Hacker News Reader

Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

This is somewhat entertaining, but it's a giant strawman. When someone talks about destroying earth, they don't mean literally making the planet cease to be a such, they don't even mean annihilating humanity. They mean permanently making earth a significantly less pleasant place to live for a significant portion of its population. Such as, cutting down the rain forest, disrupting the CO2 pump (or whatever) and lowering the air quality with more disease to follow (or some variation - either way, it's still a planet, and it's still very much populated by humans).

View on HN

When a writer chooses a definition, as long as the definition is not insane ("When I say 'brutal murder', I actually mean the color purple"), you really have to go along with it. English is not a sufficiently precise language to be immediately suitable to the expression of all ideas.

I don't know what the original title was, but I do know the contents of the article, in which the author makes it abundantly (and if you read everything in that section, repeatedly) clear that he is aware of the usual use of the phrase "destroy the Earth". It is not a "strawman", it is the topic of the essay. If anyone is erecting a strawman, it is those who refuse to deal with the text on its own terms and insist on forcing their personal definitions of various terms onto the text, despite clear, repeated disclaimers, and the obvious fact that the entire idea of the essay is predicated on the author's definition.

Maybe you were just reacting to this title, but this has been linked in a few places and every time it seems this reminder needs to be given, so even if you are now satisfied by the new title, this still needs saying. An author is free to choose their topic and the precise meaning of some of the terms they are using; nothing else makes any sense.

Insane? How about nonsensical? The "blow up the earth real good" goal is of the mentality of someone who watches Star Wars and decides the movie portrays real physics. Vaporizing the oceans and turning the crust into molten lava is plenty of destruction. It's also many orders of magnitude less energy than a lot of the patently unphysical proposals in the article. Equivalent mass of antimatter? You'd need a lot less than that to exceed the gravitational binding energy of planet Earth, and even that is ridiculously inefficient.

That's like the proposal to achieve AI by simulating a whole human body down to the molecules. It sounds clever to college freshmen, but it really just shows people are ignorant of the orders of magnitude of what they're discussing.

> They mean permanently making earth a significantly less pleasant place to live for a significant portion of its population.

In the context of this article such people would be termed either "wannabes" or "lacking in vision".

Really? We're talking about those who can see a way to achieve basically the same thing, but whose methods are dozens of orders of magnitude more efficient. That strikes me as clever. To me, the ones who propose such a ridiculous goal are those "lacking in vision."

The number of times 'vision' has been correlated with 'efficiency' or frankly even 'cleverness' is very small. Vision isn't about building a better cow, but how you apply that cow.

RISC? Super-Scalar? Out of Order execution? JIT? Sorry, but vision often does result in orders of magnitude improvement.

You're offering up RISC as an example of vision in a discussion of destroying planets?

Moving Jupiter via fusion candle is vision, RISC is optimization.

The fusion candle idea is neat. It's entertaining because it resembles the thinking behind real engineering. Most of the items from the article are like, "Gee whiz, let's spend about 2 seconds applying knowledge from a 2 second skim of a bunch of Wikipedia entries. Golly, look at the big numbers!"

If you really want to do a thorough job, you'll need a Vogon and a bulletin board.

You mean "Vogon constructor fleet"? A single Vogon seems a non-optimal strategy (seeing as mass suicide via poetry is only a partial solution)

I don't know, bureaucrats operate in packs. A single Vogon might be all you need to set the wheels in motion, and indeed might be more effective than touching on several distributed Vogons.

Exactly. More than one Vogon might have a meeting.

I have updated the title. It represents the article better, and hopefully makes it clear that the article is tongue-in-cheek :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com