On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 6:45 AM, Milos Rancic <[email protected]> wrote: > By accident or by some other reason, we have much better optics than > computers. So, it is reasonably to suppose that some future > civilization will achieve much faster good optics than good computers.
Okay, great. Now you can assign probabilities to my other six assumptions, and multiply all the resulting seven probabilities together. Feel free to tell us the results. If the product of those seven is more than a small fraction of a percent, I'm going to say you were being wildly unrealistic. Even if you assign each of the seven a 50% probability, their product will be less than 1%. Actually, there are more assumptions: you have to assume that humanity *ever* recovers, and within a period of time when people will still understand written English. You'd have to calibrate the magnitude of a catastrophe *very* carefully to get a situation where civilization collapses, to the extent that none of the hundreds of millions of computers on the planet remains functional for long enough to print out any needed info (even using wood/biomass-powered backup generators, or emergency fuel supplies) . . . but you still have people who can read English around. People are more fragile than computers, and not much more numerous. Yeah, I'm still going to say the entire idea is ridiculous. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
