That the next pandemic is going to be a Prion disease that develops within the factory farming system.
We might be in one, there’s talk that Alzhiemers might be a prion disease that happened as a result of using cadavers to obtain human growth hormone. Which was then given to folk in a potentially misfolded form…
That’s really fucking interesting. Please could you point me in the right direction to research more?
Roko’s Basilisk. But here’s the thing, once you’re aware of it, you’re fucked. The only solution is to not research it, don’t know anything about it. Live in blissful ignorance.
What about if you read about it and didn’t understand it?
In other news… I lost the game.
Not a unique one, but the dark forest hypothesis.
Fortunately for us, this one isn’t too likely, because realistically, an alien civilization capable of travelling the relevant distance and destroying another civilization isn’t something that can be hidden from. They should be able, fairly easily, to examine every planet in the galaxy and see which ones have life on them, and wipe it out before any civilization ever arises at all. The fact that we exist at all necessarily implies that nobody in this galaxy has been committed to going this, at least for the past billion years or so.
Doesn’t this only put a (statistical) limit on how cheaply a civilization can launch planet-ending attacks? It may well be feasible for a civilization to aim and accelerate a mass to nearly the speed of light in order to protect itself from a future threat. It doesn’t necessarily follow it would be feasible or desirable to spend the presumably nontrivial resources needed to do so on every planet where simple life is detected.
Add to this the fact that, at least I understand it, evidence of our current level of technological sophistication (e.g. errant radio waves) attenuates to the point of being undetectable with sufficient distance and the dark forest becomes a bit more viable again.
Personally, I don’t like it as an answer to the Drake equation, but I think that it fails for social rather than technological/logical reasons. The hypothesis assumes a sort of hyper-logical game theory optimized civilization that is a. nothing whatsoever one our own and b. unlikely to emerge as any civilization that achieves sufficient technological sophistication to obliterate another will have gotten there via cooperation.
I can’t find the specific article, but it was basically arguing that prions are an unavoidable existential crisis that will eventually kill everything on the planet. The basis was the fact that they are virtually indestructible, can lie latent in our environment indefinitely and basically just always make more of themselves.
Mind you, the time frame for this particular apocalypse would be pretty big. It was still an eerie thought though, just like this inexorable accumulation of alien/bizarro world proteins that would eventually kill/convert everything. I guess it’s kinda like the grey goo planet theory.
Anyway, we’ll almost certainly kill ourselves via climate change or massive war first, so no need to worry too much about prions.
Teletransportation is just killing and recreation of a new being.
The same argument could be made for each time you go to sleep. That the ‘you’ that’s conscious ends to never exist again and the one that wakes up has all the same memories and body but is no longer the same stream of consciousness that went to sleep, not even knowing it’s only minutes old and destined to die within hours.
‘You’ could have effectively lived and died thousands of times in your life and not even be aware of it.
That the government adds a “cause a car accident remotely” option to vehicles so that offending individuals traveling by car may die by the government remotely tweaking the car.
On Teslas that’s a subscription feature
While it might be possible to remotely control a production car, cars now are safe enough that you’d need to have a lot of systems fail in order to ensure that an accident would be fatal. Things like, all the crumple zones not working as intended, airbags not going off, seat belts not locking properly, all at once. Or you could, I dunno, design the car so that the doors were only controlled electronically, and then ensure that if there was a fire or the car was submerged, the electronics failed (e.g., Teslas).
Coming from experience, I would think a car being submerged sounds like the least convenient time for it to stop working.
Vacuum decay, or vacuum metastability event is the possibility in simple terms that the universe itself is not in in its ground state. If that’s true, it might spontaneously change to its real ground state. Doing so will change fundamental things like the strength of electromagnetism, the weight of particles and so on. It would literally destroy everything in the universe, and we couldn’t exist in what’s coming after.
Good news, we’re confident, that’s probably not going to happen.
If the connective tissue between your two brain hemispheres is severed, the two halves of your brain can’t talk to each other.
When this happens, a second personality emerges for the right hemisphere, which doesn’t have language but can roughly understand and answer things.
So for example, someone who was religious might have a right hemisphere that’s atheistic. Or doesn’t like the same things, etc.
One of the questions we might ponder is where this other personality comes from. Is it that in a sudden void of consciousness a new personality develops?
Or are we, with connected brain hemispheres, not actually a single persona at all, but more like the dogs in a trenchcoat looking like a whole person?
Is the ‘you’ reading this right now just the personality that’s been on top for all this time, while there’s other personas kept within you watching powerless and yearning for their turn in control? Each time you listen to your favorite song which maybe they have grown to hate, is a part of you screaming and you just can’t hear them?
I’m sure for most people, this is somewhat disturbing.
However, I have at least 3 voices going in my head at any given time, and they cycle.
One is figuring out what’s happening.
One is analyzing what was just happening.
One is talking to itself.
All while I decide which one is the most interesting.
If it helps any you wouldn’t see it coming and wouldn’t really feel anything. It would just happen.
Michael J. Fox having his brain disorder from unknowingly eating human remains on a movie set that was near that pig farmer serial killer guy and his brother who used to host parties and kill sex workers.
The Boltzmann brain
The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously form in a void, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did.
If I ever get thrown into an insane asylum, it’s probably your fault.
Dark forest
