10 Scariest theories known to man.

CrazyNeutrino said:

10 Scariest theories known to man.

That is absolutely brilliant. Their number one is my number one, false vacuum. I’m familiar with the first four and a few of the later ones. I must check up Pascal’s wager. I’d add a distinction between natural sixth mass extinction e.g. and anthropogenic sixth mass extinction.

mollwollfumble said:

CrazyNeutrino said:

10 Scariest theories known to man.

That is absolutely brilliant. Their number one is my number one, false vacuum. I’m familiar with the first four and a few of the later ones. I must check up Pascal’s wager. I’d add a distinction between natural sixth mass extinction e.g. and anthropogenic sixth mass extinction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_basalt is just as deadly to everything bigger than a tardigrade and slow enough to be painful.

Well that’s a very unusual site.

I like the comments more than the article.

Greg Egan had a wrote a fairly decent short story on the quantum suicide theme, IIRC.

sibeen said:

Greg Egan had a wrote a fairly decent short story on the quantum suicide theme, IIRC.

Greg Egan had a wrote a fairly decent

kill me now!!!!

sibeen said:

sibeen said:

Greg Egan had a wrote a fairly decent short story on the quantum suicide theme, IIRC.

sibeen said:

Greg Egan had a wrote a fairly decent

kill me now!!!!

OK.

sibeen said:

Greg Egan had a wrote a fairly decent short story on the quantum suicide theme, IIRC.

Planck Dive?

Wocky said:

sibeen said:

Greg Egan had a wrote a fairly decent short story on the quantum suicide theme, IIRC.

Planck Dive?

Cannot remember the name, Wocky, and most of my books are in storage at the moment, so cannot go delving.

In the comments someone says:

>Except that, even if the gun never fires, you would die of old age. It doesn’t stop physics and biology just because the gun doesn’t fire.<

…but that doesn’t seem to necessarily be the case. In one of the non-dead worlds that “splits off” (whatever that means) you might end up as a brain in a jar or suchlike, able to wait for technology to advance until such time as you can be uploaded to an artifical consciousness machine (whatever that means).

An obvious question is: would that still be “you”? But if the many-worlds interpretation is correct, “you” have always been this infinitely composite entity, so presumably the answer would be “yes”.

sibeen said:

Greg Egan had a wrote a fairly decent short story on the quantum suicide theme, IIRC.

He wrote a full length science fiction book, Schilds Ladder, on the topic of universe destruction due to metastability, i.e. scariest theory number one. The, first half of the book was superb. It’s not so great after they enter the second universe.

When Greg Egan writes about physics eg Schilds Ladder and Othogonal, the results are often superb. He’s the only science fiction author with a better mathematical and intuitive understanding of physics than I have. When Egan writes about biology, e.g. Terranova, a rewrite of The Island of Dr Moreau, the results are abysmal.