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Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

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Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#61

Post by rybosome »

butlike wrote: post #46
cassianoleal wrote: post #5

> And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.” I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.

I doubt it. I've ruminated a little on this and what I think is that as people start dying off, the survivors will find a rather pleasant existence before the end. People start dying off, and all of a sudden housing prices go down. There's more parks open. The air feels fresher gradually. It's a gradual decline as human influence tapers off near the end. I think it will be more "The Last of Us" than "Mad Max"

And, in turn, I doubt this.

Humans living through an event where many people are dying will not be calm and happy, they will panic. There will be factions of people trying to survive and hold society together no matter the cost, others who don't believe or agree with these methods and actively resist, as well as those who seek to exploit the chaos.

COVID was a relatively minor example of this, not even close to an extinction event - how pleasant was existence during that time?

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#62

Post by technothrasher »

I went and visited the Trinity site a bunch of years back during the open house day in October. They gave us a little pamphlet at the gate that said there was no radiation danger to worry about. Then we passed signs along the way to the site saying things like, "don't eat, don't drink, don't apply make-up, don't rub your eyes." The mixed messages didn't exactly inspire confidence.

You can see the few little bits of tower legs, what is left of the trinitite on the ground, and are surrounded by the enormous quiet of the empty desert all around you. It definitely felt like a haunted place. Not in the literal "there are ghosts here" way. Similar feeling to what I had at Dachau. Just very uncomfortable to be there.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#63

Post by nancyminusone »

rybosome wrote: post #61
butlike wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. I've ruminated a little on this and what I think is that as people start dying off, the survivors will find a rather pleasant existence before the end. People start dying off, and all of a sudden housing prices go down. There's more parks open. The air feels fresher gradually. It's a gradual decline as human influence tapers off near the end. I think it will be more "The Last of Us" than "Mad Max"

And, in turn, I doubt this. Humans living through an event where many people are dying will not be calm and happy, they will panic. There will be factions of people trying to survive and hold society together no matter the cost, others who don't believe or agree with these methods and actively resist, as well as those who seek to exploit the chaos. COVID was a relatively minor example of this, not even close to an ex…

I'll be honest, covid wasn't much different than my usual routine. Maybe it would have been if I lived in a more densely populated area.

If not for modern comms, I am convinced that even in a cold war USA vs USSR style aniliation event, there would still be a handful of people on the far corners of the earth who would otherwise take weeks or months to learn anything happened.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#64

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

rybosome wrote: post #61
butlike wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. I've ruminated a little on this and what I think is that as people start dying off, the survivors will find a rather pleasant existence before the end. People start dying off, and all of a sudden housing prices go down. There's more parks open. The air feels fresher gradually. It's a gradual decline as human influence tapers off near the end. I think it will be more "The Last of Us" than "Mad Max"

And, in turn, I doubt this. Humans living through an event where many people are dying will not be calm and happy, they will panic. There will be factions of people trying to survive and hold society together no matter the cost, others who don't believe or agree with these methods and actively resist, as well as those who seek to exploit the chaos. COVID was a relatively minor example of this, not even close to an ex…

Depends on where you live.

To use your COVID example, most of us living well outside the cities and suburbia were very little affected by it. The biggest inconvenience I remember was having to go to Walmart at 6:00 when it opened to get a chance at buying toilet paperl

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#65

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

kilobaud wrote: post #27
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or as something without a mouth and needing to scream.

Hah, if Harlan Ellison were alive for the dawn of LLMs as a widespread technology, he would have had many (dangerous) things to say about the copyright issues, and potential horrors

Oh my god. I want him to come back from the grave just so he can write an essay about LLMs in the style of "The three most important things in life."

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#66

Post by robotresearcher »

butlike wrote: post #46
cassianoleal wrote: post #5

> And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.” I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.

I doubt it. I've ruminated a little on this and what I think is that as people start dying off, the survivors will find a rather pleasant existence before the end. People start dying off, and all of a sudden housing prices go down. There's more parks open. The air feels fresher gradually. It's a gradual decline as human influence tapers off near the end. I think it will be more "The Last of Us" than "Mad Max"

If people are comfortable, they will reproduce and not go extinct. Any situation where we die out slowly is gonna be tough.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#67

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #34
kilobaud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, if Harlan Ellison were alive for the dawn of LLMs as a widespread technology, he would have had many (dangerous) things to say about the copyright issues, and potential horrors

Now we can get an LLM to adopt the persona of Harlan Ellison by fine-tuning it on all of Harlan Ellison’s recorded works and possibly other people’s written reminiscences of their interactions with him and have it generate Ellison-like opinions on the current LLM situation that might be hard to distinguish from Ellison’s actual work. I don’t know if Ellison would be amused or horrified, really. Like some ROM personal…

Were he still alive, I would bet on on Ellison's legendary natural curmudgeonlyness reducing any AI (Artificial Irascibility?) to tears.

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#68

Post by mjamesaustin »

dylan604 wrote: post #38
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty morbid but I think I would go watch if there ever was a public nuclear above surface test again. I hope it will never happen.

This is something that happened[0]. Not sure about that site, but a search returned a bunch of similar sites with no domains I was familiar. [0] https://www.storyhunt.io/en/articles/the-atomic-parties

I don't think I've ever read a story that encapsulates the vibe of Fallout more than this one. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#69

Post by smcameron »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #36

I used to teach a class on the history of contemporary science (WW2-present) and I started the class with Trinity. There’s no other moment better. We know how it turned out, but the people there waiting for the test did not know how it would turn out. The bomb might not have worked. Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world. Hans Bethe had sat down and done the calculations…

Funny enough Adam Savage just posted a youtube video about building a replica of the demon core and the box to hold it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Y4UR8xqxA

Re: Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

#70

Post by hydrogen7800 »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #52
SoftTalker wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it a single solid core that was imploded? I thought it was at least two non-critical-mass hemispheres, or more, that were smashed together by the conventional explosives/detonators, to create a critical mass.

You’re thinking of the other bomb, the U-235 one, which they didn’t test at Trinity and which was dropped on Hiroshima. That is two separate pieces of Uranium that are slammed together to create a critical mass. The Pu-239 core was a single sphere of metal. It was subcritical until you compress it down with a spherical implosion from explosive charges all around it (from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a lime…

>(from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a lime)

Whoa. Its hard to imagine you could have enough conventional explosives to compress a dense metal by ~10x (?). You'd need some serious containment to direct that energy inward rather than outward. I suppose I have some reading to do.

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