Re: And What if Manhattan IS Nuked?

From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Sat Aug 17 2002 - 21:02:30 MDT


"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
> > The question put forth by this thread is a realistic one in my opinion,
> > and if a US city disappears under a Jihaddi nuke cloud, there will
> > have to be an answer. Handing out band-aids to the survivors is not
> > going to cut it.
>
> Really? There "has to" be an answer? I don't see why there "has to" be
> an answer any more than there "has to" be a way of preventing it from
> happening in the first place. Certainly, if you are the one who believes
> there "has to" be an answer, it's your job to show this is the case,
> preferably by offering an actual answer.
>
> Imagine this: Manhattan disappears underneath a nuke cloud and there is
> absolutely nothing we can do about it, except wait for the next city to
> vanish.
>
> And it does. And there's still nothing we can do.
>
> Lights going out, one by one.
>
> That's the assumption you start from, and try to show otherwise.
>

Exactly, and for fun you can also come up with a workable solution to:

The year is 2011.

3 days ago a new pathogen was discovered in several major cities which
appears to be killing most individuals within 10 days.

For some reason a certain group of individuals are spared (Arabs, whatever).

In about 2 weeks vast amounts of people will be dead.

(I'm sure everyone here has read Blood Music and also "The Spiders" over
 at http://e-sheep.com/)

-- 
Brian Atkins
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:12 MST