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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

Leaving aside the fact that there's no evidence superintelligence is even possible, no amount of intelligence alone will let you "trivially" create black holes. Creating black holes requires a ludicrous amount of energy. Planet-scale energy, maybe solar-scale energy. Energy is conserved. You can't just think really hard and have it. At minimum you have to already have the energy and materials to build a machine that will let you (mostly build another machine that lets you) harness that much energy.

It's at least not something you'll do by accident.

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Origami Black Hole https://m.xkcd.com/3033/

"It Really Brings the Room Together" https://m.xkcd.com/1680/

M87 Size Comparison https://m.xkcd.com/2135/

Black Hole Moon https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/

You don't know any of that.

We are primitive apes. We are all uniformly dumb.

It's inherent to the math that defines the entire concept of a black hole, or "spacetime" in general. So to the extent we can contemplate the question at all, we can be pretty confident that creating black holes is Very Hard.

There's a lot we don't know, but the fact that the universe is consistent means it has to be consistent with what we do know already. Don't be so openminded your brain falls out.

> the fact that the universe is consistent

We don't know this either.

We are very limited in detection. Our energies are small.

How "standard" are standard candles and other references? Are the facts that stand as the basis for our theories even correct?

We are too primitive to be dealing in absolutes.

> > the fact that the universe is consistent

> We don't know this either.

See this is what I'm talking about as far as being too open-minded. Consider what it would mean for the universe to be inconsistent, particularly in relation to the astronomical observations that are the basis of this conversation.

All we can say is that the universe has been consistent so far, during the brief time we observed a small part of it given the instruments we have.

We update our model(s) so that it keeps being consistent and predictable to us (that’s human nature), but no model can be probably correct and complete.

You are not grappling with the full consequences of the universe being inconsistent. If the universe is inconsistent, science is dead. Why the fuck on HN of all places do I need to defend the idea that science is possible? Back to philosophy class, all of you.

Because you're being too narrow minded. Hubble Tension exists, the universe is not consistent. We take cosmological homogeneity as an axiomatic assumption and we keep being proved wrong.

The only thing we can say with confidence is that the base laws of physics appear to be mostly consistent everywhere we've looked in the last hundred or two years. But also only across relatively recent history. The laws of physics were very different early on. The electic and magnetic field used to be separate things and now they aren't.

None of this is incompatible with science as a concept.

In case it wasn't clear, I'm only talking about whether the universe is logically consistent.

Finding consistency goes hand in hand with modeling reality, and every model by definition 1) is wrong (incomplete/incorrect/unprovable) and 2) exists in your head only.

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