The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create conditions “last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.” A lawsuit has been filed to prevent the LHC from being turned on for fear that it might destroy the earth or perhaps even the universe. Some scientists associated with the LHC have stated that the LHC is safe to operate.
It depends how you draw the species line, but if there's 107+/-1 billion people who have ever lived, and 200 of them have gone up in fire, that makes 200/107+/-1 billion or 1.87+/-.02 E-7%or about what, 8.7dB of a signal against?
What's worse than not being able to get payday loans? Black holes are far worse on the galactic scale of disasters but may not affect you personally as bad as not being able to get payday loans. A black hole is, in lay terms, a part of space that has such massive gravity that it sucks everything that comes close enough and compresses it into a singularity – a point of infinite density. Right now, scientists in Europe are building the Hadron Collider, which might create artificial black holes. It's not supposed to hurt anything – it won't keep you from getting payday loans if you need them, but people are still worried about it.
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.
Probability of the "true theory" of physics being consistent with MBH's being created in the LHC that would consume the earth within the next 5 billion years:P=10^-33
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.
Is there some way that we can print out this string of comments and fire them into space so that perhaps other civilisations might gain the sort of intense enjoyment I just got from reading all of these posts? I mean, the loss of the human race / world / universe / Switzerland and France is not ideal but this blog page must live on. Wow. So good.
I'm going to drink what may be my last chocolate milk ever.
1. what exactly are we going to gain by firing this thing up? in layman terms please, no more than 1 sentence.
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?
OK, there are several relevant a priori probabilities:
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.)
"Is it possible that someone else HAS destroyed the universe, but the destruction hasn't reached here yet?"
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.
Hal, see http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-... for a Nature paper I wrote with Max Tegmark on this; we use planet formation data to estimate an upper bound on the disaster frequency (conditiona on the soundness of the Brookhaven report, and on no error having been made in the reasoning...)
Or, is it possible that WE are constantly destroying the earth/universe with our existing particle accelerators, millions of times per second, but that we are the rare survivors in the Many Words? Would our existence argue against that?
It depends how you draw the species line, but if there's 107+/-1 billion people who have ever lived, and 200 of them have gone up in fire, that makes 200/107+/-1 billion or 1.87+/-.02 E-7%or about what, 8.7dB of a signal against?
wow, just... wow... overcomingbias.com... there's nothing but bias here
it is a beautiful article.i finaly find it here.beautiful posts.keep it up http://www.dissertationedit...
What's worse than not being able to get payday loans? Black holes are far worse on the galactic scale of disasters but may not affect you personally as bad as not being able to get payday loans. A black hole is, in lay terms, a part of space that has such massive gravity that it sucks everything that comes close enough and compresses it into a singularity – a point of infinite density. Right now, scientists in Europe are building the Hadron Collider, which might create artificial black holes. It's not supposed to hurt anything – it won't keep you from getting payday loans if you need them, but people are still worried about it.
"Live every day as though LHC collisions begin tomorrow."
- B Jones, 2008
If you need me I'll be on a Thai beach, 'maximising my personal utility'.
Time for a few more chocolate milks yet:
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 "true theory" of physics being consistent with MBH's being created in the LHC that would consume the earth within the next 5 billion years:P=10^-33
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.
Is there some way that we can print out this string of comments and fire them into space so that perhaps other civilisations might gain the sort of intense enjoyment I just got from reading all of these posts? I mean, the loss of the human race / world / universe / Switzerland and France is not ideal but this blog page must live on. Wow. So good.
I'm going to drink what may be my last chocolate milk ever.
i think you all are correct
1. what exactly are we going to gain by firing this thing up? in layman terms please, no more than 1 sentence.
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?
OK, there are several relevant a priori probabilities:
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.)
"Is it possible that someone else HAS destroyed the universe, but the destruction hasn't reached here yet?"
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.
Hal, see http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-... for a Nature paper I wrote with Max Tegmark on this; we use planet formation data to estimate an upper bound on the disaster frequency (conditiona on the soundness of the Brookhaven report, and on no error having been made in the reasoning...)
Or, is it possible that WE are constantly destroying the earth/universe with our existing particle accelerators, millions of times per second, but that we are the rare survivors in the Many Words? Would our existence argue against that?
Is it possible that someone else HAS destroyed the universe, but the destruction hasn't reached here yet?
I am willing to provide insurance against such an event for a premium of 1.00% of the insured amount (please pay the premium in advance, of course).