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NoSuchPlace comments on Open Thread, December 2-8, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The talk Eliezer Yudkowsky held at Oxford (and the resulting discussion) are now online.
If the human race is down to 1000 people, what are the odds that it will continue and do well? I realize this is a nitpick-- the argument would be the same if the human race were reduced to a million or ten million.
It's an interesting question. The Toba Catastrophe Theory suggests that human population reached as low as 10,000 individuals during a climate change period linked to supervolcano eruption. Another theory suggests that human population reached as low as 2000 individuals. Overall I think 1000 individuals is enough genetic diversity that humans could recover reasonably well.
The real problem seems to me to be whether humans could ever catch up to where we are after being knocked down so low. Some people have suggested that if civilization collapses humanity won't be able to start a new industrial revolution due to depleted deposits of oil and surface minerals.
Garbage dumps would have metal that's more concentrated than you'd find it in ore. I'm not sure how much energy would be needed to refine it.
If I were writing science fiction, I think I'd have modest tech-level efforts at mining garbage dumps in coastal waters.
The History of the Next Ten Billion Years-- a Stapledonian handling of the human future. Entertaining, though I think it underestimates human inventiveness.
Aluminum, in particular, is known for being very difficult to extract from ore, but once extracted, very easy to recycle into new products.
Oil (and coal, which is less topically sexy but historically more significant to industrialization) is the big problem, though rare earths and other materials that see use more in trace than in concentration could also be an issue. If you're a medieval-level smith, you probably wouldn't care too much whether you're getting your Fe from bog iron nodules or from the melted skeletons of god-towers in the ruins of Ellae-that-Was, although certain types of bottleneck event could make the latter problematic for a time.
Still, I'd be willing to bet at even odds that that wouldn't be a showstopper if it came to it.
On the other hand, these future humans would probably be able to learn things like science much more quickly because of all the information we have lying around everywhere.
Our information storage media has a surprisingly short shelf life. Optical disks of most types degrade within decades; magnetic media is more variable but even more fragile on average (see here and the linked pages). There are such things as archival disks, and a few really hardcore projects like HD-Rosetta, but they're rare. And then there's encryption and protocol confusion to take into account.
A couple centuries after a civilization-ending event, I'd estimate that most of the accessible information left would be on paper, and not a lot of that.
I don't know. Those objects make certain kinds of superstitions seem much more plausible.
The audio cuts out partway through the talk.
I haven't watched it all the way through, but I can jump into it at any point and it plays fine.
Audio cuts out at around 38 minutes, after that there is no sound from Eliezer's mic, so it's apparently relying on the camera mic which makes the recording noisy and hard to hear.
The audio is only gone for a minute or so, so while this is annoying it's not major.
No, it cuts out completely for a minute, and then it apparently switches to the camera mic, which makes Eliezer very hard to hear over noise.
He's a better public speaker than i expected.