Centre for Applied Eschatology
appliedeschatology.com
appliedeschatology.com
Depopulating a city is relatively easy and achievable with conventional bombs. A small country would only be moderately more difficult with nuclear weapons. After this, things get much harder.
Sure, enough nukes could finish off the human race, but that's out of the price range for most shoppers in this market. In the long term, climate change might do it, but who's got that sort of time? You're probably left with something like a biological agent, a pathogen of some sort, and still run the risk of pockets of people hiding away or being immune. Still, let's say you did it, it worked, humans are gone. Yay! You destroyed the world! Right?
No. You extinguished one species. You have a long way to go on the entire world.
So you put your mind to it. Defoliation agents for the plants, the cast of Deadliest Catch to get the crabs (you planned ahead and saved them from the nuclear fallout), a few billion tons of boric acid for the roaches-- get it all covered. Yay, party time?
Again, no. If you were meticulously thorough, you killed all life, but really the project has just begun. Everything is dead, but it's all still here. The Earth is still here. And if you thought rooting out the last extremophiles was hard work, you've never had to try & sweep 6 * 10^24 kg of mass under the rug.
Do you break it up? Is that enough? Technically it's still there and if you leave it it will all just accrete back together. So maybe you decide to push it into the Sun, either piece by piece or all at once, depending on on your level of godhood.
Finally, you can relax. Cut yourself a nice piece of "I destroyed the world" cake. Have a beer... ... ... Ehh, maybe don't eat the cake or drink the beer. You didn't really destroy the world, of it's matter sti exists. It's not gone, it's just molten.
So no cake for you. In fact, it will be a long long time before you see any cake coming your way.
I dunno, there's plenty of nukes that are ready and waiting and have been paid for. I wonder what would be more effective; nuking the targets that have been designated by various states already since the cold war, or piling up all the nukes, maybe a few km underground, and trigger a cataclysmic event (like a supervolcano as mentioned on the page).
Re: climate change, they could accellerate the process a bit and nuke the north and south pole ice, maybe. Or spread a darkening agent on any exposed ice to increase heat absorption.
But anyway, I don't think any of these would completely sterilize the earth, possibly only humanity and other large animals. To sterilize it, we need to get rid of the atmosphere and most of the earth's crust. I guess a big enough asteroid could do it (think moon-sized), something whose impact is so big it breaks up the whole ball.
I really should watch more of their videos, I'd forgotten how brilliant they are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GJttnC8PoA&t=16s
[Edit: And by 'better job' I mean scared me witless as a teenager]
_Feels old_
The problem though is still the amount of energy needed: In short, too much. Ball park estimate place it at about 410^28 joules, and a large nuker only puts out about 410^15.
The theory is still sound though, and could be modified: Drill down a hundred miles or so and put 90% of the nukes down the hole to blow a crater out. Take the largest chunks and the remaining 10% of the nukes and proceed as originally planned, but on a smaller scale. Bonus: The debris should also make its way to LEO and trigger a cascade of collisions that take out everything in orbit.
I like the your thinking. This is a problem that definitely benefits from a gestalt approach. Otherwise there's lots of ways pockets of life can cling on and maybe regain a foothold in a few thousand years when your back is turned. That's why you need the Deadliest Catch crew for the crabs: Sure they have to search, but even the worst ship always came back with some. Load those guys up with crystal meth, adult diapers, and an IV nutrient drip and push them through a decade of non-stop crabbing until there aren't enough left to sustain a reproductive cycle. Between that, nuclear fallout, and the chemical agents used for other life forms you can knock out these little delicious cockroaches of the sea.
On the availability of nukes, sure there's more than enough around, but the problem is ownership. Unless you've subverted the government of Russia, the US, or China then even if you have enough nukes, you don't have the infrastructure to launch them all at the same time & avoid giving too much warning to people. They'll bunker down and do all sorts of inconvenient things like try to restart civilization. Their chances are slim, especially with the super volcano route, but it could take a while to wait them out. And at that point you've lost the nuke option since all of the launch infrastructure has been destroyed. Then you've got to go the long way around and root them out shelter by shelter (or vault by vault, Fallout style) Messy. On the plus side, some of the people in those shelters will be preppers who tried to plan for this sort of thing, and they'll get to die while living out their fantasy.
It works as follows:
1. Quantumly randomise the list, such that there is no way of knowing what order the list is in until it is observed. This will divide the universe into O(n!) universes; however, the division has no cost, as it happens constantly anyway.
2. If the list is not sorted, destroy the universe. (This operation is left as an exercise to the reader.)
3. All remaining universes contain lists which are sorted.
And given that the list being sorted is a one in n! chance, often enormously less likely than than hardware malfunction, wouldn’t the algorithm mostly produce malfunctions rather than sorted lists?
(Genuinely curious if I’ve got the right understanding of the CS and potential physics.)
Btw, the quantum bogosort also assumes that destroying the universe is O(1), which seems unlikely. Clearly, when sorting a bigger list there is more information in the universe (ie the list). Since information and energy seem to have some equivalence in quantum dynamics, is does not seem unreasonable that destroying a universe with more information in it would take longer and so destroying the universe cannot be O(1).
I don't think this is necessarily true. You could argue that the list is simply a bigger fraction of the information in the universe.
“These and other factors make us confident that CAE and its partners can reduce uncertainty and accelerate the world to its ultimate end.”
“CAE pursues applied and transdisciplinary research into several areas of global and existential catastrophe, focusing on those most likely to produce rapid and broad-based impact.”
They sat they are not terrorists, not a religious group, not nihilists, not anti-natalists, not negative utilitarians, not misanthropes, and not eco-radicals. I really like their broad dedication to not-ness: https://www.appliedeschatology.com/faqs
Ah, being the change they want to see.
The response to 'How can I help?', namely 'You are surely helping already' seems like the biggest clue to me that this is a joke.
Q: Why do you want to end the world?
A: CAE is devoted to practical, pragmatic solutions. We’re interested in the how, not the why.
> "CAE is devoted to practical, pragmatic solutions. We’re interested in the how, not the why."
I don't know why, but it reminded me Facebook.
I had to look this up : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology
My favourite quote from the FAQ:
- How can I help? - You are surely helping already.
Sadly likely to be true
There are no new antibiotics coming and the half life on new ones before resistance is developed is less than 5 years. They want you to focus on the "virus," we know how to deal with viruses, they aren't the issue for long periods of time, only decades. Bacteria will cause extinction.
They didn't cause humanity to go extinct before antibiotics were invented. If they all lost effectiveness, we'd just return to the status quo ante (not extinct, with more sickness).
There are enough antibiotics that they could be cycled, with some kept in reserve for emergencies only (e.g. sepsis).
"The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse (theatlantic.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081438
When life gives you lemons... sometimes the only solution is to trade sides and play for Team Lemon.
Are you doing your part to change could into will?
Side note: I was convinced at first that the author patterned the main character, Reid Malenfant, after Elon Musk, until I checked and saw the thing was published back in 1999.
Basically, Doomer Corp.
>OUR MISSION: To accelerate the world's transition to non-being.