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Yoreth comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong
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I suppose, perhaps, an asteroid impact or nuclear holocaust? It's hard for me to imagine a disaster that wipes out 99.999999% of the population but doesn't just finish the job. The scenario is more a prompt to provoke examination of the amount of knowledge our civilization relies on.
(What first got me thinking about this was the idea that if you went up into space, you would find that the Earth was no longer protected by the anthropic principle, and so you would shortly see the LHC produce a black hole that devours the Earth. But you would be hard pressed to restart civilization from a space station, at least at current tech levels.)
The other problem is this: if there is a disaster that wipes out such a large percentage of the Earth's population, the few people who did survive it would probably be in very isolated areas and might not have access to any of the knowledge we've been talking about anyway.
Still, it is interesting to look at what knowledge our civilization rest on. It seems to me that a lot of the infrastructure we rely on in our day-to-day lives is "irreducibly complex"--for example, we know how to make computers, but this is not a necessary skill in a disaster scenario (or our ancestral environment).
I am not following this. Why would the anthropic principle no longer apply if you went into space?
I think it's a quantum immortality argument. If you, the observer, are no longer on Earth, the Earth can be destroyed because its destruction no longer necessitates your death.