Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

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What I find so strange about the awe and horror of the atom bomb, its utter power and violence, is how it was the result of decades - well, centuries - of abstract thinking in mathematics and theoretical physics. And how it required particularly new paradigms about the nature of the material world.

Imagine a cosmic being looking at the Earth through a microscope, and seeing this bubble pop on the surface in mid-20th century. Then another, and another pop. Some of them evaporated hundreds of thousands of human beings, melting and dying in gruesome ways you can't imagine in the worst nightmares of hell. Later these organisms learn to harness this destructive force for more useful and productive purposes, powering their cities and data centers for machine intelligence. And this massive amount of energy is released by breaking up the tiniest particles of matter, the nucleus of an atom, how clever and strange is that. Well, no more strange than the phenomenon of life itself, I suppose.

The really mad thing is that while you say it's centuries of abstract thinking and the like, it was only 50 years between the discovery of X-rays and radiation and the first atom bomb, or 40 between the first idea that you could use fission to make a bomb. Neutrons and the nuclear chain reaction was only theorized in the 30's, about 10-15 years before the first nuclear bomb was detonated.

But likewise, there was only a few decades between the first airplane and the first person on the moon (although rocketry goes back hundreds of years. Actually TIL rocketry is older than Newton's laws of physics)

While rocketry is older than Newton, even in 1920, it was widely believed that rockets would not work in space (and therefore couldn't get us to the moon).

https://www.astronomy.com/today-in-the-history-of-astronomy/...

Luckily, the Times did issue a correction - almost 50 years later, on July 17, 1969. The day after NASA launched the first mission to the moon.

It's funny to me to imagine that the whole time humans were doing basically anything on this planet, nuclear fission was also already happening in a few places around the world. I wonder how much science would've been jump-started if we'd found any of the natural nuclear reactors prior to having figured fission out already.

That was one of the secondary points of James Burke's Connections documentary (the primary being the "technology trap"). Scientific discovery begets more scientific discoveries in unpredictable ways because of connections between STEM fields in an ever accelerating chain reaction.

as an example, complex numbers were from the abstract thinking of centuries ago, on which the modern physics derive much value from.

Whenever I’m tempted to think that potential AGI/ASI scenarios sound “too sci-fi” I have to remind myself of this. We live in a world with nuclear weapons and spaceships and microwave ovens. It might prove impossible and it might not, but we can’t predict that based on a general vibe of sci-fi-ness.

And each of those technologies is 70+ years old now (assuming you count V-2 rockets as spaceships). All, in fact, from the same period of history as far as I understand.

At the end of the day.... everything we see and do is just the abstract result of potential energy being released in some form. What is an atom bomb other than an extreme form of this?

The survival of the human species relies on its ability to expend energy. Grow food? We need gas to run the tractors.

Travel to your jobs? Gas or electricity.

Travel to another planet? Massive amount of energy.

Ride away on a spacecraft to another solar system? Massive amount of energy.

The amount of energy required to do these things is probably more than the amount of energy required to erase ourselves from existence. And when we have the ability to harness that energy, do we really think we are responsible enough to not do that, accidentally or adversarial-y?

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