On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 8:12 PM <[email protected]> wrote: *> John, isn't it a wiser thing to consider impact over capability?* >
One thing at a time. Before you can have any impact you've got to have a capacity. And if large-scale quantum computers are practical, and it's getting to look like they are, then somebody somewhere is certain to make one. The best historical analogy is with nuclear energy, we've known since 1905 that matter contained a huge amount of energy but there didn't seem to be any practical way to get at it; that suddenly changed in 1938 when Uranium fission was discovered, after that the technological path one needed to travel to release a large amount of that energy very quickly was obvious. It was also very expensive, but it was only a matter of time before somebody somewhere did so. And just 7 years later somebody did. The moral is that if something very powerful can be made then like it or not it will be made. > *> then in the 1950's the immensity of nuclear fission over carbon burning > should have led to an Atomic Age, but it didn't. * > Nuclear didn't beat out fossil fuels its true but you could still say we live in an Atomic Age because it still had an enormous impact on society. Considering the rate that wars were happening in the first half of the 20th century, if nuclear weapons were impossible or impractical to make I imagine we'd be in the middle of World War 5 or 6 about now; they wouldn't be nuclear wars but 20 million people died in the first world war and 50 million died in the second. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> nwb -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1dmsyuxKP%2BKzkcMkBV3KWDyMEhG3vMpEoeMHE4F9Fy5A%40mail.gmail.com.
