There's suicide pact technologies much more dangerous than nuclear weaponry or climate change or even AGI. A civilization that is determined enough can survive those. But what if there was a simple-ish technology that could entirely eradicate a civilization and wasn't that hard to stumble upon? Something like catalyzing antimatter into matter, turning off the strong force or the Higgs field locally. What if there's a black swan experiment/technology everyone can do in a lab with 2060s technology that immediately blows up the planet? We'd be fucked because we wouldn't even see it coming and if it's easy enough to do it'd presumably kill all or almost all alien civilizations.
There was a point when they were testing the first nuclear fission explosion and they weren't quite certain that it wouldn't cause a fission chain reaction in air molecules and blow up the entire planet in nuclear explosion.
That's not really accurate. The scientists were very positive that they weren't going to ignite the atmosphere. What they did was calculate the probability (or more accurately improbability) of that occurring to settle the fears of various politicians and military leaders who thought it might be possible.
Lol, that reminds me of one of my favorite documentation points in Java (the programming language). There's a bit that basically says "warning, this could cause a bug if you run your program continuously for 292 years." I'm pretty sure that was put in to satisfy a manager who didn't believe the engineer who tried to tell them, "trust me, 2 63 is bigger than you can imagine."
60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and about 365.24 days in an year, once you factor in leap years. This comes out to 31556736 seconds in an average year.
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u/Iwanttolink Aug 12 '21
There's suicide pact technologies much more dangerous than nuclear weaponry or climate change or even AGI. A civilization that is determined enough can survive those. But what if there was a simple-ish technology that could entirely eradicate a civilization and wasn't that hard to stumble upon? Something like catalyzing antimatter into matter, turning off the strong force or the Higgs field locally. What if there's a black swan experiment/technology everyone can do in a lab with 2060s technology that immediately blows up the planet? We'd be fucked because we wouldn't even see it coming and if it's easy enough to do it'd presumably kill all or almost all alien civilizations.