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Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards

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On Sun, 10 Jul 2016 14:24:59 -0400, kensi wrote:

> On 09/07/2016 5:15 PM, Nadegda wrote:
>> On Sat, 09 Jul 2016 14:01:38 -0700, Checkmate, DoW #1 wrote:
>>> Here's what it boils down to:  The human species will destroy itself
>>> with its own hubris long before those answers are forthcoming.  Life
>>> carries no more importance than we choose to give it... then we die.
>>> Meanwhile, I'm just waiting for a spontaneous Universal phase change
>>> to be the next DoW.  (for those of you who "get" that)
>>
>> Pessimist.
> 
> Higgs field collapse in our lifetimes is *highly* improbable. If natural
> forces (e.g. supernovae; energetic events around neutron stars and black
> holes; etc.) could trigger it the odds of it happening within any
> particular narrow window of time are tiny; more likely it happens long
> after we're dead or would have happened long before humans even evolved
> than that it happens in the next, say, 50 years.
> 
> As for artificially triggered, if it hasn't happened naturally yet it's
> hard for even very high energy events such as the astrophysical ones
> noted above to set one off, and nothing in our technology is projected
> to be able to throw that kind of energy around in the foreseeable
> future. That leaves only the option of "it takes finesse": what random
> high energy particle-crackups takes many billions of years to eventually
> accomplish by chance can be accomplished quickly, reliably, and at much
> lower energy by doing something precise and tricky.
> 
> In that case, setting one off would be like building a Toyota: no matter
> how many times Fords are crashed into lampposts you won't see a Toyota
> spontaneously assembled from the parts, but if you set about crafting
> one intentionally, it's not that hard. But if that's possible with a
> Higgs collapse, to set one off we'd probably have to know enough about
> quantum gravity and grand unified theories that we'd *know that was the
> consequence* of whatever we were doing. You can crash a Ford without
> knowing much about how to build cars, but you can't assemble a Toyota
> without that knowledge.
> 
> So, the only way it's likely to happen within our lifetimes is if
> someone sets one off *on purpose*, rather than as an unintended
> consequence of a physics experiment. Meaning some doomsday cult or
> something. But I'd bet on germ warfare as the biggest threat from those
> sorts of l00ns, not high energy physics stuff we haven't even invented
> yet. And likely won't -- unlike nukes, this hypothetical thing would
> have no potential use as a weapon of war, as its use would be suicide.
> 
> Its only possible use would be as a terror threat used as a deterrent,
> but the downside if it accidentally got triggered is so huge no sane
> country would build one for that purpose. And before you say "Dr.
> Strangelove", keep in mind that if any *other* civilization out there
> had built one and set it off anytime in the past 13 billion years, we
> wouldn't be here having this discussion right now, so the odds are it
> either can't be done or won't be done even under fairly broad
> assumptions about the psychology of those with access to the big red
> button (broader than even the assumption "has *human* psychology").

Doesn't your own multiverse + anthropics hypothesis throw a monkey wrench 
into that? With that, humans necessarily wake up to find themselves in a 
branch where no earlier civilization set one of these doomsday devices 
off, but that needn't be because one setting one off is impossible or 
even improbable. In fact if most civilizations eventually do this it 
would explain the Fermi paradox. Each one is the first, and last, in its 
Hubble volume, modulo quantum branches.

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Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards "Sir Gregory Hall, Esq." <greghall@yacht_master.fake> - 2016-07-01 19:42 -0400
  Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards "Checkmate, DoW #1" <Lunatic.Fringe@The.Edge> - 2016-07-01 16:53 -0700
    Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards Janithor <Janithor@comcast.net> - 2016-07-01 16:55 -0700
    Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards "Sir Gregory Hall, Esq." <greghall@yacht_master.fake> - 2016-07-01 20:20 -0400
      Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards Janithor <Janithor@comcast.net> - 2016-07-01 17:59 -0700
        Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards BBB DoW #14 <r0llinThru@none.invalid> - 2016-07-02 22:11 +1000
      Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards "Checkmate, DoW #1" <Lunatic.Fringe@The.Edge> - 2016-07-01 20:26 -0700
        Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards BBB DoW #14 <r0llinThru@none.invalid> - 2016-07-09 19:21 +1000
          Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards vallor <vallor@cultnix.org> - 2016-07-09 09:36 +0000
            Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards BBB DoW #14 <r0llinThru@none.invalid> - 2016-07-09 19:52 +1000
              Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards "\"Fakey's\" dogwhistle holder living at 5907 Stanton Ave., Pittsburgh, PA (aka Teh Mop  Jockey), socked up as 5907 Stanton Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15206-2117" <root@127.0.0.1> - 2016-07-09 12:16 -0400
              Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards Nadegda <nad318b404@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-09 20:30 +0000
        Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards "Checkmate, DoW #1" <Lunatic.Fringe@The.Edge> - 2016-07-09 14:01 -0700
          Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards Nadegda <nad318b404@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-09 21:15 +0000
            Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards kensi <kkensington01@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-10 14:24 -0400
              Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards "Checkmate, DoW #1" <Lunatic.Fringe@The.Edge> - 2016-07-10 12:32 -0700
                Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards Nadegda <nad318b404@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-10 22:44 +0000
                Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards "Checkmate, DoW #1" <Lunatic.Fringe@The.Edge> - 2016-07-10 15:53 -0700
              Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards Nadegda <nad318b404@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-10 22:42 +0000
                Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards kensi <kkensington01@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-11 05:39 -0400
                Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards Nadegda <nad318b404@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-11 20:45 +0000
                Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards kensi <kkensington01@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-12 05:23 -0400
                Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards Nadegda <nad318b404@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-12 20:19 +0000
  Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards kensi <kkensington01@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-05 11:03 -0400
    Re: WINNERS - June 2016 Usenet Kook Awards Nadegda <nad318b404@gmail.invalid> - 2016-07-05 21:32 +0000

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