h a l f b a k e r yWhat was the question again?
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This powerful nuclear bomb has precisely one chance in
32 quadrillion per second of exploding and destroying
everything in the city around it. The city has a half-life of
about 500,000,000 years making the risk insignificant but
very real.
Encourages thoughts about risk and mortality.
The Mouse that Roared
http://en.wikipedia...e_Mouse_That_Roared
The Q-Bomb [AusCan531, May 25 2012]
[link]
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Would you name the city Schrödinger? |
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This same idea was posted recently.. |
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I looked for it, are you sure? |
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edit: I've had lots and lots of ideas marked for
deletion as redundant when they weren't in fact
redundant but merely similar or even merely
possessing of a similar title to another idea. |
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Judging by the nature of the idea it's probably gone. |
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Can't remember much about the idea but it was about building a town around a nuclear bomb. |
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There are many reasons unrelated to this idea one
could want to do that. |
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I'm not sure how you'd go about testing an algorithm
designed to generate a random number between 0
and 32 quadrillion each second indefinitely. You'd
have to have faith that the programmer didn't make
a mistake, the hardware is robust enough to last
indefinitely and is perfectly secure from any outside
attack, that the system won't somehow fail-deadly,
and so on. |
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While it's an interesting gedanken
experiment, there are serious ethical and logistical
problems with having a weapon of mass destruction
that can be triggered with no direct human action
whatsoever. That's why nobody uses them. Even the
Soviets, when they built the "Dead Hand" nuclear
deterrence system, rejected the idea of making it
completely automatic as crazy. |
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Still, I'd like to bun this, because I don't interpret this
idea as anything more than a hypothetical situation for
the purposes of sparking a philosophical discussion. But
the biggest problem there is that, well, it's not really so
hypothetical. Extinction events are estimated to occur
every 30 million years or so. So we live with a much
higher risk of random and arbitrary mass destruction on
a daily basis, and nobody seems overly concerned about
it. All you really need to do to achieve the same effect
is to make people more cognizant of that fact. |
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First of all, who would want to live in a city like that? Second of all, there is a much, much greater chance that a Russian submarine just launched a nuclear missile that will explode over your town in 5... 4... 3... 2... |
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It would be an interesting premise for a short story; not sure what the obligatory twist at the end would be though... hmm, now that I think about it, the twist could be that the bomb doesn't actually exist, but the spectre of the imminent/eventual explosion makes people generally nicer and happier. |
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Everybody already knows that they could die anytime and definitely will die sometime - are we happier for it? |
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Not sure. I'd love to live amoungst immortals to find out though. |
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But it's a bit different to simply mortality; since you would all die simultanteously this might engender a spirit of comraderie/gallows humour. |
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Of course, if the hairpin that triggered the device broke it would turn the nuclear bomb into a 'good bomb' as in The Mouse That Roared [link] |
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//Encourages thoughts about risk and mortality// |
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I think I'll move there and publish a weekly "news" magazine, which mostly predicts "The END". |
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The sad thing is, it would probably sell like hotcakes. |
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