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.-- Voice, May 24 2012 The Mouse that Roared http://en.wikipedia...e_Mouse_That_RoaredThe Q-Bomb [AusCan531, May 25 2012] Would you name the city Schrödinger?-- ytk, May 24 2012 This same idea was posted recently..-- rcarty, May 24 2012 I looked for it, are you sure?
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.-- Voice, May 24 2012 Judging by the nature of the idea it's probably gone.
Can't remember much about the idea but it was about building a town around a nuclear bomb.-- rcarty, May 24 2012 There are many reasons unrelated to this idea one could want to do that.-- Voice, May 24 2012 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.
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.
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.-- ytk, May 24 2012 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...-- DIYMatt, May 25 2012 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.-- xaviergisz, May 25 2012 Everybody already knows that they could die anytime and definitely will die sometime - are we happier for it?-- DIYMatt, May 25 2012 Not sure. I'd love to live amoungst immortals to find out though.
But it's a bit different to simply mortality; since you would all die simultanteously this might engender a spirit of comraderie/gallows humour.-- xaviergisz, May 25 2012 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]-- AusCan531, May 25 2012 //Encourages thoughts about risk and mortality//
And moving elsewhere.-- UnaBubba, May 25 2012 I think I'll move there and publish a weekly "news" magazine, which mostly predicts "The END".-- lurch, May 25 2012 The sad thing is, it would probably sell like hotcakes.-- Alterother, May 25 2012 random, halfbakery