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Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with horse and carriages only to see us landing on the moon before you die. That's some serious societal whiplash.

I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.

"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"

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I'm envy of people of the past having real freedom in their lives. I wouldn't be surprised that future generation would envy of us, who have the freedom to move fast anywhere.

Tech changed at a much faster and drastic pace then compared to now. Another example the first ever nightclub opened and ran from the early 1870s until 1910. The Haymarket Historical Marker https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=121028

That will pale in comparison to how future generations view plastics.

Imagine if we ate and drank out of lead paint containers constantly for decades before discovering their health impacts. That's basically what has happened with plastics.

Plastic isn’t remotely as toxic as lead

Lead was used as a sweetener in food for hundreds of years

And pewter cups and plates for thousands

Indeed.

Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.

How could you possibly come up with 10-15%?

Eyeballing a sigmoid curve for TRL development times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

There's several things that it depends on which are TRL 1-3, but are known to be at least theoretically possible. Based on how long it takes to get other things from TRL 1 to working device, I think it's most likely to take longer than my current remaining life expectancy even to be even odds, but not by such a large margin as to be infinitesimal odds.

This seems enormously optimistic to me, both as a technological assertion and a cultural one. Like even if we could build self-assembling nano-machines (nota bene: we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines) why would we use them to disassemble the moon? I mean a 0.1 % chance, maybe. But 10% chance? Nuts.

Culturally? Nuts, sure, but you've been following the news right? Humans are nuts.

> we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines

TRL-1 tends to imply such statements :)

… although, is that actually true? For macroscopic, I mean? Given factories exist and robot arms are part of them, are you sure nobody has used a robot arm to assemble an identical robot arm from a pile of robot arm parts? I've not heard of anyone actually doing so, but are you sure that's never been done?

Essentially, completely sure. Also, purely energetically, disassembling the moon basically could not occur on the timescale of a few years.

Energetically, it would take 1.244e29 J to disassemble the moon: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=binding+energy+moon

This can only be done if the VN machines are able to form a useful cloud away from the moon immediately after they've disassembled the surface layer. If they aren't allowed to do that, it would take 415 millennia: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.244e29+J+%2F+%281kW%2...

But you can make it twice as fast by getting the first layer to lift the second layer to cislunar orbit, then combine the power of both layers; then four times as fast etc. etc.

I don't know the upper limit before the main constraint is cooling.

Without getting into hairy calculations, if you really thought this was possible with a high probability, you'd accept $20 bucks and agree to give me a big payout (say $4000) in the future (say when you retire) because you think there is a large chance you'd never have to pay.

We could game this out and figure out exactly what a rational bet is, but you get my point. It seems very hard to believe you think there is a 10-15% chance. Those are probabilities at which you would be making major moves to hedge.

I do not understand how you think those numbers work.

I said "10-15%" of the moon being disassembled in my (current natural) lifetime, as in the break-even point for a bet is me spending $20 today for a chance you pay me $133-$200 on my deathbed. (I don't expect you to want to do that just because your odds for this are even lower, so you'd only want to take the other side of a 1:10 payout ratio if you thought it was 90% likely to be disassembled, the point is the breakeven point for positive expected returns is return ≥ cost * probability even before time discounted value of money and why would I want more money when I die).

As for hedging, isn't that normally done for negative outcomes? If so, what's the downside here?

A VN replicator on the moon is unambiguously harder than one on Earth (existence proof: life only found on one of them), so if the D6-to-D10 dice roll says "success!" for the moon, the mere existence of the tech will also radically transform what money even means down here on earth.

Surely the hedge to make against it is what to expect if we don't maintain the current rate of tech development that makes such an outcome even this likely? And the hedge for that looks somewhere between "prepper" and "political economist"?

Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit, so the most likely version of this scenario is not beneficial/benign (e.g, grey goo scenario), so you need to factor in the chance that you'll be dissasembled before you see it happen to the moon.

> Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit

Not by itself. I basically agree with your broader point, of course, but on this particular detail, if someone's goal is to turn the moon into something like a Culture Orbital with the Earth at the centre*, the overall momentum of the system doesn't need to change.

* Or the old barycentre at the centre. This is also a terrible idea, please don't do this. Apart from anything else, mistakes are inevitable and large chunks of moon/O will rain down on us.

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