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Karmakaiser comments on Glenn Beck discusses the Singularity, cites SI researchers - Less Wrong
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Disregard me: This is an inaccurate statement, not an understatement. I still maintain the understatement of the century probably happened sometime around WWII.
Better candidate:
This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.... We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again. - Neville Chamberlain
Your overall point is well taken, but you're interpreting "century" to mean "last hundred years". The way I'd interpret the word, this is a candidate for understatement of the last century. And the winner was probably somewhere near the Trinity test...
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Strikes me as just statement statement not over or under (I'm assuming this is your reference?)
Atomic bombs aren't much good for destroying one world, let alone worlds in general.
Sure they are. You're not being creative enough if you can't figure out how (hint: they can affect the orbital trajectories of some pretty large objects, which can themselves affect the orbital trajectories of some really big objects).
No, I'm referring to the fact that before the Trinity test lots of people greatly underestimated what the yield would be. Someone must surely have said "it will be a little bigger than our conventional bombs".
There's a famous story about Trinity where the scientists all bet on the blast magnitude, and a visiting general made a ridiculously huge prediction, way above what they hoped for, in order to flatter his hosts. He won; the blast was still far more powerful than his seemingly fanciful, signaling-motivated guess but he came the closest.
It will go boom and look bright. I dunno what else, I just clear the floors.