Yes, I suppose it would take an all-out war between two superpowers to kill that many today. (Several thousand nuclear warheads detonating over the largest cities, plus the attentant global economic collapse. With the cessation of most food shipments from net producing nations to net consuming nations, disease and starvation would make up the rest.) I fully expect at least one rogue nation to detonate a nuke in an enemy city in my lifetime.
I'm glad that no recent war has employed a WMD. However, with science actively exploring biology and nanotechnology, and with totalitarian nations like the former Soviet Union trying their best to make weapons out of the same, I figure that such technology will get exponentially more powerful, and become accessible to smaller and smaller groups of people.
It would be nice if the 20th century remained the bloodiest in human history, but I don't have that much faith in human nature...
Don't forget the Fermi Paradox and Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation for why we appear to be alone is that we are alone.
Furthermore, don't forget that as our technology grows, our ability to destroy always outstrips our ability to create. (See physics, entropy, cybernetics, etc.) In the last 100 years, we have cured diseases that have saved millions of lives. But large teams of people have also invented weapons that can kill billions. In another 100 years, when that ratio improves some more, a small group of people will be able to kill trillions. Then it's just a matter of time.
So even if there is life out there someplace, I doubt it will live long enough to be visited. (I'm assuming--as other posters did--that any advanced civilization out there arrived there via aggressive Darwinian competition.)
So this means we need to re-introduce lead paint into half the nation, and ban abortion in one half the lead-paint region, plus half the non-lead paint region, to get a full 2-factor experiment?
(Seriously, though, did either of these researchers take the mobility of people into account? E.g., were all the crooks long-term residents of the area?)
Personally, I think we should focus on merely surviving our own human nature. Since it is always easier to destroy than it is to create (see laws of physics), the greater our technological power becomes, the easier it will be for smaller and smaller groups of people to do more and more destructive things. Eventually it will be trivial for one nut case to kill us all. Certainly explains the Fermi Paradox quite well.
1) The Fermi Paradox. Much as we want to think of ourselves as a universal community who just hasn't discovered its true neighbors yet, the simplest explanation of the Fermi Paradox (i.e., the one using the fewest number of assumptions) is that we are actually alone. Therefore, nothing we create is going to be appreciated by anyone, because there isn't anyone else out there as far as we can prove.
2) It is ALWAYS easier to destroy than to create. That is just an unfortunate law of physics (entropy, cybernetics, etc.) Right now, a group of people of size X working in concert can destroy a number of humans of size ~1000X (or larger). As that ratio gets even larger, the probability of us making it off our rock before we destroy ourselves is dropping like a...well...rock.
If you have any optimism at all, you aren't looking at the whole picture. (Or you're a theist.) I don't hate humanity, I just don't have much of that emotion called hope...
In addition to the features listed on wiki, it supported easily-creatable multiple windows (onto the same file, or different files) and the ability to select/cut/paste rectangular blocks of text. 'Twas the first (and probably last) time I have experienced a true order-of-magnitude increase in productivity from any software product.
I give humanity 100 more years before all this becomes moot. Today, we can, with expensive machinery, tinker with individual molecules. Once you can go to Nano-Shack and get your own 65-in-1 Nanotech Kit, it's only a matter of time until some nut case embeds a logic bomb in an airborne virus or nanomachine, and humanity is finished--or at least set back a few centuries. And it will only take one person out of 30-some billion going off the deep end to do this. Don't count on post-humanity, either. Bio-electronic beings won't be any less evil than we are now, they'll just be a lot quicker and more efficient about things like genocide.
Never bet against human foolishness, selfishness or destructiveness.
Look at stamps from 100 years ago. Far more artistic talent employed than just a few minutes in Photoshop like today. And the stamps actually honored real people and real achievements. Today, not only are stamps ugly and cheap looking, but every other one honors some superficial thing from pop culture! It says a lot about where we are as a society.
But just so you won't think I'm totally humorless here: These are the usual self-adhesive stamps, right? So you don't actually get to _lick_ the _Princess_, you sex-crazed perverts! (However, the Grace Kelly stamp from over a decade ago still had the old-fashioned adhesive. Now _there_ was a stamp!)
Back in April of 1989, the Communications of the ACM published an article describing a language for just this sort of purpose, called Linda. It provided elegance and simplicity in multithreaded programming at the expense of more overhead for coordination (always a tradeoff). Communication was done by each thread putting the results of its processing into a shared pool, from which downstream threads would periodically take messages and perform further processing. No synchronization really, just producers and consumers operating on this shared pool of data. Obviously this would not be a silver bullet for every multithreaded need, but strong in the "simple" department.
If robots do end up self-aware and able to reproduce, we should expect the same sorts of things we humans do now: Genocide, torture, wars over resources and territory, totalitarian systems of government, the invention of novel types of crime, hunting other living things to extinction, and so on.
I.e., what good will a set of rules be? They won't follow them any better than we do.
"Let's try this thing out on _that_ asteroid...it's not headed for earth."
(BOOOM)
"OK, now run your calculations on the trajectories of the fragments."
"Uh oh...."
Now I remember! It was an _emerald_ they said would scratch easily. That's why I ended up getting two _sapphires_. Good thing I'm using my nickname here... (Hi honey!)
Saphires are quite soft compared to diamonds and won't last in a ring very well. (At least that's what the jeweler who wanted me to buy more diamonds told me.)
The article states that, "If two people disagree on how long a task takes, it's likely that...each person made different assumptions about details of the work..." If only it were that easy! Given that developers vary from 1-4x in productivity (or 1-10x, if you read Tom DeMarco's _Controlling Software Projects_), any hope of estimating accurately, especially on small projects with only a few developers, is, well...hopeless.
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Yes, I suppose it would take an all-out war between two superpowers to kill that many today. (Several thousand nuclear warheads detonating over the largest cities, plus the attentant global economic collapse. With the cessation of most food shipments from net producing nations to net consuming nations, disease and starvation would make up the rest.) I fully expect at least one rogue nation to detonate a nuke in an enemy city in my lifetime.
I'm glad that no recent war has employed a WMD. However, with science actively exploring biology and nanotechnology, and with totalitarian nations like the former Soviet Union trying their best to make weapons out of the same, I figure that such technology will get exponentially more powerful, and become accessible to smaller and smaller groups of people.
It would be nice if the 20th century remained the bloodiest in human history, but I don't have that much faith in human nature...
Don't forget the Fermi Paradox and Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation for why we appear to be alone is that we are alone.
Furthermore, don't forget that as our technology grows, our ability to destroy always outstrips our ability to create. (See physics, entropy, cybernetics, etc.) In the last 100 years, we have cured diseases that have saved millions of lives. But large teams of people have also invented weapons that can kill billions. In another 100 years, when that ratio improves some more, a small group of people will be able to kill trillions. Then it's just a matter of time.
So even if there is life out there someplace, I doubt it will live long enough to be visited. (I'm assuming--as other posters did--that any advanced civilization out there arrived there via aggressive Darwinian competition.)
The realist: The glass contains half beer, half air. Drink the beer, breathe the air, and keep your silly emotions out of it.
So this means we need to re-introduce lead paint into half the nation, and ban abortion in one half the lead-paint region, plus half the non-lead paint region, to get a full 2-factor experiment?
(Seriously, though, did either of these researchers take the mobility of people into account? E.g., were all the crooks long-term residents of the area?)
As the owner of a 50-year slide rule that is still in great shape, I can say they are cool, at least. But what is even cooler (and a lot more expensive) is the Curta: http://www.webcom.com/calc/Curta_text.html and http://www.vcalc.net/disassy/ !
Personally, I think we should focus on merely surviving our own human nature. Since it is always easier to destroy than it is to create (see laws of physics), the greater our technological power becomes, the easier it will be for smaller and smaller groups of people to do more and more destructive things. Eventually it will be trivial for one nut case to kill us all. Certainly explains the Fermi Paradox quite well.
Aren't we forgetting a couple of things here?
1) The Fermi Paradox. Much as we want to think of ourselves as a universal community who just hasn't discovered its true neighbors yet, the simplest explanation of the Fermi Paradox (i.e., the one using the fewest number of assumptions) is that we are actually alone. Therefore, nothing we create is going to be appreciated by anyone, because there isn't anyone else out there as far as we can prove.
2) It is ALWAYS easier to destroy than to create. That is just an unfortunate law of physics (entropy, cybernetics, etc.) Right now, a group of people of size X working in concert can destroy a number of humans of size ~1000X (or larger). As that ratio gets even larger, the probability of us making it off our rock before we destroy ourselves is dropping like a...well...rock.
If you have any optimism at all, you aren't looking at the whole picture. (Or you're a theist.) I don't hate humanity, I just don't have much of that emotion called hope...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor)
In addition to the features listed on wiki, it supported easily-creatable multiple windows (onto the same file, or different files) and the ability to select/cut/paste rectangular blocks of text. 'Twas the first (and probably last) time I have experienced a true order-of-magnitude increase in productivity from any software product.
I give humanity 100 more years before all this becomes moot. Today, we can, with expensive machinery, tinker with individual molecules. Once you can go to Nano-Shack and get your own 65-in-1 Nanotech Kit, it's only a matter of time until some nut case embeds a logic bomb in an airborne virus or nanomachine, and humanity is finished--or at least set back a few centuries. And it will only take one person out of 30-some billion going off the deep end to do this. Don't count on post-humanity, either. Bio-electronic beings won't be any less evil than we are now, they'll just be a lot quicker and more efficient about things like genocide.
Never bet against human foolishness, selfishness or destructiveness.
I'm sure they will turn out to be well-rounded people when they grow up.
Look at stamps from 100 years ago. Far more artistic talent employed than just a few minutes in Photoshop like today. And the stamps actually honored real people and real achievements. Today, not only are stamps ugly and cheap looking, but every other one honors some superficial thing from pop culture! It says a lot about where we are as a society.
But just so you won't think I'm totally humorless here: These are the usual self-adhesive stamps, right? So you don't actually get to _lick_ the _Princess_, you sex-crazed perverts! (However, the Grace Kelly stamp from over a decade ago still had the old-fashioned adhesive. Now _there_ was a stamp!)
Back in April of 1989, the Communications of the ACM published an article describing a language for just this sort of purpose, called Linda. It provided elegance and simplicity in multithreaded programming at the expense of more overhead for coordination (always a tradeoff). Communication was done by each thread putting the results of its processing into a shared pool, from which downstream threads would periodically take messages and perform further processing. No synchronization really, just producers and consumers operating on this shared pool of data. Obviously this would not be a silver bullet for every multithreaded need, but strong in the "simple" department.
If robots do end up self-aware and able to reproduce, we should expect the same sorts of things we humans do now: Genocide, torture, wars over resources and territory, totalitarian systems of government, the invention of novel types of crime, hunting other living things to extinction, and so on.
I.e., what good will a set of rules be? They won't follow them any better than we do.
"Let's try this thing out on _that_ asteroid...it's not headed for earth."
(BOOOM)
"OK, now run your calculations on the trajectories of the fragments."
"Uh oh...."
Now I remember! It was an _emerald_ they said would scratch easily. That's why I ended up getting two _sapphires_. Good thing I'm using my nickname here... (Hi honey!)
Saphires are quite soft compared to diamonds and won't last in a ring very well. (At least that's what the jeweler who wanted me to buy more diamonds told me.)
The article states that, "If two people disagree on how long a task takes, it's likely that...each person made different assumptions about details of the work..." If only it were that easy! Given that developers vary from 1-4x in productivity (or 1-10x, if you read Tom DeMarco's _Controlling Software Projects_), any hope of estimating accurately, especially on small projects with only a few developers, is, well...hopeless.