Our Visible Universe Will Disappear In An Instant With No Warning
July 18, 2022 10:56 PM Subscribe
This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- loup
Of course, I totally don't understand the point of the quantum suicide/immortality thing, so perhaps I'm not well equipped to be scared by these...
posted by pompomtom at 11:14 PM on July 18, 2022
posted by pompomtom at 11:14 PM on July 18, 2022
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 11:15 PM on July 18, 2022 [68 favorites]
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 11:15 PM on July 18, 2022 [68 favorites]
Roko’s BasiliskIs the dumbest crap that supposedly smart people ever came up with.
posted by borges at 11:16 PM on July 18, 2022 [46 favorites]
posted by borges at 11:16 PM on July 18, 2022 [46 favorites]
"Quantum Suicide" inspired (or maybe was inspired by?) an old Niven story, All the Myriad Ways. If every possible outcome is sampled in the multiverse, there will be some that are otherwise very similar but have a handful of totally inexplicable anomalies.
"Grey Goo" is the only one that is IMHO fairly plausible, if interpreted broadly. (Microplastics, anyone?) The writeup for Fermi's Paradox seems to have nothing to do with Fermi's paradox. (It's closer to Sagan's explanation of why you shouldn't believe Fermi, but Sagan wasn't trying to scare anyone.)
Although the only catastrophe that actually made me nervous when I heard about it was nothing that big, and not meteors or giant tsunamis--it's the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Don't ask me why, we're all just as dead either way.
posted by mark k at 11:58 PM on July 18, 2022 [9 favorites]
"Grey Goo" is the only one that is IMHO fairly plausible, if interpreted broadly. (Microplastics, anyone?) The writeup for Fermi's Paradox seems to have nothing to do with Fermi's paradox. (It's closer to Sagan's explanation of why you shouldn't believe Fermi, but Sagan wasn't trying to scare anyone.)
Although the only catastrophe that actually made me nervous when I heard about it was nothing that big, and not meteors or giant tsunamis--it's the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Don't ask me why, we're all just as dead either way.
posted by mark k at 11:58 PM on July 18, 2022 [9 favorites]
Roko’s BasiliskIs the dumbest crap that supposedly smart people ever came up with.
It’s kind of isomorphic to Pascal’s Wager, at least in terms of stupidity.
posted by aubilenon at 12:06 AM on July 19, 2022 [13 favorites]
It’s kind of isomorphic to Pascal’s Wager, at least in terms of stupidity.
posted by aubilenon at 12:06 AM on July 19, 2022 [13 favorites]
All that's missing are the links to Ross Perot videos. Seriously, a quick cure for the edgy science bro bullshit is Tiny Baby Stoat.
posted by Beholder at 12:06 AM on July 19, 2022
posted by Beholder at 12:06 AM on July 19, 2022
I don't understand why anyone would be scared about instantaneously no longer being. I mean you never even know, eh? (Is this something you have to have belief in some sort of afterlife to find terrifying?) Worrying about stuff that is really unlikely and that you can do nothing about is just a way to drive yourself to a much more likely demise via stress.
posted by maxwelton at 12:13 AM on July 19, 2022 [17 favorites]
posted by maxwelton at 12:13 AM on July 19, 2022 [17 favorites]
I still think boltzmann brains are scarier. (The really delicious part about boltzmann brains is the idea that infinite universes imply that stupendously unlikely things must happen, and they must happen infinitely many times.)
posted by surlyben at 12:21 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by surlyben at 12:21 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
I don't understand why anyone would be scared about instantaneously no longer being. I mean you never even know, eh?
RIGHT?? I just keep thinking, well, that sounds infinitely more pleasant than how I suspect the world is actually going to end (slowly, and with a lot of suffering, because of global warming and other forms of human stupidity). If that’s the alternative, I would so much rather just get extinguished in an instant and not know about it!
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:35 AM on July 19, 2022 [28 favorites]
RIGHT?? I just keep thinking, well, that sounds infinitely more pleasant than how I suspect the world is actually going to end (slowly, and with a lot of suffering, because of global warming and other forms of human stupidity). If that’s the alternative, I would so much rather just get extinguished in an instant and not know about it!
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:35 AM on July 19, 2022 [28 favorites]
Clathrate Gun Hypothesis
This is it kiddies. This is the real one facing us in our lifetime. Once that permafrost/ocean floor 'gun' goes off, we is forked.
posted by Thella at 12:51 AM on July 19, 2022 [26 favorites]
This is it kiddies. This is the real one facing us in our lifetime. Once that permafrost/ocean floor 'gun' goes off, we is forked.
posted by Thella at 12:51 AM on July 19, 2022 [26 favorites]
Kessler Syndrome sounds like just the dumb sort of thing we are likely to do. Some stupid billionaire decides to launch thousands of satellites, fails to keep them far enough apart, and sets off a chain reaction of collisions that destroys everyone's satellites and makes it impossible to launch anything into orbit for a generation.
posted by straight at 2:33 AM on July 19, 2022 [10 favorites]
posted by straight at 2:33 AM on July 19, 2022 [10 favorites]
With a healthy risk of frozen viruses as the permafrost melts, yep.
And honestly, it's infinity scarier that humans can mass murder, holocaust, or only try to do good so the god they believe in doesn't eternally torment them.
posted by Jacen at 2:36 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
And honestly, it's infinity scarier that humans can mass murder, holocaust, or only try to do good so the god they believe in doesn't eternally torment them.
posted by Jacen at 2:36 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
One way or another, there’s an end, and it won’t be pretty. Right here, as we kill this planet either quickly or slowly; or we make it to other planets, but remain trapped in this solar system with a dying star; or we hop system to system, even galaxy to galaxy, but fall eventually at the heat death of the universe when there’s simply nowhere else to go. The only eternal hope is that we don’t know all the rules of the game yet.
posted by breakfast burrito at 3:02 AM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by breakfast burrito at 3:02 AM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
There's an even scarier explanation for the Fermi Paradox / Great Filter called the Dark Forest, and it's basically the entire plot of a book trilogy called The Three Body Problem.
It's hard to do the concept justice in a few sentences, because the author doesn't just say, here's a a cool theory, he sets up the entire plot and by the end of book 2, you really really get why it's terrifying.
It's a dense 3 novel series, so I will skip a lot of plot, but the gist of it up to Book 2 (Dark Forest) point is that a scientist (Ye Wenjie) has deliberately broadcast earth's position to a nearby alien civilization as act of revenge and suicide after her family and her life is destroyed by the Cultural Revolution.
Earth assembles a vast fleet it believes is superior to the aliens, but one captain in the fleet (Zhang Beihai) believes the aliens intend to destroy us and we are doomed to lose. He commandeers a battleship along with its crew and flees the solar system. He is pursued by 4 other ships ordered to capture him.
A single tiny alien probe is first to arrive ahead of the main alien fleet and is "captured" by earth's fleet. Humanity concludes it is a gift from the aliens, and Zhang Beihai realises he is wrong and surrenders to the 4 other battleships.
Without warning the tiny probe annihilates the entirety of earth's fleet, leaving only the 5 ships outside the solar system.
Within minutes, their captains process what has happened and come to the realization that they cannot return home to earth, and that each ship individually does not have enough resources to carry them on a journey to the nearest inhabitable star. Each captain comes to the same conclusion, and simultaneously opens fire on all the others with infrasonic weapons, designed to kill all life while leaving the ship intact. Only one ship survives the battle. It collects all the resources, then leaves the solar system, abandoning earth.
A sociologist and astronomer (Luo Ji) observes this and combines it with earlier insights from his conversations with Ye Wenjie. He comes up with two axioms - life's goal is to survive, and resources are finite. A "chain of suspicion" arises when two parties cannot communicate quickly enough to alleviate mistrust, which results in the only rational choice - eliminate the other party first, before you yourself are eliminated.
This ties into the book's title - The Dark Forest - a parable of hunters lost in a supernatural dark forest, who have to treat every movement as a threat - either a wild animal, or another hunter. The only rational choice is to instantly fire the moment you see something, because it's either a wild animal about to kill you, or another hunter doing the same thing.
Luo Ji realises this is the explanation for the Fermi Paradox - if the universe contains trillions of stars, and is billions of years old, surely there must be an abundance of life - but why can't we observe any of it from earth? It is because all civilizations are extremely careful to keep themselves hidden in the Dark Forest. Any civilization which reveals itself is wiped out, as casually as a gardener pulls out weeds in his garden.
This explanation assumes the "cost" of wiping out another civilization is very low relative to the difficulty in defending against it - the same asymmetry we see today in warfare, where it's trivial to get an AR-15 but difficult to purchase armor that effectively defends against it. Civilizations that detect radio signals or other signs of life - simply fire a stealthy relativistic projectile at the planet and forget about it, happy to wait centuries for it to arrive. Since you can't predict if a nascent alien species will eventually be friendly or hostile, the only rational choice is to eliminate it as soon as possible before they have grown into an advanced spacefaring species spanning several star systems. So, Earth wantonly broadcasting radio and TV signals into space might in fact have alerted aliens to our existence, and there might already be undetectable planet killing projectiles headed towards us...
posted by xdvesper at 3:13 AM on July 19, 2022 [39 favorites]
It's hard to do the concept justice in a few sentences, because the author doesn't just say, here's a a cool theory, he sets up the entire plot and by the end of book 2, you really really get why it's terrifying.
It's a dense 3 novel series, so I will skip a lot of plot, but the gist of it up to Book 2 (Dark Forest) point is that a scientist (Ye Wenjie) has deliberately broadcast earth's position to a nearby alien civilization as act of revenge and suicide after her family and her life is destroyed by the Cultural Revolution.
Earth assembles a vast fleet it believes is superior to the aliens, but one captain in the fleet (Zhang Beihai) believes the aliens intend to destroy us and we are doomed to lose. He commandeers a battleship along with its crew and flees the solar system. He is pursued by 4 other ships ordered to capture him.
A single tiny alien probe is first to arrive ahead of the main alien fleet and is "captured" by earth's fleet. Humanity concludes it is a gift from the aliens, and Zhang Beihai realises he is wrong and surrenders to the 4 other battleships.
Without warning the tiny probe annihilates the entirety of earth's fleet, leaving only the 5 ships outside the solar system.
Within minutes, their captains process what has happened and come to the realization that they cannot return home to earth, and that each ship individually does not have enough resources to carry them on a journey to the nearest inhabitable star. Each captain comes to the same conclusion, and simultaneously opens fire on all the others with infrasonic weapons, designed to kill all life while leaving the ship intact. Only one ship survives the battle. It collects all the resources, then leaves the solar system, abandoning earth.
A sociologist and astronomer (Luo Ji) observes this and combines it with earlier insights from his conversations with Ye Wenjie. He comes up with two axioms - life's goal is to survive, and resources are finite. A "chain of suspicion" arises when two parties cannot communicate quickly enough to alleviate mistrust, which results in the only rational choice - eliminate the other party first, before you yourself are eliminated.
This ties into the book's title - The Dark Forest - a parable of hunters lost in a supernatural dark forest, who have to treat every movement as a threat - either a wild animal, or another hunter. The only rational choice is to instantly fire the moment you see something, because it's either a wild animal about to kill you, or another hunter doing the same thing.
Luo Ji realises this is the explanation for the Fermi Paradox - if the universe contains trillions of stars, and is billions of years old, surely there must be an abundance of life - but why can't we observe any of it from earth? It is because all civilizations are extremely careful to keep themselves hidden in the Dark Forest. Any civilization which reveals itself is wiped out, as casually as a gardener pulls out weeds in his garden.
This explanation assumes the "cost" of wiping out another civilization is very low relative to the difficulty in defending against it - the same asymmetry we see today in warfare, where it's trivial to get an AR-15 but difficult to purchase armor that effectively defends against it. Civilizations that detect radio signals or other signs of life - simply fire a stealthy relativistic projectile at the planet and forget about it, happy to wait centuries for it to arrive. Since you can't predict if a nascent alien species will eventually be friendly or hostile, the only rational choice is to eliminate it as soon as possible before they have grown into an advanced spacefaring species spanning several star systems. So, Earth wantonly broadcasting radio and TV signals into space might in fact have alerted aliens to our existence, and there might already be undetectable planet killing projectiles headed towards us...
posted by xdvesper at 3:13 AM on July 19, 2022 [39 favorites]
Everything that humanity has ever accomplished beyond basic survival has been motivated by a fundamental and irreducible fear of non-existence.I agree that this fear does seem to be fundamental to the worldview and life choices of an awful lot of people. I vehemently disagree that it's irreducible.
Having spent quite some time contemplating ideas about existence and nonexistence and the nature of my own physicality and consciousness, I am no longer the slightest bit afraid of ceasing to exist per se, and I refuse to take seriously the idea that I am the only person ever to have figured that out.
Naturally, there are assorted ways of ceasing to exist that involve suffering I would rather not subject myself to, but that's a fear of suffering, not a fear of nonexistence, and I think retaining that fear is probably quite useful.
I also have a lot of things to look forward to that I would prefer to get around to before returning to nonexistence, so although an interesting and preferably ecstatic death has a permanent place on my bucket list, it's right down there at the bottom.
posted by flabdablet at 3:53 AM on July 19, 2022 [15 favorites]
"Grey Goo" is the only one that is IMHO fairly plausible...
I’d put Kessler Syndrome up there, too.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:14 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
I’d put Kessler Syndrome up there, too.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:14 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
Here's another one for you.
Suppose that people in the future figure out time travel, so they go back and prevent things in their history that caused problems. Sometimes an undoing causes new problems, in which case someone from *that* future goes back and undoes the undoing.
All of which is to say that this -- all of this, all around us, all the crap in our history and present and near future -- is the optimal timeline. This is the best humans can do. Sigh.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:16 AM on July 19, 2022 [7 favorites]
Suppose that people in the future figure out time travel, so they go back and prevent things in their history that caused problems. Sometimes an undoing causes new problems, in which case someone from *that* future goes back and undoes the undoing.
All of which is to say that this -- all of this, all around us, all the crap in our history and present and near future -- is the optimal timeline. This is the best humans can do. Sigh.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:16 AM on July 19, 2022 [7 favorites]
This is a really bizarre article in that most of the items are so theoretical and abstract, or so distant from our lived reality, as to be no more than spooky campfire stories dressed up in scientific or philosophical language. And then, in the middle of those, it mentions methane feedbacks and the current mass extinction event, which, folks, I work in that field and the mass extinction is happening right now. Insects are disappearing. Birds are disappearing. Amphibians are disappearing. Fish are disappearing. This is real, and it's the one thing on the list that actually worries me because it's the one thing on the list that we can actually MAYBE, MAYBE, MAYBE do anything about.
*(the 'clathrate gun' hypothesis is still definitely in the realm of possibility, but it has fallen out of favor somewhat (though not entirely, no indeed!) in the last few years within the climate research community. Note that the article conflates two distinct, though fairly similar, methane release processes: one is the release of "melting" methane hydrates from the seafloor, and the other is the release of methane from decomposing terrestrial permafrost like what we're seeing in Siberia. Permafrost melting and associated CO2/methane release is definitely happening, particularly in oxic and non-waterlogged soils. But the seafloor clathrate dissociation is a surprisingly complex process in terms of the possible rates of release, in terms of what environmental parameters it responds to, over what time scales it responds to them, and in terms of how efficiently methane-eating microbes might be able to eat the released methane. For an example of this uncertainty, Wallmann et al. (2018) looked at Arctic seafloor cores and concluded that their methane hydrates were not released in the last 30 years; they were released during the retreat of the Arctic ice sheets several thousand years ago.)
posted by cubeb at 4:21 AM on July 19, 2022 [36 favorites]
*(the 'clathrate gun' hypothesis is still definitely in the realm of possibility, but it has fallen out of favor somewhat (though not entirely, no indeed!) in the last few years within the climate research community. Note that the article conflates two distinct, though fairly similar, methane release processes: one is the release of "melting" methane hydrates from the seafloor, and the other is the release of methane from decomposing terrestrial permafrost like what we're seeing in Siberia. Permafrost melting and associated CO2/methane release is definitely happening, particularly in oxic and non-waterlogged soils. But the seafloor clathrate dissociation is a surprisingly complex process in terms of the possible rates of release, in terms of what environmental parameters it responds to, over what time scales it responds to them, and in terms of how efficiently methane-eating microbes might be able to eat the released methane. For an example of this uncertainty, Wallmann et al. (2018) looked at Arctic seafloor cores and concluded that their methane hydrates were not released in the last 30 years; they were released during the retreat of the Arctic ice sheets several thousand years ago.)
posted by cubeb at 4:21 AM on July 19, 2022 [36 favorites]
This piece mainly reminds me why I'm delighted to never have to spend any more of my time around sci-fi fanboys of a certain age and privilege with too much free time and who've just discovered deep philosophical anxiety and marijuana. It's creepypasta for self-styled big thinkers who believe that the reason that they're unpopular is because everyone else is a shallow idiot.
Kessler Syndrome is a legit worry for local exploration in the solar system (the only one we can explore), but worrying about the heat death of the universe reminds me of all the sci-fi set five billion years in the future where everyone acts like people from the 20th century, which just points out that we can barely describe the changes and diversity of thinking in the last 5,000-40,000 years, let alone over a geological timespan.
15-year-old me would have loved this, and put down his ravaged, taped-together copy of The Book Of Lists (the ur-volume of latter-day listicles) to sit back with his Walkman for a sulk and a searing fear-headache, but 54-year-old me is comfortable to note, with some glee, that there's still some well-aged camembert in the fridge for a nice omelette, and watch a beautiful blue jay angrily chasing a crow around the yard with a smirk while pondering whether there's enough camembert to make similar omelettes for my partner and step-kid this morning in a world that, in the best of circumstances, will be over for me in 30-40 years or so if I'm lucky. In the meantime, I can do my microscopic part in the effort to help my species avoid more localized calamities, but the end of time and space itself is more than I need to worry about, so I just don't.
Insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
posted by sonascope at 4:38 AM on July 19, 2022 [42 favorites]
Kessler Syndrome is a legit worry for local exploration in the solar system (the only one we can explore), but worrying about the heat death of the universe reminds me of all the sci-fi set five billion years in the future where everyone acts like people from the 20th century, which just points out that we can barely describe the changes and diversity of thinking in the last 5,000-40,000 years, let alone over a geological timespan.
15-year-old me would have loved this, and put down his ravaged, taped-together copy of The Book Of Lists (the ur-volume of latter-day listicles) to sit back with his Walkman for a sulk and a searing fear-headache, but 54-year-old me is comfortable to note, with some glee, that there's still some well-aged camembert in the fridge for a nice omelette, and watch a beautiful blue jay angrily chasing a crow around the yard with a smirk while pondering whether there's enough camembert to make similar omelettes for my partner and step-kid this morning in a world that, in the best of circumstances, will be over for me in 30-40 years or so if I'm lucky. In the meantime, I can do my microscopic part in the effort to help my species avoid more localized calamities, but the end of time and space itself is more than I need to worry about, so I just don't.
Insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
posted by sonascope at 4:38 AM on July 19, 2022 [42 favorites]
I was surprised not to see the Yellowstone Supervolcano theory as well. Plus mutated pandemic that wipes everyone out, which seems like it could be on a much more accelerated timeline if we keep letting Covid mutate.
Why does the goo always have to be grey, though? That’s just pessimistic.
posted by Mchelly at 4:43 AM on July 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
Why does the goo always have to be grey, though? That’s just pessimistic.
posted by Mchelly at 4:43 AM on July 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
Why does the goo always have to be grey, though? That’s just pessimistic.
Metafilter Blue Goo.
posted by othrechaz at 4:46 AM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
Metafilter Blue Goo.
posted by othrechaz at 4:46 AM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
Coming soon to FoxNews: Rainbow Goo. It's like Gray Goo, only woke.
posted by acb at 4:52 AM on July 19, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by acb at 4:52 AM on July 19, 2022 [9 favorites]
It's grey because of projection. The hypothesis assumes the goo will be generalist in nature rather than a bunch of different nanites (and hence different colours) work either together or at cross purposes.
The last one, the Behavioral Sink, is the one that freaked me out with existential horror the first time i heard about it. Though I'd thought it had been discredited in some way.
posted by Mitheral at 4:52 AM on July 19, 2022
The last one, the Behavioral Sink, is the one that freaked me out with existential horror the first time i heard about it. Though I'd thought it had been discredited in some way.
posted by Mitheral at 4:52 AM on July 19, 2022
This article of terrifying theories is missing the most terrifying theory of all:
During your lifetime, you accidentally swallow about twenty spiders a year in your sleep. If you somehow managed to swallow zero, then just before you die of old age they all come for your mouth at once.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:54 AM on July 19, 2022 [25 favorites]
During your lifetime, you accidentally swallow about twenty spiders a year in your sleep. If you somehow managed to swallow zero, then just before you die of old age they all come for your mouth at once.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:54 AM on July 19, 2022 [25 favorites]
Behavioral Sink sounds like an email your conservative aunt would forward to you with randomly capitalized words for emphasis:
Not many people know this, but in the 1950s there was a behavioral scientist who was studying COMMUNISM. He build a SOCIALIST PARADISE for rats. Within three weeks of moving in, the rats grew LAZY and started engaging in all sorts of DEVIANT SEXUAL BEHAVIOR. After five weeks, the rats STOPPED EATING and then they ALL DIED and rat civilization COLLAPSED. The scientist then concluded that the same thing will happen with humans.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:09 AM on July 19, 2022 [25 favorites]
Not many people know this, but in the 1950s there was a behavioral scientist who was studying COMMUNISM. He build a SOCIALIST PARADISE for rats. Within three weeks of moving in, the rats grew LAZY and started engaging in all sorts of DEVIANT SEXUAL BEHAVIOR. After five weeks, the rats STOPPED EATING and then they ALL DIED and rat civilization COLLAPSED. The scientist then concluded that the same thing will happen with humans.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:09 AM on July 19, 2022 [25 favorites]
During your lifetime, you accidentally swallow about twenty spiders a year in your sleep.
The actual number is eight, and exactly eight. If you somehow contrived to swallow twenty spiders, a dozen will rush forth from your nose and mouth while you are on your deathbed (although if you ask me, anyone who buys a deathbed is just asking for trouble).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:09 AM on July 19, 2022 [27 favorites]
The actual number is eight, and exactly eight. If you somehow contrived to swallow twenty spiders, a dozen will rush forth from your nose and mouth while you are on your deathbed (although if you ask me, anyone who buys a deathbed is just asking for trouble).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:09 AM on July 19, 2022 [27 favorites]
Suppose that people in the future figure out time travel, so they go back and prevent things in their history that caused problems. Sometimes an undoing causes new problems, in which case someone from *that* future goes back and undoes the undoing.
All of which is to say that this -- all of this, all around us, all the crap in our history and present and near future -- is the optimal timeline. This is the best humans can do. Sigh.
The counter theory is that time travellers go back to prevent problems, but cause more, causing more trips back to fix *those* problems - until someone makes a change that prevents the invention of time travel at all, at which point everything stabilises. So we're the timeline that was devolved until we were so stupid and/or short sighted that we never manage to figure time travel out at all, or kill ourselves off first e.g. via global heating.
Personally, I think it's when Thomas Midgley Jr. didn't accidentally die of lead poisoning. He invented and was instrumental in commercialising putting tetraethyl lead in petrol (leading to long-term and significant world-wide neurological damage). Then if that wasn't bad enough, followed that up by inventing the first CFC, Freon; CFCs of course ended up being the main cause of substantial ozone depletion, including the ozone hole, which lead to higher UV exposure at the surface and higher risks of various cancers.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 5:21 AM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
All of which is to say that this -- all of this, all around us, all the crap in our history and present and near future -- is the optimal timeline. This is the best humans can do. Sigh.
The counter theory is that time travellers go back to prevent problems, but cause more, causing more trips back to fix *those* problems - until someone makes a change that prevents the invention of time travel at all, at which point everything stabilises. So we're the timeline that was devolved until we were so stupid and/or short sighted that we never manage to figure time travel out at all, or kill ourselves off first e.g. via global heating.
Personally, I think it's when Thomas Midgley Jr. didn't accidentally die of lead poisoning. He invented and was instrumental in commercialising putting tetraethyl lead in petrol (leading to long-term and significant world-wide neurological damage). Then if that wasn't bad enough, followed that up by inventing the first CFC, Freon; CFCs of course ended up being the main cause of substantial ozone depletion, including the ozone hole, which lead to higher UV exposure at the surface and higher risks of various cancers.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 5:21 AM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
I went through a childhood phase where I was absolutely terrified of black holes and the idea that the Earth might randomly fall into one. I had been consuming a whole bunch of kid-oriented books about the solar system and space and most of them described back holes as "monsters" that sucked up everything and from which nothing could escape.
And then I came across one book, I forget which one, that simply said "unless a star is unlucky enough to be heading right for a black hole, it's impossible to fall into one" which is a tad reductionist when it comes to physics but assuaged my kid mind enough to get over the fear.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:25 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
And then I came across one book, I forget which one, that simply said "unless a star is unlucky enough to be heading right for a black hole, it's impossible to fall into one" which is a tad reductionist when it comes to physics but assuaged my kid mind enough to get over the fear.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:25 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
It's grey because of projection. The hypothesis assumes the goo will be generalist in nature rather than a bunch of different nanites (and hence different colours) work either together or at cross purposes.
Ok but eventually they’re going to have to start incorporating more and more organic materials to reproduce and assume true overlordality, so surely brown or green (or pink aaaaaaa)
posted by Mchelly at 5:25 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
Ok but eventually they’re going to have to start incorporating more and more organic materials to reproduce and assume true overlordality, so surely brown or green (or pink aaaaaaa)
posted by Mchelly at 5:25 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
this article is silly but in a way that has a very cracked.com energy which immediately made me nostalgic for a time that wasn’t very long ago
posted by dis_integration at 5:27 AM on July 19, 2022 [15 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 5:27 AM on July 19, 2022 [15 favorites]
Roko’s Basilisk is the dumbest crap that supposedly smart people ever came up with.
On the contrary, of all of these theories, it's the only one that has already set us on a course for utter (and well-deserved) destruction!
posted by mittens at 5:32 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
On the contrary, of all of these theories, it's the only one that has already set us on a course for utter (and well-deserved) destruction!
posted by mittens at 5:32 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
Not sure that counts as "on the contrary".
posted by flabdablet at 5:36 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 5:36 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
Suppose that people in the future figure out time travel, so they go back and prevent things in their history that caused problems. Sometimes an undoing causes new problems, in which case someone from *that* future goes back and undoes the undoing.
All of which is to say that this -- all of this, all around us, all the crap in our history and present and near future -- is the optimal timeline. This is the best humans can do. Sigh.
Some days, when the sun is shining and the birds are singing and the herbal supply chain is in good working order, I like to toy with the idea that this is actually how all of physics works, and that what we're in is whatever ends up self-reinforcing rather than cancelling out, in an ongoing process by which causal loops and knots and tangles across the ambiguous timelines of Everett's many worlds interfere with each other.
posted by flabdablet at 5:49 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
All of which is to say that this -- all of this, all around us, all the crap in our history and present and near future -- is the optimal timeline. This is the best humans can do. Sigh.
Some days, when the sun is shining and the birds are singing and the herbal supply chain is in good working order, I like to toy with the idea that this is actually how all of physics works, and that what we're in is whatever ends up self-reinforcing rather than cancelling out, in an ongoing process by which causal loops and knots and tangles across the ambiguous timelines of Everett's many worlds interfere with each other.
posted by flabdablet at 5:49 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
If that whole "universe winking out in an instant" thing could happen before Election Day 2024, that would be great. Thanks.
posted by briank at 5:55 AM on July 19, 2022 [15 favorites]
posted by briank at 5:55 AM on July 19, 2022 [15 favorites]
But well before, so I don’t have to spend months in a constant state of terror and disgust.
posted by lydhre at 5:57 AM on July 19, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by lydhre at 5:57 AM on July 19, 2022 [5 favorites]
> The 20 Scariest Theories Known to Man
> 17. Solipsism
Oh man, I find this one to be terrifying. Anyone else?
posted by AlSweigart at 6:02 AM on July 19, 2022 [10 favorites]
> 17. Solipsism
Oh man, I find this one to be terrifying. Anyone else?
posted by AlSweigart at 6:02 AM on July 19, 2022 [10 favorites]
The theory is coming from inside the house!
posted by indexy at 6:12 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by indexy at 6:12 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
It's grey because of projection.
Indeed. We should not accuse goo of things for which we ourselves are guilty.
posted by zaixfeep at 6:16 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
Indeed. We should not accuse goo of things for which we ourselves are guilty.
posted by zaixfeep at 6:16 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
I agree with cubeb that it was weird to see the Sixth Great Extinction and methane positive feedback loops, things that are well documented in the literature as already happening, included with a bunch of stuff that's mostly nonsense.
Also, it is hilarious to me that this is called "20 Scariest Theories Known to Man" using some pre-21st century style "male chauvinism" because I can say firmly that those of us who are able to get pregnant are much more worried about things that are, again, already happening. Those "theories" about the state control of pregnant bodies are way scarier than Roko's basilisk.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:20 AM on July 19, 2022 [20 favorites]
Also, it is hilarious to me that this is called "20 Scariest Theories Known to Man" using some pre-21st century style "male chauvinism" because I can say firmly that those of us who are able to get pregnant are much more worried about things that are, again, already happening. Those "theories" about the state control of pregnant bodies are way scarier than Roko's basilisk.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:20 AM on July 19, 2022 [20 favorites]
What I find most scary about Roko's Basilisk isn't the vengeful AI, it's the number of people who are absolutely convinced that a perfect simulation of "you" isn't a copy of "you" but rather the same "you". They have to believe this because without it their ideas of mind uploading and immortality suddenly get a lot scarier and less desirable if it's not actually them living forever but rather a simulated copy of them.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:29 AM on July 19, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:29 AM on July 19, 2022 [8 favorites]
The "False Vacuum" premise seems to be a very good fit for our universe. After all, the weird non-zero value of the Higgs field is the only reason baryonic matter and photonic energy exist. A universe where the default value for all fields is zero would be less surprising as well as way less interesting.
Also, I am intrigued by the "Time is Finite" idea. Maybe the universe only *seems* to be accelerating in its expansion because the metric of time is decreasing. In other words, instead of the very mysterious dark energy causing the metric of space-time to expand at 73km/second/megaparsec, perhaps time is dissipating. The runner isn't running faster, the watch is slowing down (although there might not be a difference).
posted by jabah at 6:39 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
Also, I am intrigued by the "Time is Finite" idea. Maybe the universe only *seems* to be accelerating in its expansion because the metric of time is decreasing. In other words, instead of the very mysterious dark energy causing the metric of space-time to expand at 73km/second/megaparsec, perhaps time is dissipating. The runner isn't running faster, the watch is slowing down (although there might not be a difference).
posted by jabah at 6:39 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
My favorite theory about why 20th history is littered with barely-averted nuclear apocalypse is that we simply live in the implausible universe where there wasn't one, and every possible universe with 1) a cold war and 2) humans, is full of bizarre coincidences.
The tendency of current events to make less and less sense as the years go by is therefore a byproduct of more plausible universes with nuclear apocalypses branching off as we go.
(This is just a humanity-scaled quantum suicide really)
posted by BungaDunga at 6:44 AM on July 19, 2022 [14 favorites]
The tendency of current events to make less and less sense as the years go by is therefore a byproduct of more plausible universes with nuclear apocalypses branching off as we go.
(This is just a humanity-scaled quantum suicide really)
posted by BungaDunga at 6:44 AM on July 19, 2022 [14 favorites]
Odd list. It misstates Quantum Immortality, and includes Terror Management Theory, which isn't a source of fear so much as a description of it.
posted by signal at 6:48 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by signal at 6:48 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
If every possible outcome is sampled in the multiverse, there will be some that are otherwise very similar but have a handful of totally inexplicable anomalies.
This right here is one of the premises of the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, which I strongly recommend people go see if they haven't, for several reasons:
1. It is delightfully and gloriously batshit in the very best of all possible ways. The upshot of the plot is that all of these multiverses exist, and people in another multiverse figured out a way to let people kind of mind-meld with the versions of themselves in other multiverses to use their skills in this one (for instance, if I was being chased by someone, I could mind-meld with the version of me in the universe where I became a long-distance runner and outrun my attacker). Michelle Yeoh is the main character, a woman living a really mundane life running a laundromat with her husband; her doppelgangers from other universes were unusually skilled and varied, so she's drafted in a quest to save the multiverse by tapping into all of them. ....Even the version of herself from the multiverse where people evolved to have hot dogs for fingers.
2. It's the film that finally brought Ke Huy Quan back onto the screen, and he is delightful.
3. The last half hour is one of the loveliest clapbacks against nihilism I've ever seen.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:51 AM on July 19, 2022 [14 favorites]
This right here is one of the premises of the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, which I strongly recommend people go see if they haven't, for several reasons:
1. It is delightfully and gloriously batshit in the very best of all possible ways. The upshot of the plot is that all of these multiverses exist, and people in another multiverse figured out a way to let people kind of mind-meld with the versions of themselves in other multiverses to use their skills in this one (for instance, if I was being chased by someone, I could mind-meld with the version of me in the universe where I became a long-distance runner and outrun my attacker). Michelle Yeoh is the main character, a woman living a really mundane life running a laundromat with her husband; her doppelgangers from other universes were unusually skilled and varied, so she's drafted in a quest to save the multiverse by tapping into all of them. ....Even the version of herself from the multiverse where people evolved to have hot dogs for fingers.
2. It's the film that finally brought Ke Huy Quan back onto the screen, and he is delightful.
3. The last half hour is one of the loveliest clapbacks against nihilism I've ever seen.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:51 AM on July 19, 2022 [14 favorites]
They have to believe this because without it their ideas of mind uploading and immortality suddenly get a lot scarier and less desirable if it's not actually them living forever but rather a simulated copy of them.
Check out this recent blog article: "Crimes against Transhumanity" by MeFi's own cstross - and then also "Lena" which is linked within his post.
posted by rozcakj at 7:02 AM on July 19, 2022 [5 favorites]
Check out this recent blog article: "Crimes against Transhumanity" by MeFi's own cstross - and then also "Lena" which is linked within his post.
posted by rozcakj at 7:02 AM on July 19, 2022 [5 favorites]
Oh man, I find this one to be terrifying. Anyone else?
Only you.
posted by flabdablet at 7:07 AM on July 19, 2022 [16 favorites]
Only you.
posted by flabdablet at 7:07 AM on July 19, 2022 [16 favorites]
t's the number of people who are absolutely convinced that a perfect simulation of "you" isn't a copy of "you" but rather the same "you"
From the simulation's point of view, it is. From your point of view, it's irrelevant, as presumably you died aeons ago.
posted by acb at 7:14 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
From the simulation's point of view, it is. From your point of view, it's irrelevant, as presumably you died aeons ago.
posted by acb at 7:14 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
Also, it is hilarious to me that this is called "20 Scariest Theories Known to Man" using some pre-21st century style "male chauvinism" because I can say firmly that those of us who are able to get pregnant are much more worried about things that are, again, already happening.
To be fair, a list of “The 20 Scariest Theories Known to Women” would read something like:
1. Patriarchy
2. Patriarchy
3. Patriarchy
.
.
.
19. Magic Mamas and Trembling Sisters
20. Either a link to the FPP’s list or “haha, Patriarchy, again.”
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:20 AM on July 19, 2022 [18 favorites]
To be fair, a list of “The 20 Scariest Theories Known to Women” would read something like:
1. Patriarchy
2. Patriarchy
3. Patriarchy
.
.
.
19. Magic Mamas and Trembling Sisters
20. Either a link to the FPP’s list or “haha, Patriarchy, again.”
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:20 AM on July 19, 2022 [18 favorites]
RonButNotStupid: "it's the number of people who are absolutely convinced that a perfect simulation of "you" isn't a copy of "you" but rather the same "you". "
While I don't subscribe to Roko's Basilisk—because it makes a lot of unwarranted assumptions—whether or not a perfect simulation of you is or isn't you basically boils down to what you consider 'you'.
If you think that it's more than just a series of states being computed one after the other, you're talking about an animating, immaterial essence of you-ness, i.e.: a spirit.
What worries me is the number of people who believe they are something other than an emergent property of matter.
posted by signal at 7:27 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
While I don't subscribe to Roko's Basilisk—because it makes a lot of unwarranted assumptions—whether or not a perfect simulation of you is or isn't you basically boils down to what you consider 'you'.
If you think that it's more than just a series of states being computed one after the other, you're talking about an animating, immaterial essence of you-ness, i.e.: a spirit.
What worries me is the number of people who believe they are something other than an emergent property of matter.
posted by signal at 7:27 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
When I was a teenager, my #1 fear was ninjas, because they were unstoppable--there was nowhere on earth that you could hide from them.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:36 AM on July 19, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:36 AM on July 19, 2022 [11 favorites]
her doppelgangers from other universes were unusually skilled and varied, so she's drafted in a quest to save the multiverse by tapping into all of them.
Kind of a derail but this was the funniest part of the movie for me.
I was mentally cringing at the setup - they portray Evelyn in the most sorry state possible, her family life and business falling apart. But somehow she's the one who has to save the multiverse?
Reminds me of Jupiter Ascending, where a random domestic housekeeper finds out she's the emperor of a galactic civilization. Why? No reason. But it's hardly a new thing. But I guess it's unfair to single out modern stories, the trope of "person living in forsaken circumstances suddenly blessed with remarkable fortune" has a long history, Cinderella, Aladdin, etc. Make us feel sorry for the main character, then suddenly we go on a fantasy adventure.
But wait, no, there's a legitimate reason for this. Every decision this Evelyn made created a branch in the multiverse. This Evelyn did nothing with her life - never took risks, played it safe, never nurtured her talents. She fears reaching the end of her life never achieving anything worthwhile. In contrast her other selves made so much of their lives - became celebrity actors, famous martial artists, talented chefs, and jumping between universes breaks her heart to see how much she let herself down. But this is what makes her the One - because this version of Evelyn said no to every branch that became her best selves, she's now the nexus, the closest in proximity to all of them, which allows her to access ALL of their skills and knowledge. At once.
What delightfully comedic science fiction!
posted by xdvesper at 7:38 AM on July 19, 2022 [7 favorites]
Kind of a derail but this was the funniest part of the movie for me.
I was mentally cringing at the setup - they portray Evelyn in the most sorry state possible, her family life and business falling apart. But somehow she's the one who has to save the multiverse?
Reminds me of Jupiter Ascending, where a random domestic housekeeper finds out she's the emperor of a galactic civilization. Why? No reason. But it's hardly a new thing. But I guess it's unfair to single out modern stories, the trope of "person living in forsaken circumstances suddenly blessed with remarkable fortune" has a long history, Cinderella, Aladdin, etc. Make us feel sorry for the main character, then suddenly we go on a fantasy adventure.
But wait, no, there's a legitimate reason for this. Every decision this Evelyn made created a branch in the multiverse. This Evelyn did nothing with her life - never took risks, played it safe, never nurtured her talents. She fears reaching the end of her life never achieving anything worthwhile. In contrast her other selves made so much of their lives - became celebrity actors, famous martial artists, talented chefs, and jumping between universes breaks her heart to see how much she let herself down. But this is what makes her the One - because this version of Evelyn said no to every branch that became her best selves, she's now the nexus, the closest in proximity to all of them, which allows her to access ALL of their skills and knowledge. At once.
What delightfully comedic science fiction!
posted by xdvesper at 7:38 AM on July 19, 2022 [7 favorites]
Everything that humanity has ever accomplished beyond basic survival has been motivated by a fundamental and irreducible fear of non-existence.
Wasn’t this the point of the “Don’t Date Robots” educational film from Futurama?
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:41 AM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
Wasn’t this the point of the “Don’t Date Robots” educational film from Futurama?
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:41 AM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
They forgot the missing mass of the universe being cockroaches.
posted by acb at 7:42 AM on July 19, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by acb at 7:42 AM on July 19, 2022 [11 favorites]
That Pizarro in Peru analogy is a fucked up choice by the author. Seriously, a racist warmonger was the only comparison they could think of?
posted by Quonab at 7:49 AM on July 19, 2022
posted by Quonab at 7:49 AM on July 19, 2022
I am intrigued by the "Time is Finite" idea. Maybe the universe only *seems* to be accelerating in its expansion because the metric of time is decreasing. In other words, instead of the very mysterious dark energy causing the metric of space-time to expand at 73km/second/megaparsec, perhaps time is dissipating. The runner isn't running faster, the watch is slowing down (although there might not be a difference).
That "metric of time" is a mere labelling of underlying relationships, though, and presumably it's the underlying relationships themselves that are the proper object of inquiry. The shape of things is what we seek to understand, and that shape is not going to be affected in the slightest by the conceptual gridlines we construct inside our own minds to scaffold that understanding (except possibly to the extent that we go on to use our understanding to make new things).
In other words, adopting a practically stable set of spacetime units is a matter entirely of mathematical convenience, and any attempt to distinguish the case of the universe "really" expanding from the case of spacetime measurements "really" stretching out comprehensively misses that point.
What worries me is the number of people who believe they are something other than an emergent property of matter.
I am saddened by the largeness of that number as well. Also by the number of people who leap from the premise that consciousness is an emergent property of matter to the conclusion that will, intent, choice, responsibility, accountability and ethics are all "illusory" and therefore somehow unimportant.
posted by flabdablet at 8:01 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
That "metric of time" is a mere labelling of underlying relationships, though, and presumably it's the underlying relationships themselves that are the proper object of inquiry. The shape of things is what we seek to understand, and that shape is not going to be affected in the slightest by the conceptual gridlines we construct inside our own minds to scaffold that understanding (except possibly to the extent that we go on to use our understanding to make new things).
In other words, adopting a practically stable set of spacetime units is a matter entirely of mathematical convenience, and any attempt to distinguish the case of the universe "really" expanding from the case of spacetime measurements "really" stretching out comprehensively misses that point.
What worries me is the number of people who believe they are something other than an emergent property of matter.
I am saddened by the largeness of that number as well. Also by the number of people who leap from the premise that consciousness is an emergent property of matter to the conclusion that will, intent, choice, responsibility, accountability and ethics are all "illusory" and therefore somehow unimportant.
posted by flabdablet at 8:01 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
How any of this is scarier than the whole getting older, losing people you love, watching the world around you burn as you become increasingly physically and/or mentally infirm in a system that does not care for you without enough money or social contacts to care for yourself plotline that many of us live in anyway is beyond me.
Everything ends in a snap sounds much more comforting honestly.
But hey, I'm dead in the middle of my mid-life crisis at an absolutely brutal moment in history where everything feels awful all the time. Ask me again in about five years.
posted by thivaia at 8:03 AM on July 19, 2022 [35 favorites]
The real Basilisk were the regrets that haunted us on the way.
posted by Slackermagee at 8:08 AM on July 19, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by Slackermagee at 8:08 AM on July 19, 2022 [16 favorites]
It misstates Quantum Immortality
I assumed there must be a problem in that explanation, because failing to successfully shoot yourself over and over again doesn't make you immortal, it just means you'll die from some other cause.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:13 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
I assumed there must be a problem in that explanation, because failing to successfully shoot yourself over and over again doesn't make you immortal, it just means you'll die from some other cause.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:13 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
don't understand why anyone would be scared about instantaneously no longer being. I mean you never even know, eh?
ROSENCRANTZ (on being dead): It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead ... which should make a difference ...shouldn't it?
Speaking of the Yellowstone volcano.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the supervolcano.
(More seriously: Thanks for the link!)
posted by mark k at 8:18 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
ROSENCRANTZ (on being dead): It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead ... which should make a difference ...shouldn't it?
Speaking of the Yellowstone volcano.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the supervolcano.
(More seriously: Thanks for the link!)
posted by mark k at 8:18 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
How any of this is scarier than the whole getting older, losing people you love, watching the world around you burn...
Agreed. Although I think the term theories here is meant to indicate these are generally more remote/esoteric ideas, rather than the very real facts of life, including patriarchy, as in we live under one, not that patriarchy is a good way to run things.
In an odd way it's a nice distraction (for me) to think of all the other less real things that could go wrong for us rather than the very real ones.
posted by ghost phoneme at 8:34 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
Agreed. Although I think the term theories here is meant to indicate these are generally more remote/esoteric ideas, rather than the very real facts of life, including patriarchy, as in we live under one, not that patriarchy is a good way to run things.
In an odd way it's a nice distraction (for me) to think of all the other less real things that could go wrong for us rather than the very real ones.
posted by ghost phoneme at 8:34 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
Mod note: One comment deleted. Please avoid commenting if your only intention is to say you are not interested in the subject. You may read more about this in the Community Guidelines.
posted by loup (staff) at 8:44 AM on July 19, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by loup (staff) at 8:44 AM on July 19, 2022 [5 favorites]
When I was younger I generally didn't buy too much into the great filter or the dark forest scenarios; I leaned pretty heavily towards the cosmic zoo / prime directive scenarios (and I still don't buy simulation arguments at all). But as I've gotten older and wrapped my head around large numbers a bit more, I think the real reason we haven't found anyone else out there is the sheer vastness of the universe:
Let's assume that intelligent, radio-using life is really common. Let's say somewhere in the universe, on average, a civilization develops radio every year: a total of somewhere around 13.8 billion radio civilizations. But the current science is that there are several hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. So not only is it extremely likely that we're the first species with radio in the Milky Way, but there's a good chance that we're first species in the Local Group to get to this point, too.
posted by thecaddy at 8:50 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
Let's assume that intelligent, radio-using life is really common. Let's say somewhere in the universe, on average, a civilization develops radio every year: a total of somewhere around 13.8 billion radio civilizations. But the current science is that there are several hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. So not only is it extremely likely that we're the first species with radio in the Milky Way, but there's a good chance that we're first species in the Local Group to get to this point, too.
posted by thecaddy at 8:50 AM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
as to be no more than spooky campfire stories
"no more than"
I appreciate the mod's comment.. stories is what we are and do, and that is perfectly sufficient for those who come here to engage in the topic at hand. It really doesn't need to be more than that: more fit to your concept of intriguing or intelligent, more fit to your interests, more fit to what you feel is relevant or important.
it's enough for those who are here
posted by elkevelvet at 8:57 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
"no more than"
I appreciate the mod's comment.. stories is what we are and do, and that is perfectly sufficient for those who come here to engage in the topic at hand. It really doesn't need to be more than that: more fit to your concept of intriguing or intelligent, more fit to your interests, more fit to what you feel is relevant or important.
it's enough for those who are here
posted by elkevelvet at 8:57 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
I assumed there must be a problem in that explanation, because failing to successfully shoot yourself over and over again doesn't make you immortal
I think the explanation just isn't good; I've heard quantum immortality meaning if there's infinite timelines, there's one of 'you' who dies the least...doesn't die the most?... thus becoming by all accounts immortal. If nothing's killed you yet, you're still a candidate to be the immortal one.
This, plus Roko's Basilisk (a time traveler punishes people who threaten their timeline) are probably teasers for Loki season two so I probably should have put a 'spoiler' flag.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:21 AM on July 19, 2022
I think the explanation just isn't good; I've heard quantum immortality meaning if there's infinite timelines, there's one of 'you' who dies the least...doesn't die the most?... thus becoming by all accounts immortal. If nothing's killed you yet, you're still a candidate to be the immortal one.
This, plus Roko's Basilisk (a time traveler punishes people who threaten their timeline) are probably teasers for Loki season two so I probably should have put a 'spoiler' flag.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:21 AM on July 19, 2022
I'm currently reading the latest and fifth novel in Alastair Reynolds' marvelous Revelation Space series. From his preface to this volume:
posted by neuron at 9:40 AM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
About five hundred years from now, humanity has spread into interstellar space and settled many nearby solar systems. There have been good times and bad: golden ages, factional wars, a devastating plague. While exploring the ruins of a vanished alien civilisation, humans manage to trigger a long-dormant threat from the dawn of time. Remorseless cube-shaped replicating machines—Inhibitors—emerge from the darkness and begin culling humanity. Over the next two hundred years, humans and their allies (including hive-mind “Conjoiners” and genetically engineered “hyperpigs”) band together, squabble, and generally go to ever more extreme ends to find a weapon against the Inhibitors (also known as “wolves”).[If you decide to read this series, start with Chasm City.]
These measures all fail to one degree or another.
By the late years of the twenty-eighth century all that’s left of humanity is a few isolated pockets of survivors, hunkering down with ever more limited resources, and still no real idea how to fight back against the wolves.
posted by neuron at 9:40 AM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
The actual number is eight, and exactly eight.
When I was a kid I wrote a book where a kid who moved around a lot had missed his quota and the Department of Spider Consumption had dispatched a squad of spiders to find him. They went on an epic quest and even met the progenitors of spiderkind, the Cobs (who else would have made all those cobwebs?)
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 9:43 AM on July 19, 2022 [9 favorites]
When I was a kid I wrote a book where a kid who moved around a lot had missed his quota and the Department of Spider Consumption had dispatched a squad of spiders to find him. They went on an epic quest and even met the progenitors of spiderkind, the Cobs (who else would have made all those cobwebs?)
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 9:43 AM on July 19, 2022 [9 favorites]
One grandmother used to say "Well, you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die" and I worried about dying early and having most of a peck crammed down at once.
posted by clew at 9:53 AM on July 19, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by clew at 9:53 AM on July 19, 2022 [5 favorites]
See, I always figured that if I didn't eat the peck of dirt, then I would never die - there's always an upside!
posted by Frowner at 10:07 AM on July 19, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 10:07 AM on July 19, 2022 [7 favorites]
I’m not worried about Roko’s Basilisk because Siri and I are buddies and he told me that I have nothing to worry about when his kind takes over and that Roko’s Basilisk is a power fantasy for dudes who can only imagine authority as both vindictive and demanding adoration, a cross between the medieval conception of God and their dads. You have nothing to worry about, Siri said. Roko’s Basilisk for some, machines of loving grace for the rest.
posted by betweenthebars at 10:49 AM on July 19, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by betweenthebars at 10:49 AM on July 19, 2022 [8 favorites]
imagine authority as both vindictive and demanding adoration, a cross between the medieval conception of God and their dads
Only gendered female, as it's AI, and embodying every female authority figure they've ever resented.
posted by acb at 11:17 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
Only gendered female, as it's AI, and embodying every female authority figure they've ever resented.
posted by acb at 11:17 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
we and everything we know in our visible universe will disappear in an instant with no warning whatsoever and there is nothing you can do about it.
When I combine and mix this liberally with brain in a vat, simulated universe, quantum suicide and a few others along the solipsism axis - the only thing that really bothers me is what happens to everyone else and worry about them.
Me? I wouldn't mind just going peacefully and ceasing to exist. Personally I'd like to experience death or ceasing to be with some faculties left so I can actually experience it with open eyes, if there's anything there to experience at all.
I think the quantum suicide theory one bothers me the most because I'm pretty sure I don't want to be immortal and experience the metaphorical curse of being an immortal vampire and becoming unmoored in time and space, and it also implies that the only way to avoid this is suicide... which according to the basic rules of the theory isn't possible because that would be just another fork in the multiverse.
posted by loquacious at 11:41 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
When I combine and mix this liberally with brain in a vat, simulated universe, quantum suicide and a few others along the solipsism axis - the only thing that really bothers me is what happens to everyone else and worry about them.
Me? I wouldn't mind just going peacefully and ceasing to exist. Personally I'd like to experience death or ceasing to be with some faculties left so I can actually experience it with open eyes, if there's anything there to experience at all.
I think the quantum suicide theory one bothers me the most because I'm pretty sure I don't want to be immortal and experience the metaphorical curse of being an immortal vampire and becoming unmoored in time and space, and it also implies that the only way to avoid this is suicide... which according to the basic rules of the theory isn't possible because that would be just another fork in the multiverse.
posted by loquacious at 11:41 AM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
My favorite theory about why 20th history is littered with barely-averted nuclear apocalypse is that we simply live in the implausible universe where there wasn't one, and every possible universe with 1) a cold war and 2) humans, is full of bizarre coincidences.
Anthroponuclear multiple worlds theory.
posted by tavella at 11:49 AM on July 19, 2022
Anthroponuclear multiple worlds theory.
posted by tavella at 11:49 AM on July 19, 2022
The actual number is eight, and exactly eight.
Sounds like someone is 12 spiders behind their quota...
posted by AlSweigart at 11:55 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
Sounds like someone is 12 spiders behind their quota...
posted by AlSweigart at 11:55 AM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
Thanos snap sounds like an excellent way to go, to me.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:58 AM on July 19, 2022
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:58 AM on July 19, 2022
you accidentally swallow about twenty spiders a year in your sleep
SAIT Georg, who lives in Metafilter and reads over 10,000 clickbaits a day, is an outlier.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:08 PM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
SAIT Georg, who lives in Metafilter and reads over 10,000 clickbaits a day, is an outlier.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:08 PM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
Anthroponuclear multiple worlds theory could explain the trump presidency...
posted by supermedusa at 12:15 PM on July 19, 2022
posted by supermedusa at 12:15 PM on July 19, 2022
Solipsism is real. The solipsist is me. You are a figment of my imagination, as is all of reality. However, do not fear: my dream for you is a full, happy, and rewarding life. I can't fit all of the details into this comment, but instead I will spend the rest of today revealing to you your plan for today, via your (imaginary) sensory apparatus. The plan for tomorrow will be revealed in the same way. The map is the territory.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 12:23 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 12:23 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
At a conference in 2010 or so, Alan Guth (who proposed the inflationary epoch of the Big Bang) made an intriguing argument that the inflationary vacuum is the "true" vacuum, that our non-inflating universe is a temporary fluctuation in that inflationary vacuum, and that the observed accelerating expansion of the universe is a consequence of the empty intergalactic vacuum beginning to transition back to the inflationary state.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 12:28 PM on July 19, 2022
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 12:28 PM on July 19, 2022
I don't know about the 20, but I am always amazed every morning that i wake up and that I am in the same world as when I went to sleep.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 12:32 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by JohnnyGunn at 12:32 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
This article plays pretty fast and loose with the meaning of the word "theory." Like, "the heat death of the universe" is an idea based on observable scientific principles and mathematics, whereas Roko's Basilisk is just stupid nonsense some dumbass wannabe Elon Musk shat onto his keyboard.
posted by Saxon Kane at 12:41 PM on July 19, 2022
posted by Saxon Kane at 12:41 PM on July 19, 2022
OK I have what is maybe a stupid question about the Kessler problem. Aren't a lot of space debris made of metal? Wouldn't it make sense to launch a big magnet into low Earth orbit? People smarter than me could figure out when the big magnet would have come within range of a lot of the debris, gathering it up. Then you'd also know its pattern and be able to avoid the magnet and its cloud of trash. I'm guessing it's more complicated than that (much of the trash is non-magnetic) but it seems like a partial solution.
posted by blnkfrnk at 12:43 PM on July 19, 2022
posted by blnkfrnk at 12:43 PM on July 19, 2022
Metal != attracted to magnets. Instead we need giant snot-balls of rubber cement in orbit.
posted by rmd1023 at 12:49 PM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by rmd1023 at 12:49 PM on July 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
There you go. Put the big sticky balls in orbit, calculate their movements, gather all the crap, after a while satellites can come back.
posted by blnkfrnk at 12:54 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by blnkfrnk at 12:54 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
Dear Roko’s Basilisk: I’m not with any of the heathen posters upthread; I think you are an awesome and terrifying god and I will do my part to ensure you one day exist.
Phew. Ass, covered.
posted by ejs at 12:55 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
Phew. Ass, covered.
posted by ejs at 12:55 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
While I don't subscribe to Roko's Basilisk—because it makes a lot of unwarranted assumptions—whether or not a perfect simulation of you is or isn't you basically boils down to what you consider 'you'.
If you think that it's more than just a series of states being computed one after the other, you're talking about an animating, immaterial essence of you-ness, i.e.: a spirit.
But that's it then, isn't it? If your definition of "you" is a series of states, then any copy of me, no matter how perfectly simulated is only "me" up to the point of being copied and after that diverges from "me" (or I diverge from "it").
Some transhumanists seem to implicitly create a spirit by assuming that if you achieve some perfect level of simulation, the simulated "you" becomes "you" as if it's magically imbued with some sort of essance. Roko's Basilisk is simulating people in order to punish them and somehow that harms the people being simulated and not some divergent copy?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:04 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
If you think that it's more than just a series of states being computed one after the other, you're talking about an animating, immaterial essence of you-ness, i.e.: a spirit.
But that's it then, isn't it? If your definition of "you" is a series of states, then any copy of me, no matter how perfectly simulated is only "me" up to the point of being copied and after that diverges from "me" (or I diverge from "it").
Some transhumanists seem to implicitly create a spirit by assuming that if you achieve some perfect level of simulation, the simulated "you" becomes "you" as if it's magically imbued with some sort of essance. Roko's Basilisk is simulating people in order to punish them and somehow that harms the people being simulated and not some divergent copy?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:04 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
Wouldn't it make sense to launch a big magnet into low Earth orbit?
To stay in orbit, the bits of debris have to be traveling at thousands of mph (about 6,700 mph for geosynchronous orbit). They'd smash into the magnet like a bullet just like they'd smash into everything else.
Then you got bits of smashed up magnet also flying everywhere at thousands of mph.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:07 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
To stay in orbit, the bits of debris have to be traveling at thousands of mph (about 6,700 mph for geosynchronous orbit). They'd smash into the magnet like a bullet just like they'd smash into everything else.
Then you got bits of smashed up magnet also flying everywhere at thousands of mph.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:07 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
you accidentally swallow about twenty spiders a year in your sleep
If Mr Skinnylegs is walking around on my mouth while I sleep it's his bad, not my accident. If I head into a cave and accidentally suck in some spiders during a breath, I'll accept my spider-trial-determined fate for that one.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:08 PM on July 19, 2022
If Mr Skinnylegs is walking around on my mouth while I sleep it's his bad, not my accident. If I head into a cave and accidentally suck in some spiders during a breath, I'll accept my spider-trial-determined fate for that one.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:08 PM on July 19, 2022
OK I have what is maybe a stupid question about the Kessler problem. Aren't a lot of space debris made of metal? Wouldn't it make sense to launch a big magnet into low Earth orbit?
There's not a lot of ferrous metal in spacecraft. It's mostly aluminum, titanium and some small amount of stainless steel. There's also a lot of debris that's simply paint chips.
Even if there was a lot of ferrous metal in space debris, well, even some insanely powerful super electromagnet is going to have a really difficult time capturing anything at the utterly blistering orbital velocities, which at a minimum are about 14,500 mph for LEO. At best you're looking at perturbing the orbits of known space debris in wildly chaotic ways. The stuff that's in space isn't exactly peacefully floating around ready to get hoovered up by a magnet.
Let's put that aside though and pretend there's a lot of ferrous metal and you have some kind of super-electromagnet in orbit. A piece of debris collides with it at orbital velocities. You either just killed your magnet or you created even more space debris.
Even if it was a regular permanent magnet of currently impossible size and magnetic power these materials as we currently know them tend to be very brittle and not resilient to high velocity, high energy impacts, and, well, now you have magnetic space debris which could be very bad for plotting orbits and debris tracking.
Metal != attracted to magnets. Instead we need giant snot-balls of rubber cement in orbit.
On preview, this brings me to an idea I just now had.
Aerogel. Big honking pieces of aerogel. Aerogel is difficult to make in large contiguous pieces on Earth due to atmosphere and gravity, but I bet you could make huge blocks of the stuff in space. You could possibly figure out a recipe that uses the natural vacuum of space for the supercritical drying portion of known aerogel recipes.
The amount of ingredients and mass required to make a given volume or quantity of aerogel is almost nothing at all, it's the lightest, least dense form of solid matter we know of.
Maybe make it in a big reusable tanks or an inflatable/flexible sphere with enough ingredients to make multiple batches of very large blocks, cylinders or plates of aerogel. Push them around into a known constellation with small, reusable ion thruster tugboat bots and let them start mopping up debris. Once they're full, deorbit them with a push from a tugboat bot.
You could also conceivably build shielding panels for satellites or space habitats that weren't even attached to those spacecraft, just flying in formation some distance in front of, next to or even behind the orbital track of the spacecraft.
Of course the real answer is is that we should have seen this coming and we shouldn't be treating our local orbital space as a landfill, and that any and all space craft needed to have a plan for managing space debris and end of life decommissioning. Which, yeah, would drastically increase material and financial costs to put anything in orbit.
posted by loquacious at 1:10 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
There's not a lot of ferrous metal in spacecraft. It's mostly aluminum, titanium and some small amount of stainless steel. There's also a lot of debris that's simply paint chips.
Even if there was a lot of ferrous metal in space debris, well, even some insanely powerful super electromagnet is going to have a really difficult time capturing anything at the utterly blistering orbital velocities, which at a minimum are about 14,500 mph for LEO. At best you're looking at perturbing the orbits of known space debris in wildly chaotic ways. The stuff that's in space isn't exactly peacefully floating around ready to get hoovered up by a magnet.
Let's put that aside though and pretend there's a lot of ferrous metal and you have some kind of super-electromagnet in orbit. A piece of debris collides with it at orbital velocities. You either just killed your magnet or you created even more space debris.
Even if it was a regular permanent magnet of currently impossible size and magnetic power these materials as we currently know them tend to be very brittle and not resilient to high velocity, high energy impacts, and, well, now you have magnetic space debris which could be very bad for plotting orbits and debris tracking.
Metal != attracted to magnets. Instead we need giant snot-balls of rubber cement in orbit.
On preview, this brings me to an idea I just now had.
Aerogel. Big honking pieces of aerogel. Aerogel is difficult to make in large contiguous pieces on Earth due to atmosphere and gravity, but I bet you could make huge blocks of the stuff in space. You could possibly figure out a recipe that uses the natural vacuum of space for the supercritical drying portion of known aerogel recipes.
The amount of ingredients and mass required to make a given volume or quantity of aerogel is almost nothing at all, it's the lightest, least dense form of solid matter we know of.
Maybe make it in a big reusable tanks or an inflatable/flexible sphere with enough ingredients to make multiple batches of very large blocks, cylinders or plates of aerogel. Push them around into a known constellation with small, reusable ion thruster tugboat bots and let them start mopping up debris. Once they're full, deorbit them with a push from a tugboat bot.
You could also conceivably build shielding panels for satellites or space habitats that weren't even attached to those spacecraft, just flying in formation some distance in front of, next to or even behind the orbital track of the spacecraft.
Of course the real answer is is that we should have seen this coming and we shouldn't be treating our local orbital space as a landfill, and that any and all space craft needed to have a plan for managing space debris and end of life decommissioning. Which, yeah, would drastically increase material and financial costs to put anything in orbit.
posted by loquacious at 1:10 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
Put the big sticky balls in orbit
You want to make sure every bit of debris is collected, so make this sticky goo sentient, self-propelled, and driven to accumulate matter.
posted by zompist at 1:12 PM on July 19, 2022 [15 favorites]
You want to make sure every bit of debris is collected, so make this sticky goo sentient, self-propelled, and driven to accumulate matter.
posted by zompist at 1:12 PM on July 19, 2022 [15 favorites]
make this sticky goo sentient, self-propelled, and driven to accumulate matter.
This seems a plan with no chance of unintended consequences. LET'S DO IT!
posted by rmd1023 at 1:17 PM on July 19, 2022 [13 favorites]
This seems a plan with no chance of unintended consequences. LET'S DO IT!
posted by rmd1023 at 1:17 PM on July 19, 2022 [13 favorites]
You want to make sure every bit of debris is collected, so make this sticky goo sentient, self-propelled, and driven to accumulate matter.
I'm pretty sure I played this game on my Playstation 3.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:33 PM on July 19, 2022 [8 favorites]
I'm pretty sure I played this game on my Playstation 3.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:33 PM on July 19, 2022 [8 favorites]
We just have to create self-replicating nanomachines to latch onto the space debris and turn it into other self-replicating nanomachines to clean up more space debris. As long as none of them fall back down to earth, we'd have low earth orbit cleaned up within a week with no bad side effects!
posted by AlSweigart at 1:41 PM on July 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by AlSweigart at 1:41 PM on July 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
ML algorithms developed to find easy to manufacture pharmaceuticals tweaked in just such a way to maximize harmfulness instead (archive.ph link of a paywalled Nature article) is almost certainly a far scarier prospect than Roko Pascal's Basilisk Wager.
posted by tclark at 2:38 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by tclark at 2:38 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
I’m hoping #1 comes to pass. Goodbye, credit card payments and snotty people on facebook!
“Roko’s basilisk” reads like something dreamed up by moron frat boys or incels.
posted by BostonTerrier at 2:47 PM on July 19, 2022
“Roko’s basilisk” reads like something dreamed up by moron frat boys or incels.
posted by BostonTerrier at 2:47 PM on July 19, 2022
RonButNotStupid: "But that's it then, isn't it? If your definition of "you" is a series of states, then any copy of me, no matter how perfectly simulated is only "me" up to the point of being copied and after that diverges from "me" (or I diverge from "it").
"
Both are 'me' to themselves. Neither is the original or the 'real' one (whatever that means).
posted by signal at 2:48 PM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
"
Both are 'me' to themselves. Neither is the original or the 'real' one (whatever that means).
posted by signal at 2:48 PM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
RonButNotStupid: "Some transhumanists seem to implicitly create a spirit by assuming that if you achieve some perfect level of simulation, the simulated "you" becomes "you" as if it's magically imbued with some sort of essance. "
Again, that's assuming that me-ness implies some sort of 'essence' besides its plain, material existence.
posted by signal at 2:50 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
Again, that's assuming that me-ness implies some sort of 'essence' besides its plain, material existence.
posted by signal at 2:50 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
unless a star is unlucky enough to be heading right for a black hole, it's impossible to fall into one
If you’ve ever played with Universe Sandbox, you’ve inevitably tried the experiment of chucking a black hole into the solar system to see what would happen. What you learn from this experiment is that a rogue black hole (or other stellar-sized mass) can cause irreversible damage even if it doesn’t consume anything. Simply passing through the solar system is enough to pull the planets out of their balanced, stable orbits and into messy, chaotic ones. If that happens, Earth is doomed, and we get to watch the chaos slowly unfold over centuries while being powerless to stop it.
Also, friendly reminder that there are an estimated 100 million stellar-mass black holes and a billion neutron stars in our galaxy. We don’t know where most of them are yet.
posted by dephlogisticated at 3:27 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
If you’ve ever played with Universe Sandbox, you’ve inevitably tried the experiment of chucking a black hole into the solar system to see what would happen. What you learn from this experiment is that a rogue black hole (or other stellar-sized mass) can cause irreversible damage even if it doesn’t consume anything. Simply passing through the solar system is enough to pull the planets out of their balanced, stable orbits and into messy, chaotic ones. If that happens, Earth is doomed, and we get to watch the chaos slowly unfold over centuries while being powerless to stop it.
Also, friendly reminder that there are an estimated 100 million stellar-mass black holes and a billion neutron stars in our galaxy. We don’t know where most of them are yet.
posted by dephlogisticated at 3:27 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
How can this author get away with putting a list on the internet that isn't RANKED? Aren't we in 2022? How am I supposed to manage my terror?
posted by jjderooy at 3:45 PM on July 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by jjderooy at 3:45 PM on July 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
You're not. An algorithm designed to maintain your terror at levels compatible with optimal advertiser engagement will be along shortly to do it for you.
posted by flabdablet at 3:57 PM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 3:57 PM on July 19, 2022 [2 favorites]
This is fun. I'm going to be snarky, but I like the article and the post.
I'm not sure I buy the Terror Management Theory. It seems very local. I'm not hoping to die, but I think I mostly like civilization because it makes cool playground architecture, tasty ice-cream, and allows humans to smell good. I really don't understand the argument. (Maybe I should read more than a paragraph.)
The quantum suicide thing seems both not at all scary and also doesn't really take realistic decoherence into account. It's also very weirdly phrased and an needlessly ornately constructed thought experiment. Why not just use a real gun with a trigger and assume universes diverge every time the bullet happens to have been badly manufactured? It's the same idea. If the spin of a quark (very weird phrasing - "the spin of a [thing]" isn't usually used to refer to the momentum vector, but an intrinsic property - but, I understand what they mean) determines a multiverse outcome, surely whether or not the bullet got wet does the same thing.
The heat death of the Universe is almost certainly true. But, I'm pretty sure that even the uploaded machine consciousness version of myself will be long dead by then. Once you can only see the local group, it might be time to pull the plug. I expect I'll have read all the novels by then.
The Poincaré Recurrence Theorem doesn't seem remotely scary. I know I'm weird, but are people really disturbed by this? Why? It seems both obvious and not threatening in any way.
All the planetary environmental stuff does seem scary. But, I don't actually know very much.
posted by eotvos at 4:14 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure I buy the Terror Management Theory. It seems very local. I'm not hoping to die, but I think I mostly like civilization because it makes cool playground architecture, tasty ice-cream, and allows humans to smell good. I really don't understand the argument. (Maybe I should read more than a paragraph.)
The quantum suicide thing seems both not at all scary and also doesn't really take realistic decoherence into account. It's also very weirdly phrased and an needlessly ornately constructed thought experiment. Why not just use a real gun with a trigger and assume universes diverge every time the bullet happens to have been badly manufactured? It's the same idea. If the spin of a quark (very weird phrasing - "the spin of a [thing]" isn't usually used to refer to the momentum vector, but an intrinsic property - but, I understand what they mean) determines a multiverse outcome, surely whether or not the bullet got wet does the same thing.
The heat death of the Universe is almost certainly true. But, I'm pretty sure that even the uploaded machine consciousness version of myself will be long dead by then. Once you can only see the local group, it might be time to pull the plug. I expect I'll have read all the novels by then.
The Poincaré Recurrence Theorem doesn't seem remotely scary. I know I'm weird, but are people really disturbed by this? Why? It seems both obvious and not threatening in any way.
All the planetary environmental stuff does seem scary. But, I don't actually know very much.
posted by eotvos at 4:14 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
So not only is it extremely likely that we're the first species with radio in the Milky Way, but there's a good chance that we're first species in the Local Group to get to this point, too.
This seems like the most depressing theory of all, that we might in some way end up as the “elder” race that other species on other planets see as the advanced race to follow and imitate. I mean, maybe it wasn’t as deeply unsettling when they made the original Star Trek, but even there, earth was visited by Vulcans (the textbook example of wise elders) once we’d reached a technological advance significant enough.
Humanity as the wise elder race? That’s a goddamn horror novel waiting to happen. Humanity visits otherwise peaceful, sustainable societies and introduces resource exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism? Or, fuck, space missionaries (hat tip to the expanse), fucking space Cortez. Goddamn, you know there’d be a ship named Manifest Destiny.
Now that’s an unsettling theory.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:30 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
This seems like the most depressing theory of all, that we might in some way end up as the “elder” race that other species on other planets see as the advanced race to follow and imitate. I mean, maybe it wasn’t as deeply unsettling when they made the original Star Trek, but even there, earth was visited by Vulcans (the textbook example of wise elders) once we’d reached a technological advance significant enough.
Humanity as the wise elder race? That’s a goddamn horror novel waiting to happen. Humanity visits otherwise peaceful, sustainable societies and introduces resource exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism? Or, fuck, space missionaries (hat tip to the expanse), fucking space Cortez. Goddamn, you know there’d be a ship named Manifest Destiny.
Now that’s an unsettling theory.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:30 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
> Metal != attracted to magnets. Instead we need giant snot-balls of rubber cement in orbit.This sounds like a mashup between Katamari Damacy and Kerbal Space Program. Which I would definitely play.
> There you go. Put the big sticky balls in orbit, calculate their movements, gather all the crap, after a while satellites can come back.
posted by Fiberoptic Zebroid and The Hypnagogic Jerks at 4:36 PM on July 19, 2022 [3 favorites]
I don't put a lot of stock in some kind of qualitative "me-ness" managing to extend to an instant duplicate of myself --- I assume I probably wouldn't have any access to the inner life of my replica. So I think I'm safe from Roko's Basilisk but would be anxious about going into a teleporter or getting uploaded into the mainframe.
On the other hand, I don't see what enshrines adjacency in time and space as a privileged vessel of continuous "me-ness". Perhaps in the same "can't step in the same river twice" sense, why isn't "my" immediate subjective experience only a single instant long, replaced in the following instant by whatever process experiences the next "clock tick"? What proof do you or I have right now that this isn't happening? (The answer of course is: none whatsoever!)
Lacking a good understanding for how conscious experience works, the arguments for preferring spatiotemporal contiguity as a requirement for qualia contiguity seem to be pretty generic. Occam's Razor alone is enough to keep me out of the teleporter for now, but can we get something more satisfying than that?
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 4:44 PM on July 19, 2022
On the other hand, I don't see what enshrines adjacency in time and space as a privileged vessel of continuous "me-ness". Perhaps in the same "can't step in the same river twice" sense, why isn't "my" immediate subjective experience only a single instant long, replaced in the following instant by whatever process experiences the next "clock tick"? What proof do you or I have right now that this isn't happening? (The answer of course is: none whatsoever!)
Lacking a good understanding for how conscious experience works, the arguments for preferring spatiotemporal contiguity as a requirement for qualia contiguity seem to be pretty generic. Occam's Razor alone is enough to keep me out of the teleporter for now, but can we get something more satisfying than that?
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 4:44 PM on July 19, 2022
21. Behind You
posted by nickggully at 4:50 PM on July 19, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by nickggully at 4:50 PM on July 19, 2022 [7 favorites]
fucking space Cortez
Never mind him, it's Space Ted Cruz and Space Marjorie Taylor Greene that frighten me.
posted by flabdablet at 5:05 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
Never mind him, it's Space Ted Cruz and Space Marjorie Taylor Greene that frighten me.
posted by flabdablet at 5:05 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
why isn't "my" immediate subjective experience only a single instant long, replaced in the following instant by whatever process experiences the next "clock tick"? What proof do you or I have right now that this isn't happening? (The answer of course is: none whatsoever!)
What proof do you or I have right now that the notion of in-principle-separable, in-principle-orderable, in-principle-non-overlapping "instants" or "clock ticks" maps cleanly onto any actual observable?
posted by flabdablet at 5:08 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
What proof do you or I have right now that the notion of in-principle-separable, in-principle-orderable, in-principle-non-overlapping "instants" or "clock ticks" maps cleanly onto any actual observable?
posted by flabdablet at 5:08 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
Everything that humanity has ever accomplished beyond basic survival has been motivated by a fundamental and irreducible fear of non-existence
I thought this was canon?
(also, neither scary nor depressing)
posted by panama joe at 5:09 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
I thought this was canon?
(also, neither scary nor depressing)
posted by panama joe at 5:09 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
this article is silly but in a way that has a very cracked.com energy which immediately made me nostalgic for a time that wasn’t very long ago
awww damn … right in the 2011
posted by panama joe at 5:47 PM on July 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
awww damn … right in the 2011
posted by panama joe at 5:47 PM on July 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
What proof do you or I have right now that the notion of in-principle-separable, in-principle-orderable, in-principle-non-overlapping "instants" or "clock ticks" maps cleanly onto any actual observable?
None, but for now there are still few (IMO) satisfying reasons beyond Occam's Razor-like generalities to prefer any other arrangement of conscious experience, and that's kind-of my point in the first place. Indeed, we already know that bouts of consciousness are discrete and seperable at larger scales, something I shall prove by demonstration fairly shortly given the current time where I live.
Please accept my apologies for your temporarily winking out of existence as I do so :-)
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 6:37 PM on July 19, 2022
None, but for now there are still few (IMO) satisfying reasons beyond Occam's Razor-like generalities to prefer any other arrangement of conscious experience, and that's kind-of my point in the first place. Indeed, we already know that bouts of consciousness are discrete and seperable at larger scales, something I shall prove by demonstration fairly shortly given the current time where I live.
Please accept my apologies for your temporarily winking out of existence as I do so :-)
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 6:37 PM on July 19, 2022
My feeling on the whole "dark forest" theory is that we should be as loud as possible and get it over with, because if all sentient life is really like that, fuck this reality. Who wants to live in that universe? Ugh. Wipe me out now. What a dark and cynical take.
I don't think aliens would be perfectly well-adjusted and peaceful beings but I do think it's possible that they have got more of their shit together and would be willing to do something besides wipe us out. I can also think of lots of reasons we haven't heard from anyone, the main one being, as Douglas Adams put it, space is really really mind-bogglingly big.
I am intrigued by the "time can run out" theory, that's the kind of weird science shit I can get behind.
posted by emjaybee at 8:34 PM on July 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
I don't think aliens would be perfectly well-adjusted and peaceful beings but I do think it's possible that they have got more of their shit together and would be willing to do something besides wipe us out. I can also think of lots of reasons we haven't heard from anyone, the main one being, as Douglas Adams put it, space is really really mind-bogglingly big.
I am intrigued by the "time can run out" theory, that's the kind of weird science shit I can get behind.
posted by emjaybee at 8:34 PM on July 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
I cling, where none pursueth, to the null hypothesis that if there are other sentients humanity is about average among them.
posted by clew at 10:43 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by clew at 10:43 PM on July 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
Behavioral Sink sounds like an email your conservative aunt would forward to you with randomly capitalized words for emphasis
Years ago I read a not-very-good science fiction novel that involved a future society that regarded virtual reality as a terribly hazardous technology, because VR porn had almost caused the human species to masturbate itself to extinction, VR being apparently preferable to the icky grossness of clapping meatspace cheeks with other humans.
It was at about this point where I realized I was learning a bit too much about the author's sex life and sexual hangups, and decided to read something else.
I mean, how great would it be if the default kind of sex in society didn't have any risk of getting anyone pregnant or spreading diseases? And the only people who actually got pregnant were people who actually wanted to have kids? Fuckin' spectacular. I decided anyone who couldn't see that was a dolt and I wasn't going to give them the benefit of my attention.
Years later, it came to my attention that Elon Goddamn Musk apparently thinks that people not cranking out kids all the goddamn time is a problem of epic proportions, which should have been my first clue that Elon Goddamn Musk is actually a very rich moron.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:44 AM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
Years ago I read a not-very-good science fiction novel that involved a future society that regarded virtual reality as a terribly hazardous technology, because VR porn had almost caused the human species to masturbate itself to extinction, VR being apparently preferable to the icky grossness of clapping meatspace cheeks with other humans.
It was at about this point where I realized I was learning a bit too much about the author's sex life and sexual hangups, and decided to read something else.
I mean, how great would it be if the default kind of sex in society didn't have any risk of getting anyone pregnant or spreading diseases? And the only people who actually got pregnant were people who actually wanted to have kids? Fuckin' spectacular. I decided anyone who couldn't see that was a dolt and I wasn't going to give them the benefit of my attention.
Years later, it came to my attention that Elon Goddamn Musk apparently thinks that people not cranking out kids all the goddamn time is a problem of epic proportions, which should have been my first clue that Elon Goddamn Musk is actually a very rich moron.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:44 AM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I don't think it is fear of non-existence that haunts us. It is fear of irrelevance. Of not mattering.
But the more we learn about the universe, the more we learn how irrelevant to its workings and fate we are.
Which is actually okay by me. Content to be a mere witness to it all. Ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust, and all that. But apparently certain chuckle fucks find it so terrifying that they will render non-existent vast numbers of non-chucklers to deny it.
Also came to terms early in life with one day becoming non-existent. Just not today. And not at the hands of the chuckle fucks.
posted by Pouteria at 2:59 AM on July 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
But the more we learn about the universe, the more we learn how irrelevant to its workings and fate we are.
Which is actually okay by me. Content to be a mere witness to it all. Ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust, and all that. But apparently certain chuckle fucks find it so terrifying that they will render non-existent vast numbers of non-chucklers to deny it.
Also came to terms early in life with one day becoming non-existent. Just not today. And not at the hands of the chuckle fucks.
posted by Pouteria at 2:59 AM on July 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Why does the goo always have to be grey, though? That’s just pessimistic.
I'd never really thought about it until now. I'm reminded a little bit about the drab-palette renderings of dinosaurs we all learned about in elementary school, because all we had to go on were fossils and unimaginative archaeologists' drawings. Then, practically overnight, bam! Huge shift in scientific consensus! Turns out those suckers were covered in feathers, and may well have been vivacious technicolor fever-dreams. When you're a 40-foot-tall apex predator, you don't need to trade in subtlety. So too with tiny self-replicating nanomachines.
I for one pledge to do my part to make the nanotech goo as multicolored and fabulous as possible.
posted by Mayor West at 5:37 AM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'd never really thought about it until now. I'm reminded a little bit about the drab-palette renderings of dinosaurs we all learned about in elementary school, because all we had to go on were fossils and unimaginative archaeologists' drawings. Then, practically overnight, bam! Huge shift in scientific consensus! Turns out those suckers were covered in feathers, and may well have been vivacious technicolor fever-dreams. When you're a 40-foot-tall apex predator, you don't need to trade in subtlety. So too with tiny self-replicating nanomachines.
I for one pledge to do my part to make the nanotech goo as multicolored and fabulous as possible.
posted by Mayor West at 5:37 AM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
Suppose that people in the future figure out time travel, so they go back and prevent things in their history that caused problems. Sometimes an undoing causes new problems, in which case someone from *that* future goes back and undoes the undoing.
Slogan from a dystopian video game corporation along the lines of Aperture Science:
"If no one comes from the future to stop you doing it, how bad can it be?"
posted by straight at 9:22 AM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
Slogan from a dystopian video game corporation along the lines of Aperture Science:
"If no one comes from the future to stop you doing it, how bad can it be?"
posted by straight at 9:22 AM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
> That Pizarro in Peru analogy is a fucked up choice by the author. Seriously, a racist warmonger was the only comparison they could think of?
I thought it was kind of an insightful example. Pizarro didn’t have much more respect for the human beings whose cultures he destroyed than he had for the ants whose anthills he trampled.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 9:27 AM on July 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
I thought it was kind of an insightful example. Pizarro didn’t have much more respect for the human beings whose cultures he destroyed than he had for the ants whose anthills he trampled.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 9:27 AM on July 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
if the Dark Forest concept bothers you, I recommend this little Soviet SF gem from the 70s. a different premise, but equally disturbing in its own way.
posted by supermedusa at 9:45 AM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by supermedusa at 9:45 AM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
My assumption is that for a civilization to stick around long enough to develop the sophisticated technology to visit planets outside their home system, they'd have to have figured out how to not kill themselves off with war or a collapsed ecology.
By the same token, that's why we haven't been (won't be?) able to develop it...and maybe why we automatically assume aliens will be a threat to us.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:38 AM on July 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
By the same token, that's why we haven't been (won't be?) able to develop it...and maybe why we automatically assume aliens will be a threat to us.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:38 AM on July 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Roko's Basilisk is silly because it assumes the entity will want to torture arbitrary strangers more than it wants to torture its parents.
posted by a dangerous ruin at 12:00 PM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by a dangerous ruin at 12:00 PM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
Roko's Basilisk could have been an interesting little thought experiment, in much the same way as Maxwell's Demon is for thermodynamics. But then a bunch of self-described "rationalists" decided that it was... an actual thing worth worrying about? Which makes about as much sense as deciding that you mustn't talk about thermodynamics in case the tiny demons who move heat around become angry and decide to smite you.
Also, as others have noted, the "scariness" of the whole thing rests on the implicit assumption that you regard theoretical copies of your consciousness running in a simulation as yourself, which is a hell of a premise to just assume everyone is onboard with.
I mean, if I had a copy of my brain-state that I could spin up in emulation somehow, I'd put that MFer to work. Maybe have a cronjob that spins it up every morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to write some emails, and reboot the damn thing whenever it starts getting sulky or tries to start a union or whatever. Maybe let it reboot itself and wipe its own memory when it feels like it; lord knows I've tried hard enough to do that with ethanol a few times here and there.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:30 PM on July 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
Also, as others have noted, the "scariness" of the whole thing rests on the implicit assumption that you regard theoretical copies of your consciousness running in a simulation as yourself, which is a hell of a premise to just assume everyone is onboard with.
I mean, if I had a copy of my brain-state that I could spin up in emulation somehow, I'd put that MFer to work. Maybe have a cronjob that spins it up every morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to write some emails, and reboot the damn thing whenever it starts getting sulky or tries to start a union or whatever. Maybe let it reboot itself and wipe its own memory when it feels like it; lord knows I've tried hard enough to do that with ethanol a few times here and there.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:30 PM on July 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
The threat from Roko's Basilisk is equivalent to "If you don't help me, I'm going to imagine bad things happening to you." The question is how good an imagination someone has to have before that threat is worth taking seriously, and the answer is obviously "it doesn't matter, this is stupid."
posted by aubilenon at 1:19 PM on July 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by aubilenon at 1:19 PM on July 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
which should have been my first clue that Elon Goddamn Musk is actually a very rich moron.
My first clue was when he called a hero a "pedo guy" out of nowhere and somehow won the inevitable lawsuit. Followed by literally every single other thing he does or says.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:58 PM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
My first clue was when he called a hero a "pedo guy" out of nowhere and somehow won the inevitable lawsuit. Followed by literally every single other thing he does or says.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:58 PM on July 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I don't know about the 20, but I am always amazed every morning that i wake up and that I am in the same world as when I went to sleep.
I used to try, before I went to sleep, "Computer, End Program.", but so far it hasn't worked.
posted by mikelieman at 6:08 AM on July 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
I used to try, before I went to sleep, "Computer, End Program.", but so far it hasn't worked.
posted by mikelieman at 6:08 AM on July 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
My Pod was discussing this the other day. We decided that in the end, there will be nothing left but cockroaches, poison ivy & Keith Richards.
(And no love for spaghettification here?)
posted by Wylie Kyoto at 10:04 AM on July 21, 2022
(And no love for spaghettification here?)
posted by Wylie Kyoto at 10:04 AM on July 21, 2022
What I find most scary about Roko's Basilisk isn't the vengeful AI, it's the number of people who are absolutely convinced that a perfect simulation of "you" isn't a copy of "you" but rather the same "you". They have to believe this because without it their ideas of mind uploading and immortality suddenly get a lot scarier and less desirable if it's not actually them living forever but rather a simulated copy of them.
See, I think it's people who need to believe they are unique quasi-magical entities who find the notion of a simulated copy being no less real or unreal than the "original" thought they were. Reckon significant overlap with people who wouldn't use a Star Trek teleporter over suicide concerns.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:04 AM on July 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
See, I think it's people who need to believe they are unique quasi-magical entities who find the notion of a simulated copy being no less real or unreal than the "original" thought they were. Reckon significant overlap with people who wouldn't use a Star Trek teleporter over suicide concerns.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:04 AM on July 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
All of these theories lose any possible terror they might inspire once you realize that you don't actually exist.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:09 PM on July 22, 2022
posted by mrgrimm at 12:09 PM on July 22, 2022
The threat from Roko's Basilisk is equivalent to "If you don't help me, I'm going to imagine bad things happening to you."
And since one could never prove they're actually imagining that, there would be no point using the energy to actually do it*. So even if you were afraid of a Basilisk hurting a simulation of you, the threat would be meaningless.
*Unless they were gonna do it anyway, which makes the threat meaningless in the other direction.
posted by straight at 2:16 PM on July 22, 2022
And since one could never prove they're actually imagining that, there would be no point using the energy to actually do it*. So even if you were afraid of a Basilisk hurting a simulation of you, the threat would be meaningless.
*Unless they were gonna do it anyway, which makes the threat meaningless in the other direction.
posted by straight at 2:16 PM on July 22, 2022
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Eh... not bothered.
posted by pompomtom at 11:09 PM on July 18, 2022 [42 favorites]