I would argue that superstring theory and such are excellent protections
against the risk
that our civilization might develop more powerful and dangerous forms of
nuclear technology.


On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 11:00 PM, Mike Gogulski <mike@???> wrote:

> See, now this is why I and all right-thinking people advocate for
> immediately slitting the throats of any entity who would dare split,
> merge, collide, fracture, coerce, seduce, subduct, interossitize or
> otherwise violate the holy sanctity of an atom. Or two atoms. Or more.
> Especially more atoms. Especially more throats. Especially more entities.
>
> Yes, we can completely screw up the planet and destroy this ecology,
> including ourselves, with our present power to much about in the nuclear
> realm.
>
> That class of threat is only going to increase as knowledge and
> technology inevitably progress deeper into the sub-nuclear, quantum,
> string, brane, whatever strata which lie beneath. It's hard to get too
> terribly bent out of shape about a planet-killing Fukushima-scale
> disaster while the potential awaits us for a /Schild's Ladder/ (Greg
> Egan) earthoentity-triggered cosmological mis-event destroying our
> friendly false vacuum via a trivial simplification.
>
> "Do away with X" is oftentimes a recipe for nothing more than fostering
> ignorance among the greater number of earthoentities and thereby less
> caution among those who will always, always, always tinker at the
> fragile, friable and fractal fringes of reality.
>
> The threat you point you point to is extremely real, but attempting to
> bury people's heads in sands or to make them beholden to new stone
> tablets' commandments is not a viable survival strategy. We cannot put
> the nuclear genie back in its bottle while teenagers construct breeder
> reactors in their parents' garages, and especially not when all of that
> is soon to become trivial when the next generation of potentially awful
> but omg-its-amazing tech hits.
>
> Bathtub quark-gluon mixmeisters? Chemlab brane colliders? False-vacuum
> brinksmanship? No frickin' idea.
>
> On 11/03/2013 03:26 AM, Harish Shah wrote:
> > Whether for safety or environmental reasons, it is [of] utmost human
> > interest to begin doing away with both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
>
>