Slashdot Mirror
On The Collapse of Complex Societies
One of the mailing lists that I'm on had a great short essay about the disastrous decision that societies can make - and their consequences. The author is Jared Diamond, who also wrote Guns, Germs and Steel (First Slashdot book review was that book), and is still one of the most interesting books I've read in a while.
Starting your example by postulating a girlfriend reminds of me of those physics problems that postulate a frictionless surface.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Speaking of probabilities, once you get to quantum mechanics, the probability of practically *anything* happening is non-zero, so tiny to be irrelevant. Like, the probability of an object spontaneously jumping a few feet in the air due to a quantum fluctuation is non-zero, but small enough (10^-60 or so?) that the probability of seeing it happen, anywhere in the universe, anytime in the lifetime of the universe, is much much smaller than 1.
Ie, the moral is, knowing whether or not a probability is non-zero doesn't help. You need to actually do the calculation and find out exactly how probable it is.
Well, there is actually a reason why that could not happen. The weather system doesn't contain that much energy.
Two words: Quantum Tunneling.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
Yes, in principle that could happen (as I said in my post), but the potential barrier is absolutely gigantic, I mean the probability of tunnelling a single atom from earth to the Sun is so vanishingly small to be utterly negligable. And you are talking about the whole atmosphere? Get real!
But you are correct. We could wait quite literally forever and never see it happen.
Dyolf Knip
Ack, I'm off by a few orders of magnitude. That should be 2000kph.
Dyolf Knip