thread since you'd have to check all the elements. If you can do it with a prefix sum or something, it should be possible to do it in O(log N) over many cores. Btw, the quantum bogosort also assumes that destroying the universe is O(1), which seems unlikely. Clearly, when sorting a bigger list there is more information in the universe (ie the list). Since…
As with most technical challenges, scale is always an issue. Depopulating a city is relatively easy and achievable with conventional bombs. A small country would only be moderately more difficult with nuclear weapons. After this, things get much harder. Sure, enough nukes could finish off the human race, but that's out of the price range for most shoppers in this market. In the long term, climate change might do it,…
> Sure, enough nukes could finish off the human race, but that's out of the price range for most shoppers in this market. I dunno, there's plenty of nukes that are ready and waiting and have been paid for. I wonder what would be more effective; nuking the targets that have been designated by various states already since the cold war, or piling up all the nukes, maybe a few km underground, and trigger a cataclysmic ev…
I like the your thinking. This is a problem that definitely benefits from a gestalt approach. Otherwise there's lots of ways pockets of life can cling on and maybe regain a foothold in a few thousand years when your back is turned. That's why you need the Deadliest Catch crew for the crabs: Sure they have to search, but even the worst ship always came back with some. Load those guys up with crystal meth, adult diapers, and an IV nutrient drip and push them through a decade of non-stop crabbing until there aren't enough left to sustain a reproductive cycle. Between that, nuclear fallout, and the chemical agents used for other life forms you can knock out these little delicious cockroaches of the sea.
On the availability of nukes, sure there's more than enough around, but the problem is ownership. Unless you've subverted the government of Russia, the US, or China then even if you have enough nukes, you don't have the infrastructure to launch them all at the same time & avoid giving too much warning to people. They'll bunker down and do all sorts of inconvenient things like try to restart civilization. Their chances are slim, especially with the super volcano route, but it could take a while to wait them out. And at that point you've lost the nuke option since all of the launch infrastructure has been destroyed. Then you've got to go the long way around and root them out shelter by shelter (or vault by vault, Fallout style) Messy. On the plus side, some of the people in those shelters will be preppers who tried to plan for this sort of thing, and they'll get to die while living out their fantasy.
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> Sure, enough nukes could finish off the human race, but that's out of the price range for most shoppers in this market. I dunno, there's plenty of nukes that are ready and waiting and have been paid for. I wonder what would be more effective; nuking the targets that have been designated by various states already since the cold war, or piling up all the nukes, maybe a few km underground, and trigger a cataclysmic ev…
Cant we just attach all nukes to one side of the moon, make it explode so hard that it pushes the moon toward the earth that it hits like a cool asteroid? Haha
The problem though is still the amount of energy needed: In short, too much. Ball park estimate place it at about 410^28 joules, and a large nuker only puts out about 410^15.
The theory is still sound though, and could be modified: Drill down a hundred miles or so and put 90% of the nukes down the hole to blow a crater out. Take the largest chunks and the remaining 10% of the nukes and proceed as originally planned, but on a smaller scale. Bonus: The debris should also make its way to LEO and trigger a cascade of collisions that take out everything in orbit.
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Amazing :) I really should watch more of their videos, I'd forgotten how brilliant they are.
They also do one on "what happens if a single modern nuclear weapon is exploded over a city" - but I think the BBC did a better job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GJttnC8PoA&t=16s [Edit: And by 'better job' I mean scared me witless as a teenager]
_Feels old_
Can't take it serious because it didn't list the primary cause of our extinction in my eyes. Its going to be the antibiotic winter, antibiotic resistant bacteria. I'm very sure some people who got ventilated for covid actually died to this, given its prevalence its a virtual certainty. There are no new antibiotics coming and the half life on new ones before resistance is developed is less than 5 years. They want you…
There are enough antibiotics that they could be cycled, with some kept in reserve for emergencies only (e.g. sepsis).
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Checking if a list is sorted is O(N) if you do it in a single thread since you'd have to check all the elements. If you can do it with a prefix sum or something, it should be possible to do it in O(log N) over many cores. Btw, the quantum bogosort also assumes that destroying the universe is O(1), which seems unlikely. Clearly, when sorting a bigger list there is more information in the universe (ie the list). Since…
Does it matter how long destroying the universe takes, since that's in the unsorted branch? The universe with the sorted list continues immediately, the cleanup is handled elsewhere.