Do they specify exactly what qualifies as a successful apocalyptic prediction? In particular they count a US civil war as an apocalyptic event… lots of countries and societies have been completely wiped out, though, which must(?) be more apocalyptic. Maybe the point of the site is just that apocalypses tend to happen unexpectedly?
Doomsday scoreboard
131–140 of 167 posts
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
People like Ray Kurzweil, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Paul Christiano see a pathway out of this inevitability through technological singularity. In their vision humans are a seed to something greater, something noticeable on cosmic scales. In their vision, like early humans who emerged on the other end of genetic bottlenecks, today's humans will have a disproportionate effect on the future. According t…
Please don't take this to be dismissive of your comment, because that's not my intention, but... I think people like Ray Kurzweil are essentially religious. Instead of a messiah and heaven, they think of salvation in terms of a singularity, immortality, or a way of ascension. It feels very religious to me, and as such, detached from reality and physical possibilities.
Even if upload does not produce a singularity or the like it still is a huge step towards getting more time to address other issues and it makes interstellar solutions viable. But when we can read out the human mind remains an unknown.
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#133Are the predictions from the 2nd and later IPCC reports in there? Last I checked they were on track.
But is that the apocalypse? I hate the fact that we're destabilizing the environment, but humans (and wildlife) are pretty good at adaptation. Our ancestors have obviously survived massive extinction events in the past.
Most species have gone extinct.
Personally, I do not believe climate change can kill us off. The worst case predictions are pretty dire (and beware the worst case makes the IPCC look tame--there is not enough data on methane hydrates for it to be in the IPCC model, but the worst case estimates are worse than the IPCC estimates and they will probably stack.) But I consider extinction likely because we can move around. An animal that loses 90% of it's habitat loses 90% of it's population but the survivors are pretty much the same as before. But are those humans who will be killed off just going to sit there?
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think Russia vs. Ukraine would happen with any similarity with the real conflict if Russia didn't have nuclear weapons? Because, IMO, Russia would be destroyed the first time they threatened NATO.
> Because, IMO, Russia would be destroyed the first time they threatened NATO. Maybe. Or maybe the big powers might realize that sending hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to die in an all out war (depending on how big it gets and who else gets involved) is a harder sell than settling on appeasement and so smaller states would lose their sovereignty. I live in Latvia. If there's no risk of MAD, then wha…
We (I'm an American) have four ballistic missile subs that no longer carry ballistic missiles because of arms reduction treaties. The subs still exist, though, with each of the Trident launch tubes instead holding 7 Tomahawks. They are built to hide and they're very good at it--we can't even reliably track them ourselves. That means they could sneak in to launch points some distance from Russia. The Ukraine war has shown that heavy air defenses sometimes work against ground hugging missiles (but remember the Moskova--despite fearsome anti-air capability it for some reason couldn't engage two sea hugging missiles), but ares without heavy defenses fare poorly against even crude low altitude stuff. Expect most of those Tomahawks to get through, and there goes Russia's logistics capability. Most stuff of importance is within Tomahawk range of the coast.
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#135It can show 0 successful predictions all it wants, but we'd been through global lockdowns and forced vaccination, there's an ongoing war in Europe with casualties in hundreds of thousands on both sides, Gaza is being demolished by Israel, Internet as we knew it is about to turn into whitelisted fiberoptic/5G TV, surveillance is rampant, and the rise of the global technofascist police state as the public is being ente…
Don't disagree with any of that, and I don't want to minimize the seriousness of the issues you've cited, but that kind of reinforces the implication of the scorecard? People are persistently presented with perils (plagues, parasites, pollution, power-hungry politicians, propaganda, plutonium-powered projectiles, etc...) and humanity keeps finding a way through (though certainly at great personal and population-wide…
What would a Denesovian say about this?
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#136Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm talking about the divinity of Jesus.
This is a widely researched topic by scholars. Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for? Or is this purposefully obtuse
>Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for?
New? Not, not really. It's not at all new that the official position of the church ("Jesus is entirely mortal and entirely divine") is inherently self-contradictory. I mean, what the hell. If I didn't know any better I'd think an atheist came up with it to troll early Christians. Try saying something similar about literally anything else. "The contents of this glass are simultaneously entirely water and entirely mercury." It says nothing good of either the followers or the clergy that that nonsense has been accepted for so long.
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, obviously, but our ancestors weren't human then.
Sure, and they didn't speak English either, but I don't see how that's relevant.
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a widely researched topic by scholars. Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for? Or is this purposefully obtuse
LOL, "researched". >Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for? New? Not, not really. It's not at all new that the official position of the church ("Jesus is entirely mortal and entirely divine") is inherently self-contradictory. I mean, what the hell. If I didn't know any better I'd think an atheist came up with it to troll early Christians. Try saying something similar about literally anything else…
"Mr. Archibald Potterfarthing is at the same time the Chair of the Committee and at the same time its most senior ranking member". Accidents, naturally, but co-existing in the same space-of-being. It turns out that "person" and "nature" are distinct (who knew?) and that it is possible for there to be one person with two natures just as well as there can be one person with two titles. But that presumes you believe the authority of the one who told you this - if not, it's useless to talk about it, because why would you ever need to distinguish person and nature unless you had encountered the reality of Christ? Nothing else we have encountered in the universe has (as far as we are aware) two natures. But nothing else behaves like a singularity either - uniqueness is not a proof of non-existence.
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
LOL, "researched". >Is there something new or relevant you’re making a case for? New? Not, not really. It's not at all new that the official position of the church ("Jesus is entirely mortal and entirely divine") is inherently self-contradictory. I mean, what the hell. If I didn't know any better I'd think an atheist came up with it to troll early Christians. Try saying something similar about literally anything else…
It's not inherently self-contradictory for us to say "Jesus revealed Himself as the Son of God and the Son of Man ... how can we properly speak about that?" https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4002.htm#article2 - now that requires a lot of extra distinctions that we don't normally think about when thinking about being and essence, but it's certainly not impossible. "Mr. Archibald Potterfarthing is at the same time the Ch…
Of course, but that falls apart as soon as you reread the dogma. Jesus is entirely human and entirely divine. He is both things in the same way at the same time. He has to be entirely human for his sacrifice to have any meaning, but he has to entirely divine... I can't remember why. So he could be worshiped?
A man who is both a doctor and a judge isn't entirely either one. There are moments of his day where he is neither presiding over a courtroom nor seeing any patients, and there are parts of his body that are neither judicial nor medical. More importantly, when he passes sentence he doesn't exercise his medical privileges, and when he prescribes medicine he doesn't do it in a judicial capacity. Even if both aspects bleed somewhat into each other, they're still mostly compartmentalized.
None of this can apply to Jesus, if the word "entirely" or "fully" means anything. If he dies, he must simultaneously die like mortals do and live on like deities do. So which is it? Did he die or didn't he?