this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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I love seeing all the tacticool "operators" with their tricked out ARs, bulletproof vests and helmets, flexicuffs, and other shit but look like they get gassed slowly ascending the stairs from their mother's basement. Rule #1 in the zombie apocalypse is Cardio.
Also society isn't going to collapse overnight. If it does it will be a slow crawl until going full Gravy Seal is warranted. They need to survive until then.
That’s the other thing. Society is more likely not to collapse, but just adapt. Half your country could be wiped out by a nuke. If the capitol was taken out then you’re just entering government less warzone like Darfur. They still have trade etc in those regions. Eventually surviving external government exert influence and prop up their preferred government.
Or the capitol survives, the housing market crashes, everybody becomes poor, disgruntled young guys force through a vote for a strong daddy to lead them through this tough time.
The movie “the road” is horrible but unlikely. The Last of Us military city states is more probable. Or just reading a history book.
Not if it goes down like you expect it to.
In my experience, the real problems are the ones you weren't planning for.
Even if we don't end up nuking each other like we thought we would in the 60s-90s, we could still get a massive asteroid / comet strike with less than a week's notice. That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.
More likely: something we don't even know about comes along and makes life far more challenging than it has been for 100,000 years.
Humans are very bad at intuitively grasping very large and very small numbers, and that includes very small probabilities. The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule. Especially with the "not seeing it until it's a week away" condition, we've come a very long way when it comes to mapping near-Earth asteroids and there just aren't any places for them to hide any more. Especially not once Vera C. Rubin goes online.
A star that's capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not "innocent-looking", it's actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us. They'd also need to have a very precisely aimed axis to hit us, gamma ray bursts look so bright in part because their "beam" is so narrow.
Absolutely, based on the information we have today.
That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that's coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don't know about that one.
The thing about our probabilities of events that haven't happened yet to leave a scar that we can notice on the surface of the Earth, we haven't been very good at observing the sky except for the last 100 years or so, really 50. So, we're learning more and more about things and newly discovered hazards don't lower the probability of occurrence...
That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst. What we don't know about that star is the super Jupiters orbiting it in a quasi stable multi-body arrangement that could collapse a bunch of mass into the star and turn it from Jekyll to Hyde under your bed ASAP.
You guys are prepping for Jupiter to become a second sun? That’s hard fucking core man!
Spoiler alert: pretty sure that was the big finish to Clarke's 2010.
Space is BIG. Even if your asteroid idea happened, I can confidently say it won't hit us, because the numbers are so much in favor of them not. Earth is a ridiculously small target compared to the space in the solar system, and we have Jupiter that throws everything out and protects us. It's not happening, and even if it did it'll likely hit water, and even if it hits land it likely won't be near you.
Prepare for a car accident. Don't prepare for asteroid impact. Youre wasting your time and money in the later and, though the former is relatively unlikely to be needed, it's actually realistic that it may happen to you. Until you're prepared for that, for a house fire, for a break in, for a medical emergency, and for anything else that's relatively likely, you're wasting your resources.
Andromeda is going to hit the Milky way, and it likely won't do anything to most earth-like planets because the densities of both (all) galaxies are so low.
Individual low odds things don't happen frequently, but collectively they happen a lot more often because there are so many low odds things with potential to happen.
The Holocene may only run 12,000 years - it looks like the Anthropocene is the most likely end for it, but life has been evolving on Earth for 3.5(ish) billion years, making the Holocene just 0.00034% of that period, 1/300,000th in round numbers.
Right. You have to dream up counterfactual fantasies in order for it to be a problem.
And you don't need to worry about it, because as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.
Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this. How much mass do those asteroids have? What's their collective cross-section, and how does that compare to the volume of space they'd be passing through? How big is Earth in comparison?
I'm betting the odds will still be microscopic. I feel safe betting that because we have real world evidence that bodies in our solar system don't frequently get hit by ghost asteroids from the Magellanic Cloud (there's an 80's sci-fi movie title for you). Large impacts are few and far between these days,
Once again, sure, you could imagine that ordinary stars sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.
If you want it to actually be a worrying scenario, though, it needs to be backed up with some kind of evidence or theory that makes it plausible. And again, we don't actually see frequent gamma ray bursts in reality, so whatever mechanism you propose needs to be rare for it to fit the data.
I don't worry about it, because it is a very small number and my life is likely very short by comparison, but... the very large number of potential sites for life to evolve in the visible universe still yields zero evidence of a technological "WE ARE HERE" sign that we can understand. That implies that either: A) we really are the center of the universe, first to develop technology or B) such developments of energy manipulating technology are an exceedingly small number rare for... reasons that we do not yet understand. And of course C) those of us who have seen irrefutable proof of alien technology are hiding it from the rest of us for... reasons.
Of the possibilities, I find A) much less likely than B), and C) to be impossibly absurd - people just aren't that good at keeping secrets for long periods of time.
You're analyzing a risk we could imagine, what you can't do is analyze a risk we haven't imagined yet. Looking at the vastness of the Universe and the rate at which our theories about how it all works evolve, I find it far more likely that we haven't imagined more of actual reality than we have.
Not miraculously, we know some of the causes that make this happen. What we don't know is all of the causes or all of the existing conditions that will precede such events.
When such event does "miraculously" happen we may be able to learn from observation what likely triggered it and then it won't be "miraculous" anymore, it will have an analyzable probability - with a rather large window of uncertainty.
Until such an event kills us all, or at least tanks civilization. We won't likely learn much from that one.
How do you find that? Through some kind of rigorous analysis, or just an intuitive feeling?
As I keep saying, the human mind is not good at intuitively handling very large or very small numbers and probabilities.
What you can't do is analyze a risk without doing an actual analysis. For that you need to collect data and work the numbers, not just imagine them.
Yes, and all the causes that we know don't apply to any nearby stars that might threaten us. You have to make up imaginary new causes in order to be frightened of a gamma ray burst.
When data is absent, rigorous analysis is impossible. When data is severely lacking, attempts at rigorous analysis are more intuition than anything else.
And when the data can't be collected? Contingency planning and resource allocation for the unknown is folly, right up until it is the smartest thing to do.
That we know of.
We should focus on expanding our knowledge and plan based on the best data we have, but like the first lunar astronauts spending 21 days in quarantine, a bit of planning and care for the unknown isn't a bad idea either.
There are an infinite number of things for which there is no evidence. Preparing for those things would be taking effort away from preparing for things that are actually real.
The first lunar astronauts spent 21 days in quarantine because we know that diseases are real and in the past there have been real examples of explorers bringing back new diseases from the places they visited. They didn't simultaneously get ritually cleansed by a shaman because there is no evidence of actual lycanthropy being a thing.