81–90 of 125 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was actually almost a year ago https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1947293757612994886
1 day ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Y4UR8xqxA
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…
> Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world Someone's got to explain to me how this was even remotely plausible. We've had orders of magnitude more energetic events in earth's history that they would be aware of (dinosaur slaying asteroid for instance). These didn't manage to destroy the earth by turning the atmosphere into a fusion reactor. Surely they were aware of this. S…
E. O. Lawrence's 1930 cyclotron could generate protons at roughly a million degrees Celsius. But that's a single proton stream. Good for splitting atoms but not for fusing them. You really don't know what the cross section of a fusion reaction is until you do it. The properties of matter at that temperature are just super weird. If it had turned out that there was, e.g., a carbon-carbon fusion reaction with a lower initiation, that might be enough to "go critical" and kick off more fusions, and propagate around the world. According to estimates, the Chicxulub crater was 1-10,000 degrees C. Not even the same ballpark.
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…
For me it was mostly terrific. We had increased streams of revenue and were food secure for the first time in a decade. Meetings I dreaded due to crowds were streamed online.
And the roads were blessedly, amazingly, wonderfully travelable.
The housing crisis in 2021 was another matter entirely. Our long term rental was sold and what few listings there were got 400 hundred applications - every day.
2020 was excellent for us. 2021 was a slow moving, panic-strewn nightmare.
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…
> Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world Someone's got to explain to me how this was even remotely plausible. We've had orders of magnitude more energetic events in earth's history that they would be aware of (dinosaur slaying asteroid for instance). These didn't manage to destroy the earth by turning the atmosphere into a fusion reactor. Surely they were aware of this. S…
But, and I'm not sure how much of this they knew back then, we do get bombarded by high-energy cosmic rays, so chances are one of these hypothetical N or O reactions should've already randomly occurred at least in isolated events over the last few billion years if possible.
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"
If people are comfortable, they will reproduce and not go extinct. Any situation where we die out slowly is gonna be tough.
I will assume this is true and plug it into our falling birthrates.
What I find so strange about the awe and horror of the atom bomb, its utter power and violence, is how it was the result of decades - well, centuries - of abstract thinking in mathematics and theoretical physics. And how it required particularly new paradigms about the nature of the material world. Imagine a cosmic being looking at the Earth through a microscope, and seeing this bubble pop on the surface in mid-20th…
Whenever I’m tempted to think that potential AGI/ASI scenarios sound “too sci-fi” I have to remind myself of this. We live in a world with nuclear weapons and spaceships and microwave ovens. It might prove impossible and it might not, but we can’t predict that based on a general vibe of sci-fi-ness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If people are comfortable, they will reproduce and not go extinct. Any situation where we die out slowly is gonna be tough.
> If people are comfortable, they will reproduce I will assume this is true and plug it into our falling birthrates.
What I find so strange about the awe and horror of the atom bomb, its utter power and violence, is how it was the result of decades - well, centuries - of abstract thinking in mathematics and theoretical physics. And how it required particularly new paradigms about the nature of the material world. Imagine a cosmic being looking at the Earth through a microscope, and seeing this bubble pop on the surface in mid-20th…
The really mad thing is that while you say it's centuries of abstract thinking and the like, it was only 50 years between the discovery of X-rays and radiation and the first atom bomb, or 40 between the first idea that you could use fission to make a bomb. Neutrons and the nuclear chain reaction was only theorized in the 30's, about 10-15 years before the first nuclear bomb was detonated. But likewise, there was only…
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…
> Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world Someone's got to explain to me how this was even remotely plausible. We've had orders of magnitude more energetic events in earth's history that they would be aware of (dinosaur slaying asteroid for instance). These didn't manage to destroy the earth by turning the atmosphere into a fusion reactor. Surely they were aware of this. S…
And then of course there are versions making it into a much more dramatic story.
When they were working on the fusion bomb (and Edward Teller was working on fusion full time already during the Manhattan project), it took some years to establish that even the "easy" to fuse deuterium cannot be set of by simply blowing up a fission bomb. The reaction simply did not propagate for any reasonable dimensions of the system. For any other material the energy balance would have been orders of magnitude short of what was required for a propagating fusion burn.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's in the TFA, there a photo of a fellow holding a small box thing that looks like a battery from a car or an old box torch.
That’s the one I meant. It’s the core, but in a box, which makes it look even more innocuous, like he is indeed just lugging a piece of industrial equipment around. There’s lots of photos of the actual (unboxed) cores online if you search.
if i remember correctly what i read it was done intentionally for security reasons - instead of all the pomp-and-circumstance of a large strong security convoy the core was delivered by a driver in a simple inconspicuous truck.