- B Jones, 2008

If you need me I’ll be on a Thai beach, ‘maximising my personal utility’.

it will be several weeks before physicists accelerate two proton beams travelling in opposite directions to their full energy of 7 teraelectronvolts, and smash them head on.

– NewScientist

Probability of the P value actually being quantifiable:
P=0

This first value is identically equal to the probability that every physical law we are capable of conceiving of is fundamentally invalid, and actual reality is completely and fundamentally insane.

I’m going to drink what may be my last chocolate milk ever.

2. what would the number crunching commentators say the probability of life on earth was (ex-anthropic please)

3. ‘and probably would pass through any matter causing no damage at all.”
“Maybe the hole would end in the center of Earth and remain there until eternity, provided no evaporation occurs. There is no need to fear black micro-holes” are you f**ing jerking us off? risk life on earth for maybe and probably?

1. The many universes theory of quantum mechanics is wrong (mangled many universes is one way for this to be so). If it is correct, then the LHC will at worst just blow up some large fraction of the incalculably large (though possibly finite) number of universes, leaving a number of universes that is still incalculably large or infinite.

Personally, I regard this probability as something under 50%. Say 1%.

2. Either it only blows up the planet in a way that is not easily notable from afar, or the great filter has already been passed. I would assign the latter a probability comparable to, or smaller than, the great filter probability itself, which is pretty much the floor for the “safe” probability. But perhaps my only rational reasons for discounting this come from the less-a-priori arguments below. So: I can conclude that it only can blow up the planet.

Only then do we come to the actual physics of what is happening. I tend to respect the many physicists I know when they say that the total luminosity of the LHC, in terms of events fitting any given description, will not exceed or even approach the number of events created by cosmic rays in the observably-free-of-post-LHC-artifacts universe. Therefore, I consider the LHC itself to be safe – that is, at least a hundred orders of magnitude. For any sane prior distribution of the probability of X causing Y (that is, without an unnatural bias to high probabilities), if n X’s have not caused Y, then the 101st X will not cause Y to a probability exponentially related to n.

This begs the question of whether any possible future LHC might blow up the world. Personally, I tend to believe that a universe-destroying energy level might exist, or a world-destroying energy level which is much less than the simple imbuing of one particle with the energy to physically heat up the planet to kill all life. However, I believe that the fact we are in a great-filter universe is good evidence for some bias against such simple deus-ex-machina endings to the story – if there were one, it would have happened – and thus a good argument that we can constructively assume that any soluble engineering problem will not destroy the universe. Either there is no universe-destroying energy level, or attaining one is an insoluble engineering problem.

(Note that I am implicitly invoking an anthropic principle across multiple, totally noncontinuous universes here. I am saying that either it is impossible to posit laws of physics that quickly result in dense intelligent life – with no great filter – or that there is some anthropic-principle reason we are heare, ie, the qualia of being an intelligence such universes are fundamentally (discontinuously?) different from ours. I am then using this same anthropic principle in a forward direction, saying that EITHER there is some subset of such universes where self-immolation-by-physics-experiments is impossible for some reason, and thus we can simply take any physics experiments as reductio-ad-absurdem proofs, using the anthropic principle, that such universes exist; OR there are no possible child-proof universes, and we should resign ourselves to our destiny of blowing ourselves up if we’re lucky enough to get that far, because clearly we are not currently the kind of species able to refrain from it, and the conditional probability, given the fact that we do miraculously refrain, that such reserve came from arguing about this issue itself, is hundreds of orders of magnitude improbable.)

Yes. Coming towards us at speed c would be very different than at just under c. The latter would give our descendants warning. Even the former might give us a chance to try something radical if tachyon beacons are an engineerable technology. One of the more important tasks of an AGI or us in the future will be to solve the Drake Equation.