soreff comments on Reference class of the unclassreferenceable - Less Wrong

25 Post author: taw 08 January 2010 04:13AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (150)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: soreff 10 January 2010 08:02:42PM 1 point [-]

It also depends on which aspects of the future one is trying to predict... I'll go out on a limb here, and say that I think the angular momentum of the Earth will be within 1% of its current value 20 years out.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 January 2010 12:59:02AM 2 points [-]

Even that is by no means certain if there are superintelligences around in 20 years, which is by no means impossible. The unFriendly ones especially might want to use Earth's atoms in some configuration other than a big sphere floating in space unconnected to anything else.

Comment author: soreff 12 January 2010 04:49:46PM 0 points [-]

Good point - I'd thought that physical constraints would make disassembling the Earth take a large fraction of that time, but solar output is sufficient to do the job in roughly a million seconds, so yes, an unFriendly superintelligence could do it within the 20 year time frame.