The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
#2It’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
Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
#3The 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
Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
#4Some 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...
Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
#5It’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…
> I feel like I’m not using any of my technical acumen to advance human civilization
What would you rather be working on?
Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
#6Some 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,…
> 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.
Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
#7The 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
> 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.
Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
#8It’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…
Those two things are very different in terms of difficulty. That is why you aren't doing them.
Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
#9It’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…
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.
Re: The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity
#10Some 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,…
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.