Toby_Ord comments on Principles for the AGI Race

[Toby_Ord]

A small correction:

Infamously there was a period where some scientists on the project were concerned that a nuclear bomb would ignite the upper atmosphere and end all life on Earth; fortunately they were able to do some calculations suggesting that showed beyond reasonable doubt that this would not happen before the Trinity test occurred.

The calculations suggesting the atmosphere couldn’t ignite were good, but were definitively not beyond reasonable doubt. Fermi and others kept working to re-check the calculations in case they’d missed something all the way up to the day of the test and wouldn’t have done so if they were satisfied by the report.

The report (published after Trinity) does say:

One may conclude that the arguments of this paper make it unreasonable to expect that the N + N reaction could propagate. An unlimited propagation is even less likely.

That is often quoted by people who want to suggest the case was closed, but the next (and final) sentence of the report says:

However, the complexity of the argument and the absence of satisfactory experimental foundations makes further work on the subject highly desireable.