Via Arnold Kling, here is a long symposium (a good time waster), from all the names you would expect to contribute to such a symposium, plus Eric Fischl and Brian Eno. Here is Anton Zeitlinger’s offering:
Some day all semiconductors will break down and therefore all
computers as, besides historic instruments no computers exist today
which are nor based on semiconductor technology. The breakdown will be
caused by a giant electromagnetic pulse (EMP) created by a nucler
explosion outside Earth’s athmosphere. It will cover large areas on
Earth up to the size of a continent. Where it will happen is
unpredictable. But it will happen since it is extremely unlikely that
we will be able to get rid of all nuclear weapons and the probability
for it to happen at any given time will never be zero.The
implications of such an event will be enormous. If it happens to one of
our technology based societies literally everything will break down.
You will realize that none your phones does work. There is no way to
find out via the internet what happened. Your car will not start
anymore as it is also controlled by computer chips, unless you are
lucky to own an antique car. Your local supermarket is unable to get
new supplies.There will be no trucks operating anymore, no trains, no
elctricity, no water supplies Society will completely break down.
I worry about that too. A lot of the answers consider nuclear bombs exploding, reengineering the human body, and nanotechnology.
This worries you Tyler? I went to a talk of yours in hte fall of 2008 and you did not list it as a rational worry. Did Kaneman prove this a legitimate worry in the lab?
Sounds like the plot of a Shyamalan movie
chrsux has it right (although “every one” is a bit harsh, and I am not sure they are “all” fringe academics, but to first order I agree). There are some interesting responses, as you would expect if you collected 50 answers from reasonably smart people on any topic, but it is remarkable how many say, in one way or another, “what will change everything is, coincidentally, what I am working on right now”.
Such a pulse would damage equipment connected to long wires and lacking good surge protectors. It would not damage portables that were unplugged or computers inside buildings with lots of metal in the walls (think aluminum siding or foil-backed insulation). It might create lots of problems in the power grid and create problems for anyone leaning on a long wire fence.
The EMP pulse needs an antenna to couple to any device with semiconductors. A chip sitting on a on the ground by itself would not be harmed by such a pulse. Of course, if the pulse were big enough it could harm such a chip. However, an event that could deliver an EMP pulse that big would have other effects that would be much more damaging.
Anon.
What about using some cheap vacuum tube stuff as a backup? Guitar amps still use this and we can be assured that post EMP we will still be rockin’.
I think this one of Edge’s better questions. I like Steven Pinker’s answer, in part because he breaks from personal hobby horses (a danger in Edge essays), and opens with the folly of prediction:
I’d say this has application for MR and Tyler because the hot topics of the day are all about prediction. “The economy is verging on X, so we must do Y!”
It’s worth noting that Krugman and Cowen are dueling with a mix of prediction and prescription.
(In other forums I talk about “green jobs”. I recognized that those also are about prediction paired with prescription.)
The breakdown will be caused by a giant electromagnetic pulse (EMP) created by a nucler explosion outside Earth’s athmosphere.
Worst of all, the blast will release three supercriminals from the Phanton Zone.
I’m not so sure about that. Basically, you’re trying to compare two very small probabilities here – the probability that nuclear weapons will be used, and the probability that nuclear weapons will be abolished. Given that we don’t really have any idea of the P values for either event, I’m not ready to count nuclear annihilation as a certainty just yet. I guess I’m just an optimist.
The right answer to “What will change *everything*?” is CALIFORNIA. The Californian dolar is coming:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28448852/
@odograph:
Ooh ooh ooh! Carbon tech will completely change everything! I don’t mean the usual 8 suspects everyone loves like:
1 – artificial volcanoes, currently the global favorite
2 – ghost ships firing seawater into the high atmosphere, close second
3 – iron-seeding the ocean, no one is sure what would happen, probably ineffective
4 – e-coli “oil 2.0,” raises questions of scale
5 – algae farming, again, scale question
6 – carbon sequestration, the environmentalist’s favorite but completely untested and massively expensive
7 – fungus diesel, more scale issues
8 – peridotite, the carbon absorbing rock – deep strip mining to save the environment! how ironic!
Nope – the one that will change the world – by providing nearly free electricity from mere seawater – that’s what we’ll do with all that arctic ice-melt – $0, 0 carbon! – is the amazing BlackLight. You heard it here first. . .if it’s, um, real. . .
What about the nuclear tests done in the atmosphere (by the french, I believe?). For a blast powerful enough to produce said EMP, wouldn’t the nuclear fallout be much more destructive? The radioactive particles would follow the air currents – and thus cause problems for everyone. I can’t help but remember some “documentary” that said something like this in relation to solar flares.
I worry about the end of silicon as much as I worry about the end of carbon life. I think the odds are real low
I too find Edge.org to be full of self-important blowhards. but if you are an academic working on problem A, and you think problem B is the really important problem that will change the world, why not immediately switch to researching B? As a society, we should welcome arrogant geniuses as preferable to mediocrities working on minimum-publishable-unit papers to get tenure. oth, Edge’s ‘Third Culture’ rhetoric about awkward scientific debates replacing the humanities is fully deserving of ridicule.
If you consider how much shielding is already around, while an emp would do some damage, the idea it will knock out everything is fiction.
I think the big change that should be of interest to the libertarians who hang out here, is to do with labour. We know that an aging population will lead to an increased dependency ratio but we are not acknowldeging that as robots become more sophisticated there will be able-bodied and willing people who will be able to do nothing economically useful that robots couldn’t do better and cheaper. As time goes by, this number will increase and our economic system (whether in the US or Europe) has no way to deal with this. There is no realistic mechanism to transfer wealth from the declining numbers of productive people to the increasing numbers of people who are much less economically productive – especially in the US. Something has to give.
Fortunately, I have a possible solution so you can now relax.
EMP from LEO detonation is less likely than an asteroid strike in the next century. Only a handful of countries can do it, and none has any reason destroy its own technology just to destroy someone else’s (MAD applies here, too).
As for extremely unlikely events, they occur at essentially random frequencies. No sense in predicting the unpredictable, or as Niels Bohr said: “prediction is difficult, especially about the future”.
>Alternatively, is it at all feasible to mandate military-style hardening for critical infrastructure and machinery?
No. Unless you can think of some way to make everyone pay 100-1000x as much for the same electronics. While TEMPEST shielding is aimed at a different threat, it does give an idea of the cost differential.
One doesn’t need nukes to create EMP or HERF weapons. It is my understanding that a number of gangs in UK (in the late 80s) were using military surplus radar sets to knock banks offline and hold them to ransom by disabling their financial centers. These things would fit inside one of the ubiquitous white vans.
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