Ask HN: What are some funky, unconventional ideas you have? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some funky, unconventional ideas you have?

11 pointsxelxebar12 comments

Disabilities aside, I believe than anyone can eventually understand anything learned by science, if they and their teacher are willing to put in the effort.

I'm convinced that the NSA is actively thwarting computer security to make their job easy in the long term.

I believe that mankind was almost wiped out 14000 years ago during the Younger Dryas disaster. Echoes of this are recorded as the great flood, and fire from the sky.

I believe that a computing fabric based on 4x4 bit look up tables clocked in alternate phases (like a chess board) can be an Exaflop computing platform offering near perfect security, fault tolerance, and scalability.

I believe capability based security is the only way to end all of our grief with computer security issues. We won't be safe until it's been widely deployed for a few years and all the bugs are worked out in the microkernels.

I believe that inertia might be quantized, and if so, it might be possible to take advantage of this to build spacecraft that don't need exhaust to work.

I believe that Electromagnetic Vector Potential is real, not just a mathematical convenience for physics theories. It may be possible to exploit this for some interesting real world applications. I really, REALLY want a detector like a SQUID to play with to find those applications.

I believe that cold fusion works, it's just hard to replicate.

I believe that Pascal is a far better programming language than C, especially as realized in Free Pascal.

I believe that no modern OS is anywhere near as safe as IBM DOS on an IBM XT with dual floppy drives, with a write protected boot disk. The machine was so simple, there's really no place for malware to hide. The only way to get past this high water mark is capability based security.

> I believe that inertia might be quantized, and if so, it might be possible to take advantage of this to build spacecraft that don't need exhaust to work.

This idea is new to me. From (what appears to be a fan site) quantizedinertia.com: "This explains why stars at the edge of galaxies can orbit faster than expected but still remain bound to the galaxy. As a result, Quantised Inertia predicts galaxy rotation perfectly without the need for dark matter or any adjustment (McCulloch, 2012, 2017). More practically, quantized inertia also predicts that we can get thrust and energy from the vacuum."

> I believe that cold fusion works, it's just hard to replicate.

Although not exactly related, Terence McKenna used to like saying that science's demand for replication limits it from studying phenomenon that differ over time.

Cold fusion does work, we use it all of the time (to enrich uranium for instance). (Cold being at sub-stellar temperatures, that is).

Cold fusion that is an energy source is a bit harder, as we would have to both find what specific arrangements out of the trillions of quintillions of possible atomic or molecular configurations would work to enable a sustained sub-stellar fusion rate but also have one that releases atomic energy from the reaction at a surplus to the energy needed to sustain that reaction.

It's one of those things that will either be solved by an amateur scientist in a basement (perhaps with some fancy AI-enhanced atomic modeling software?) or by the investment of billions of man hours across a long stretch of time.

I believe it is doable as well, but I don't think that it's a simple task that someone can throw together haphazardly. It will happen (in a repeatable way) when we know how and why it will happen before it happens and not a moment sooner.

OK. I'll give the shallow version, but this is a favorite idea complex that I like to chew on: Warren Buffett's "eat like a six year old" diet and its magnificent power over Warren Buffett.

My theory is that this specific diet is legitimately important to his health because of the way he uses his psychology.

IOW he eats like that not because he wanted to be known as the embarrassing candy diet guy, but because his body-mind system gives him no choice.

And I further suspect that if any given person starts using the same tools and perspectives he does, they will be drawn toward the same diet to the degree or depth that they use those tools and perspectives.

And also I have no opinion as to healthy/unhealthy--it's not that kind of idea. More like--it may be life-sustaining under the circumstances.

Ok, that's out there now, phew ;-)

I think someday and because the ultrarich wants to live forever and trying to do it medically, but it can't be done. Just can't. However, there is one way....; matrix.

I truly believe we will be able to take a snapshot of every single braincell activities and replicate them in a computer. Then place you in a virtual world of your choice to live however long your funds allow you to. One random day as you agree to this, when you goto sleep, you'll be moved over to the digital world and you wake there.

So the long tail of any long living cloud computing services like AWS will one day host your brain at a monthly fee. That monthly fee will entitle you to a world and a life of your choice.

I cannot see this NOT happening. We will soon discover that trying to stretch out human lives is all but impossible, because even if you could stretch another 50yrs or even 100. What aliments awaits you on a daily basis? Have you seen a tortoise at 200yrs old?

But digitally replicated, you would be free of ALL things that holds you back both societally and humanly.

Then when your funds runs out,... lights go out just like that. No pain, suffering and to make sure you can't really calculate your "final" days. Your days in a virtual world would be a repeat of one of your favorite days but you won't know that it was. The beauty of that is you get to live your fav day over and over and over...

Since awareness is part of the universe, (You are awareness and you are real), and since there is no way to construct awareness with just time, space and matter/energy, then there must be four fundamental primitives from which the universe is constructed, space, time, matter/energy, and awareness. Consciousness must then be self-organizing behavior arising from a chaotic assemblage of primitive elements of awareness. Since there is nothing like primitive elements of awareness in the world of classical physics, this primitive element of awareness must exist on the quantum level. Perhaps this is why some quantum behaviors are hauntingly evocative of awareness.

A related idea I've had is that: when a living being reproduces asexually, the conscious observer does not split, and is able to experience both bodies. That is, all bacteria exist as one living being with many bodies.

To test this, I've dreamed up an experiment.

> In April 2004, scientists at Tokyo University of Agriculture used parthenogenesis successfully to create a fatherless mouse. [0]

Create an enclosure where two mice live but are isolated from each other: the parent and the clone child produced asexually.

Then, provide food for one mouse in a place where the other cannot sense its presence and see if it reacts with salivation, a kind of macro-scale entanglement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis#Mammals

Quantum immortality is real and I think some people do get to cross to parallel universes. Probably just my brain trying to cope with us not having any transcendence whatsoever tho while knowing they confirmed some pretty sfx like things in quantum physics.

As I've gained years and felt like things keep getting stranger and stranger, I've come to wonder about this type of immortality, but I don't deliberately test it myself.

"From your own perspective, you will never die." Something will always happen so that your awareness continues but from others' point of view, you may have perished. This splitting is when you can no longer meet those others because your paths have separated. Hopefully in the splitting, that reorients you with a different set of others that you can now meet, otherwise it seems like a lonely trajectory.

I believe it is possible that the speed of light varies, and is not fixed.

Hmm. This one is a head-scratcher.

We know that the sound barrier changes based on the medium the sound is propagating in. in air, it is 717 mph, but in Aluminum it is 3100 mph.

So, there is a chance that if you could create a zone of a different medium for light to travel through, (as to what that could be, I am not sure, probably something like a naked singularity or some field symmetry that changes the background "electromagnetic vacuum", whatever) then you could approach the speed of light and be traveling faster than the observed speed of light in a vacuum.

>What are some funky, unconventional ideas you have?

All of them.

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