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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

Crazy that the spectre of instant destruction still haunts us today.

I wonder if this will ever change now. As technology goes forward, we're creating a world in which an individual can gain more and more destructive power, and in which when something goes terribly wrong, it can wider and wider consequences. We're at global level now, and fast approaching extinction-level.

Two areas to highlight the point:

- High-energy anything. There's a saying that any propulsion system that could allow us to travel between planets in a reasonable (for human) timespan is also a weapon of mass destruction. And it's not just space travel - history of technology in general is about getting, storing and making use of bigger and bigger quantities of energy.

- Self-replicating system. The best-known example of these is also known as "biology". Something we're only beginning to play with on a serious level. Mishaps, or worse - deliberate malicious actors by crazy individuals - could have planet-wide consequences as our ability to manipulate biological nanomachines grows.

Sleep tight :).

(Also, alt-text from https://xkcd.com/728/ - "Maybe we're all gonna die, but we're gonna die in really cool ways.")

Of course a lot of the risk comes from the trend for technology to operate at larger and larger scale to achieve efficiency. We could see a trend in the opposite direction where individual households and communities can be more self sufficient. For example, efficient small scale energy production could reduce the risk of nationl level grid disruption. That same biotech industry could enable local food production without needing to depend on complex infrastructure for evey meal.

I agree those may be desirable directions for development, but they don't change the overall dynamics - we expand our capabilities by dealing with more and more powerful, and thus dangerous, stuff. As individual demand for electricity increases with each appliance we incorporate in our lives, the household battery/generator of 2050 could very well be powerful enough to level a city block if weaponized. Even more likely, the same biotech industry that can enable local food production will enable creation of new, deadly pathogens.

Humans, unfortunately, are very optimistic when it comes to workplace and household safety, while at the same time extremely resourceful when they need to make weapons out of mundane objects.

Exactly. We need to find ways to manage powerful technology socially, or we are going to have serious problems in the near future. Unfortunately, I'm not sure[1] our species can adapt fast enough.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033

Thanks for linking to your old comment, it's pretty insightful. I agree that we seem to be accumulating technological advances faster than we're maturing as a civilization to handle them.

If we ever achieve some form of reasonable, in-system spaceflight, then we are really going to have to start worrying about every crazy person with a spaceship bumping a smallish space rock into an impact orbit with earth. Or even just unfortunate accidents. But it wouldn't take much of an asteroid to burn down through the atmosphere and create a Tunguska-level impact.

The most recent Expanse novel is an interesting take on how apocalyptic such an event could be http://amzn.to/2aD2AFl

It would take incredible energy over a long burn time to accomplish that.

It also takes a lot of energy to make intrasystem travel a quotidian reality.

Still several zeros apart. Moving a small ship vs moving a mountain

Sure, but intrasystem travel will only be economical if we can mine and get fuel, energy, and mass from non-Earth sources.

If we get to that point, scaling up just consists of waiting a few decades of exponential growth to kick in. It might not even involve humans, but just letting automated robots continue to build more robots.

If the technology is there, moving mountains instead of ships is just a small jump.

You don't have to move a mountain very much, or very fast. You need to slowly nudge it. Aerobraking will do the rest.

Sure. but the danger of 'some crazy' doing this undetected for a decade it takes to realign its orbit? That's where we started.

On the other hand, if a lot of countries had apocalyptic weapons (a phase that naturally precedes such weapons becoming available to individuals), it could all but eliminate war. Countries behave surprisingly like rational agents in international relations. This period would be the window of opportunity for one lucky winner to bootstrap an AGI.

The US and USSR were moments away from war several times. As Pakistan and India show, being nuclear armed does tend to end conventional wars. But as more countries become nuclear armed, the higher the chances one of them will actually use them.

Supposedly the Cuban Crisis was averted by the leadership deviating from the (supposedly rational) RAND script.

When Saudi Arabia and Iran are both nuclear armed, how long before one of them strikes first, even if it is at or through a proxy?

The Iraq Iran war was filled with incalculable human tragedy and horror, of which both sides were perfectly willing to accept. Both the people who chained children together and forced them to charge machine gun nests and the people who mowed down children chained together from their machine gun nests.

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