Jump to content

  • Member Statistics

    17,584
    Total Members
    7,904
    Most Online
    LopezElliana
    Newest Member
    LopezElliana
    Joined

Spring Banter & General Discussion/Observations

CapturedNature

By CapturedNature,
in New England

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 3.4k
  • Created
  • Last Reply
Typhoon Tip

Typhoon Tip

Posted
Posted
13 hours ago, Hoth said:

Well said. We'll be lucky to reach 2100 in my opinion. When AGI comes along, we'll be as ants compared to it. How do we treat ants? We don't hate them, but neither do we have any qualms about bulldozing their colony. If we don't perfectly align AI's goals with our own, were probably toast. We're pouring incredible resources into developing this tech across the world, from schools to every corporation to militaries, but little gets assigned to safety. This is humanity's ultimate hurdle. 

Personally ...I wouldn't put it as Humanity's ultimate hurdle, self-imposed or not.  It's n the list, though.

There are other 'self-imposed' hurdles on the list that are equal, if not ranked higher in threat. And, it's a longish list, too. You read the thing and it's like, nope - not manageable when you imagine the proactive scale of logistic immensity that would be required to prevent any one of them - let alone a cocktail calamities, should more than one on that list emerge concurrently. 

If any readers are morbidly curious enough, that list of "Dooms Day" scenarios is/was prioritized and maintained in tenths of urgency/rank, by an international consortium of renowned scientists. ... Kind of like a think tank that ferrets out the end of the world, using all available evidences. They have created also created a "Doom's Day Clock" - I'm sure many are familiar with all this.

But, it's really so overwhelming that it's all really untenable to the average mind - like, what can be done to stop any of it, anyway? May as well just party while we're here - easier to throw hands.  It's all too insurmountable - circling back to 'How in the hell can a Humanity completely guided by greed and orgasms of joy, first' ever tackle such enormity in scale of responsibility?  ... It's like asking a Down's child to solve 4th degree tensors.  Good luck.  

Anyway, then,... even if we manage to side-step our suicidal reign ... I was just reading this morning how there is a small caldera near Naples, Italy ...actually, partly under that metropolis. It's an active Supervolcano, Campi Flegrei, and it's nearing a criticality . There are land deformations, ...like a zit swelling before it pops... In Geological parlance, the critical 'pop' point is known as, "CDP, or Critical Degassing Pressure."  

The problem is, there are no known predictive techniques for if/when the Earth pops this thing and sends enough puss to throw the Earth into an Volcanic Winter.  It could be in our lifetimes... it could be 500, or 1,000 years. It could rise and fall (the deformation), approaching theoretical CDP but never release.  The history/papers about "Burning Fields" (Campi Flegrei) are all out there; not sure if there is any periodicity.  The region did go through an eruption even in the 1600's, but otherwise, according to the literature that is readily available, the last "major" caldera events were 200, 40, and 12 thousand years ago. It is theorized that they were probably causal in the extinction of the Neanderthals.  

I mean...every f thing around us in our realities ... all of it, despite Sumatra, Japan, Chili, New Madrid, ... The Carrington Event... it's all been created in a relatively friendly enabling, quiescent geological recent past.  It's almost blessed.  Like ...destiny allowed us here. Destiny could easily erode the feet right out from underneath Humanity and expose the fragility of our conceits.  If even one of these sort of deals jolt unfolded upon world, let alone if more than one timed poorly... Global Warming takes a backseat, sure. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ORH_wxman

ORH_wxman

Posted
Posted
14 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Personally ...I wouldn't put it as Humanity's ultimate hurdle, self-imposed or not.  It's n the list, though.

There are other 'self-imposed' hurdles on the list that are equal, if not ranked higher in threat. And, it's a longish list, too. You read the thing and it's like, nope - not manageable when you imagine the proactive scale of logistic immensity that would be required to prevent any one of them - let alone a cocktail calamities, should more than one on that list emerge concurrently. 

If any readers are morbidly curious enough, that list of "Dooms Day" scenarios is/was prioritized and maintained in tenths of urgency/rank, by an international consortium of renowned scientists. ... Kind of like a think tank that ferrets out the end of the world, using all available evidences. They have created also created a "Doom's Day Clock" - I'm sure many are familiar with all this.

But, it's really so overwhelming that it's all really untenable to the average mind - like, what can be done to stop any of it, anyway? May as well just party while we're here - easier to throw hands.  It's all too insurmountable - circling back to 'How in the hell can a Humanity completely guided by greed and orgasms of joy, first' ever tackle such enormity in scale of responsibility?  ... It's like asking a Down's child to solve 4th degree tensors.  Good luck.  

Anyway, then,... even if we manage to side-step our suicidal reign ... I was just reading this morning how there is a small caldera near Naples, Italy ...actually, partly under that metropolis. It's an active Supervolcano, Campi Flegrei, and it's nearing a criticality . There are land deformations, ...like a zit swelling before it pops... In Geological parlance, the critical 'pop' point is known as, "CDP, or Critical Degassing Pressure."  

The problem is, there are no known predictive techniques for if/when the Earth pops this thing and sends enough puss to throw the Earth into an Volcanic Winter.  It could be in our lifetimes... it could be 500, or 1,000 years. It could rise and fall (the deformation), approaching theoretical CDP but never release.  The history/papers about "Burning Fields" (Campi Flegrei) are all out there; not sure if there is any periodicity.  The region did go through an eruption even in the 1600's, but otherwise, according to the literature that is readily available, the last "major" caldera events were 200, 40, and 12 thousand years ago. It is theorized that they were probably causal in the extinction of the Neanderthals.  

I mean...every f thing around us in our realities ... all of it, despite Sumatra, Japan, Chili, New Madrid, ... The Carrington Event... it's all been created in a relatively friendly enabling, quiescent geological recent past.  It's almost blessed.  Like ...destiny allowed us here. Destiny could easily erode the feet right out from underneath Humanity and expose the fragility of our conceits.  If even one of these sort of deals jolt unfolded upon world, let alone if more than one timed poorly... Global Warming takes a backseat, sure. 

 

The Super Volcanoes are an interesting topic...if only because the last time we experienced one, we were still almost exclusively in Africa....during the Toba Eruption. It is theorized that we nearly went extinct during that eruption (population bottleneck to perhaps 10-15 thousand?...though this is debated), but at the same time, it "advanced" us quite a bit via the Darwinism that occurred during such hard times.

Of course, we have multiple Super Volcanoes that could erupt at any time.

 

A more near term threat though with our population as large as it is though is likely a global pandemic.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Cold Miser

Cold Miser

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, ORH_wxman said:

 

The Super Volcanoes are an interesting topic...if only because the last time we experienced one, we were still almost exclusively in Africa....during the Toba Eruption. It is theorized that we nearly went extinct during that eruption (population bottleneck to perhaps 10-15 thousand?...though this is debated), but at the same time, it "advanced" us quite a bit via the Darwinism that occurred during such hard times.

Of course, we have multiple Super Volcanoes that could erupt at any time.

 

A more near term threat though with our population as large as it is though is likely a global pandemic.

Very much agree with this. The current circumstances brought about by technology have made this scenario such an obvious possibility.  We have the know-how and again the technology to contain, and cure to some extent, but I fear not within densely populated, poorer areas of the globe.  That is not to say that we are all not vulnerable as well. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Typhoon Tip

Typhoon Tip

Posted
Posted
31 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

 

The Super Volcanoes are an interesting topic...if only because the last time we experienced one, we were still almost exclusively in Africa....during the Toba Eruption. It is theorized that we nearly went extinct during that eruption (population bottleneck to perhaps 10-15 thousand?...though this is debated), but at the same time, it "advanced" us quite a bit via the Darwinism that occurred during such hard times.

Of course, we have multiple Super Volcanoes that could erupt at any time.

 

A more near term threat though with our population as large as it is though is likely a global pandemic.

Yes, yes and yes. In fact, I think that is number two on the most recent version of the list of DDay scenarios. It seems to vary a bit based upon class and scale. 

Like, there is a top 10 list of scenarios from extra-terrestrial sources, Asteroids, Solar Storms, ...even Cosmic Ray Bursts/Gamma Ray incineration...  But these seem more fear mongering and sort of static (to me) as in, regardless of the SVs or GW or Pandemics..etc, these are more like longer epoch constants that will never change as threat levels.  

The other lists are more realistic as in our life time...or perhaps, more scientific to say, this geologic era (which of course is thousand of generations going back before Christ and going forward into the next Millennium(s), and those have a cocktail of self-imposed cataclysms.  

GW is on that list because of the Anthropogenic contribution.  But, (no pun intended)...that is more of a smoldering issue (for now; if a "threshold" like we were discussing yesterday were to flip the dial abruptly...things get dicey in areal hurry).  However, it does effect (theoretically) the fears of Pandemics. Hotter world effects the "petri-dish" of the microbial universe.  

And, as the recent southwest African Ebola scare recently showed, it is not far fetched to create "super bugs" with very high pathogenicity do to habit exposures, combined with this whole unintended antibiotic engineering crisis that is causing even common strains to mutate into drug resistant forms. The hotter world causes population densities to increase as climate shock collapses many ecosystems and drive populations to shrinking geographic regions more conducive, which then increases pathogen success..  

interesting.   

Link to comment
Share on other sites
powderfreak

powderfreak

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, eekuasepinniW said:

Wind peaked around 8:30 with a very nice gust to 42 mph, and has since slackened off a little bit.

Still increasing here.

Max wind of 66mph at the Office at 1,500ft and 94mph at 4,000ft.

We've dropped 20 degrees at the office since 6am...down to 12F here and 3F at the summit.  Wind chills well below zero.

What a shock to the system this is...after the past two weeks, 12F with high wind feels like Antarctica.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ORH_wxman

ORH_wxman

Posted
Posted
Just now, powderfreak said:

Still increasing here.

Max wind of 66mph at the Office at 1,500ft and 94mph at 4,000ft.

We've dropped 20 degrees at the office since 6am...down to 12F here and 3F at the summit.  Wind chills well below zero.

What a shock to the system this is...after the past two weeks, 12F with high wind feels like Antarctica.

The snow probably feels like Antarctica too....need to get some good snow back in the mountains. Hopefully later next week after the cutter, we get a good finish.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
powderfreak

powderfreak

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, ORH_wxman said:

The snow probably feels like Antarctica too....need to get some good snow back in the mountains. Hopefully later next week after the cutter, we get a good finish.

Yeah its got a blue tint.  That's never good, haha.  Anything ungroomed is pond ice.

This is one of the more impressive CAA of the season.  Midnight high of 50F and down to 12F in the parking lot prior to noon.

 

March2.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ORH_wxman

ORH_wxman

Posted
Posted
Just now, powderfreak said:

Yeah its got a blue tint.  That's never good, haha.  Anything ungroomed is pond ice.

This is one of the more impressive CAA of the season.  Midnight high of 50F and down to 12F.

 

March2.jpg

Just wait until Sat morning...that's gonna feel good at the summit.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Hoth

Hoth

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

 

The Super Volcanoes are an interesting topic...if only because the last time we experienced one, we were still almost exclusively in Africa....during the Toba Eruption. It is theorized that we nearly went extinct during that eruption (population bottleneck to perhaps 10-15 thousand?...though this is debated), but at the same time, it "advanced" us quite a bit via the Darwinism that occurred during such hard times.

Of course, we have multiple Super Volcanoes that could erupt at any time.

 

A more near term threat though with our population as large as it is though is likely a global pandemic.

Was that the eruption about 70k years ago? I had read somewhere that humanity may have dropped to as few as a couple hundred after that event.

Anyway, I did not mean to distract from substantive discussion of weather by bringing up the risks of AI. No, Ginx, I don't particularly care for sci-fi movies, and the scenario I'm talking about would probably not look anything like "Sky-net." But Tip made an "Apollo 13" analogy (a movie I do love) of "why bother fixing X problem when Y problem is more pressing?" and my conceit is that AI fits the bill with respect to climate change. Whether it happens in a few decades or a century from now, when you consider the exponential progression of technology, at some point computers will simulate human level cognition, and when that happens, there will be an intelligence explosion which could quite effectively eradicate us (at the very least end our reign as the species on the cognitive efficient frontier). Machines will be able to rapidly self-improve their design and power, superseding collective human cognition exponentially in short order. If it happens in a way that we have carefully thought out, and their interests are carefully aligned with ours, then it may be the best thing to ever happen to us. If, however, things are even slightly off, it could very easily wipe us out. That seems the much more likely scenario. Perhaps some will consider this total bunk and paint me a raving lunatic, charging  perhaps that we understand little about how our own brains work and that, therefore, we cannot possibly hope to create an artificial version of our cognition, but we are getting better and better at simulating these processes. We already have prosthetics that read brain signals and convert the wave patterns into an intended mechanical action. And last year, Google's AlphaGo beat the best human Go player four times in a best-of-five match, a feat which experts generally did not expect to happen for another 10-15 years. Btw, Go is not like Chess, where brute force iterative techniques can be used to find the best move. AI/machine learning technologies are rapidly coming down the pipeline. Self driving cars are nearly here and will cause dislocation of truck and taxi drivers by the early 2020s. Tech is already causing huge displacement in the financial world. Goldman had 600 equities traders fifteen years ago, now two guys handle it with technological assistance. Certain medical fields, cardiosonography, radiology, etc. are going to shrink as computers become better at recognizing anomalies in scans. Some law firms already use software for their legal discovery. Structural unemployment will likely become the norm, as people are pushed out of their fields, and are unable to adapt to jobs requiring a high-level skill set. AI is ubiquitous now and money is pouring into it by the billions in universities, corporations and governments. Anyway, the fact that such leading lights as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Sergei Brin and others have sounded the alarm on the risks of AI, and are pouring millions into researching safe implementation, suggests that this is not just some laughable far-fetched black swan event, but a real incipient concern. And as I said, as destructive as climate change is, we can adapt to it. We will be virtually defenseless against AI once it reaches parity with us.

 

But now, returning to the weather, it is windy as hell out there.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...