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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Scott Adams has something he calls the “The Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters”; i.e. if we can see a problem coming from far ahead, we’ve always been able to fix it in time to avoid it.

* http://blog.dilbert.com/2013/04/15/fact-checking-adams-law-o...

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Slow-moving disasters tend to end up as "devil take the hindmost"; afterwards the best off survivors can say it was fine but not everybody made it.

Personally I'd call the war in Yemen a resource/population one, and there's arguments that this applies more broadly across the middle east conflicts.

On the other hand Iain M. Banks had "out of context problems" which arrive in civilizations "like a full stop in a sentence."

Also William Gibbson's idea of The Jackpot is pretty relevant. All the dice can roll to six and you get a situation which you can't walk out of - so radical climate change (or even not so radical), economic depression and a fairly throaty nuclear exchange or two.

Fix that.

1) Climate change takes many years. Let me remind you of a recent one called the end of Little Ice Age. Before that, there was Medieval Warm Period. The one currently happening is unprecedented but likely not impossible to adapt to, nor fix on century lengths. It will be more painful the longer we let it run though.

2) Big nuclear exchanges? Nuclear exchanges as projected are expected to be local, we don't even have enough nukes to raze all major cities.

3) Economic depression has happened multiple times so far. With various interesting results, from World War II to Computer Era. :)

The closest thing I can think of is "Rock Falls, Everyone Dies". Generally a rock moving at km/s from out of Solar System. Last time this happened dinosaurs got extinct.

The other one is a nearby gamma ray emitting supernova. This could sterilize most of the planet.

I was going to use nuclear war as a counterexample, but I see that he is somehow using it as a point in his favor. I find that very weird. We haven’t done jack to fix that problem, it just hasn’t happened yet.

There's been significant things done to stop nuclear war.

There are huge nonproliferation and counter-proliferation efforts going on.

There have been some efforts to make it less likely. Nothing that would outright stop it.

Nonproliferation efforts aren’t even about making it less likely. They’re only about not making it more likely.

The expansion of global trade has done more to stop nuclear war than anything else. You don't want to nuke the guy who gives you all your soybeans.

Which aren't working. Did you know that India now has a fleet of SBN's?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arihant-class_submarine

So how do we measure this? We can’t use the existence or non-existence of nuclear war, since that’s an all-or-nothing proposition – the fact that we haven’t had a nuclear war yet does not say much about the likelihood of one occurring. So how do we measure the likelihood? Some people like to concentrate on the amount of nuclear weapons, and, by implication, argue that the likelihood is proportional to the number of nuclear weapons in the world. I am less than convinced about this reasoning. Or is it the simple number of countries which have them which matters? I don’t think so either; if, say, Norway and Iceland both acquired nuclear weapons, would nuclear war be more likely? Probably not. So you have to be careful in how you score this issue, since it’s impossible to measure directly, and easy to convince yourself you have chosen a good proxy for it, when in reality it’s merely an irrelevant factor which happens to be easy to measure.

We should keep this between us, please don't let any politician read it.

> we’ve always been able to fix it in time to avoid it

...only provided those who decide can profit from the fix. There’s also “it’s hard to be aware of the problem if you profit from your non-awareness.”

Therefore: “saving the banks too big to fail” works. But saving the civilisation? In god we trust, he gave us the planet to just use it.

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