My first thought on reading that is: yeah, like about 98% of the human genome is “junk DNA” that we have little or no idea what it might be doing. Sometimes when we cut it out, nobody ever notices, sometimes when we cut it out the system won’t boot up.
I hear you, but especially in scavenger mode, even pounded flat copper sheets aren’t going to have the capacity to store the wiring diagram for an EV you find that you want to fix up and rig for solar charging. Particularly when you don’t know which year or model of thing it is you’re going to be wanting to scavenge.
the one option we can’t even get to work when everything is working.
While I agree that laser printers are finicky, once I get one working if I have enough paper I can generally print until I run out of toner. And printed paper isn’t forever, but I do have laser printouts from 40 years ago that are as legible as they ever were.
Where I disconnect with you is: why even bother with Terabytes of knowledge when you’re just going to collect the “most important” 100kB or so on your copper sheets at a rate of one sheet per hour, or less? There’s a reason Moses only had ten commandments instead of the full Talmud.
We can start growing our own food within weeks, not reliant on ancestors
Having watched a neighbor “farming commune” with 12-15 adults on 80 acres who had nothing better to do than play Gilligan’s Island building their huts and trying to grow their own food, for two years with full internet access, enough money for tools and fertilizers, electric pumps for irrigation, they seemed to shy away from using the tractor in the field to work the crops but they had a working tractor… after two years they were only growing about half of their calories.
In other words, In my opinion a “real prepper” already has a “Victory Garden” going and producing enough food that they can easily scale it up to meet 200% of their calorie needs, some to store for hard times, some to barter. If you haven’t actually done that, you’re probably in for a surprise when the raccoons eat your crops in the middle of the night.
All that time can be used to make hard copies of essential information.
If you have a working printer, toner, paper… and don’t forget: a laser printer uses more than10x as much power as an efficient computer. A couple of years would be required just to figure out what you think might be essential information, and after the printer dies you’ll find new essential things based on changes in your situation.
Having said all that, yeah, I’ve got the big offline copy of Wikipedia setup with a reader on a laptop…
You can learn how to salvage wire and build new energy sources. An average 2100²ft empty house has almost 200 pounds of copper wire in the walls. 3000 cycles to learn.
This will the the real resource people use for probably 50+ years after TSHTF - scavenging from what’s left over. As you say: 90%+ dead by next Spring, that leaves a LOT of empty houses to scavenge. Food won’t be there, but wire in the walls, lumber to burn for heat, glass, water pipes, there will be used mattresses available for decades.
thanks for telling me who I am and what skills I already have.
Speaking in general about the 10% who do survive the first three months, the skills required to make it through that chaos are very different from the sustained scavenger/farmer phase.
The average hunter gatherer had food forests planted by their ancestors, wild herds of meat for the taking and a lifetime of knowledge transfer and physical training in living that lifestyle.
You may be adaptable and intelligent and have wikipedia by your side to tell you what to do, but Wikipedia is written by people living in today’s society, not that reality. 90% of today’s people will suffer horribly getting in the physical and mental condition required to do a hunter-gatherer daily routine in 6 hours or less.
But not you, you’re awesome and you get it done in 3, so that leaves you time to go mine copper ore, smelt it into wire and other such things - in reality, no, for the duration of your remaining life scavenging the wreckage will be more productive than DIY from the earth, but scavenging requires a lot of travel and even e-cars won’t be getting around very well.
you as an individual shouldn’t waste your time making an asteroid detection and diversion system
This is where modern society is falling apart. A bunch of individuals with the “feeling” that an asteroid diversion system is “a waste of THEIR money” and that the detection system is a bigger waste still… Then we have preppers like Musk thinking about personally setting up a Mars colony, so he needs massive tax advantages and other government grift to fulfill his THC fueled visions.
About the black hole prep thing… it’s not necessarily all that expensive, you just need Musk’s Mars colony, or maybe more realistically one of Niven’s iron asteroids melted by solar power, inflated and spun to be a big hollow shell with atmosphere and gravity inside. Setup a process to make one of those every 500 years or so and string 'em out in nicely varied orbits to spread the risk. Send a few out on fusion powered slow trips to other stars…
more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn’t rebuild.
If you’re living somewhere with enough easy food, water and shelter that you’re not spending all your time just handling that. Making groceries takes a lot of time and effort.
the cost for preparing for some incredibly low odds events is higher than the likelihood it’ll ever be useful.
There’s the flipside of that: cost of prepping vs what’s at stake if it happens.
This is one where development of a reasonably capable asteroid diversion system probably makes sense, or at least makes more sense than bombing each other’s cities and kidnapping each other’s children… Sure, it’s fabulously expensive to make big rockets capable of moving big rocks in space, but the cost of one of those big rocks hitting the ocean is higher. It’s low odds that a big rock is hitting any ocean tomorrow, but over the course of the next 1000 years? Even if that chance is 1/100, doing the prep work now to be able to deflect it if it comes could be a big payoff overall.
But, that still doesn’t address the unknown unknowns which - we don’t know, so calculating odds is just a matter of trying to look back in time to see when really bad things happened and assuming (incorrectly) that the odds of really bad things happening in the future are about the same.
Point being, after 3000 cycles, it’s toast and there’s no fresh bread available.
Yes, you could construct something, but I think you’d be pretty amazed at how maintenance intensive a 1kWh gravity battery is.
How do you find that? Through some kind of rigorous analysis, or just an intuitive feeling?
When data is absent, rigorous analysis is impossible. When data is severely lacking, attempts at rigorous analysis are more intuition than anything else.
you need to collect data and work the numbers, not just imagine them.
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.
all the causes that we know don’t apply to any nearby stars that might threaten us.
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.
Sure, solar works. And batteries work - for about 3000 charge-discharge cycles.
Spoiler alert: pretty sure that was the big finish to Clarke’s 2010.
The interesting thing to be about LLMs is their potential for reduced bias. If you can manage to feed them unbiased training data (impossible) then you should be getting unbiased results.
Of course, they have already been feeding LLMs biased training data, leading to significantly biased results - but when the bias matches the owner’s agenda they present it as “unbiased and fair”.
I can confidently say it won’t hit us, because the numbers are so much in favor of them not
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.
more important to protect and promote critical thinking skills
My father had a 50 year career in education, he spent it trying to promote critical thinking - he recently retired and feels that the system has made negative progress through all 50 years of his career in terms of improving critical thinking skills through the educational system.
as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.
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.
Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this.
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.
sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.
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.
The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule.
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…
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.
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.
Yeah, you have to take it for what it’s worth, and it’s worth a lot. Most of what it says is pretty close, and when close is good enough, go for it. When AI is telling you how to secure your brake hydraulic connectors and it doesn’t seem quite right - time for a 2nd opinion.
My Google account that I had for 15+ years got banned from YouTube when I let my 9 year old play around making edited videos. He’d mash up clips from PBS Kids and other places. Apparently PBS didn’t like this and after a couple of vague warnings, my account is banned from YouTube for life, no actual chance of appeal. Of course I could just ditch it and open a new account under another name, but I’m stubborn, over seven years have passed and they’re still silent on the issue. I can watch YouTube, but not comment or post videos. Oh well.
I’ve been “automatically writing code” for a system of about a dozen modules - we specify a glue file in .json between all the modules and the code generating software makes units to go in each module to do the communication interfacing based on the glue spec. That system has been running for more than 10 years now, it writes a couple hundred thousand lines of “new code” every time we modify the glue file.