Thanks for the in-depth comment. I agree with most of it.
if interstellar colonization would predictably doom the long-term future, then people would figure out solutions to that.
Agreed, I hope this is the case. I think there are some futures where we send lots of ships out to interstellar space for some reason or act too hastily (maybe a scenario where transformative AI speeds up technological development, but not so much our wisdom). Just one mission (or set of missions) capable of self-propagating to other star systems almost inevitably leads to galactic civilisation in the end, and we’d have to catch up to it to ensure existential security, which would become challenging if they create von-Neumann probes.
“50%” in the survey was about vacuum decay being possible in principle, not about it being possible to technologically induce (at the limit of technology). The survey reported significantly lower probability that it’s possible to induce. This might still be a big deal though!
Yeah this is my personal estimate based on that survey and its responses. I was particularly convinced by one responder who put 100% probability that its possible to induce (conditional on the vacuum being metastable), as anything that’s permitted by the laws of physics is possible to induce with arbitrarily advanced technology (so, 50% based on that chance of the vacuum is metastable).
anything that’s permitted by the laws of physics is possible to induce with arbitrarily advanced technology
Hm, this doesn’t seem right to me. For example, I think we could coherently talk about and make predictions about what would happen if there was a black hole with a mass of 10^100 kg. But my best guess is that we can’t construct such a black hole even at technological maturity, because even the observable universe only has 10^53 kg in it.
Similarly, we can coherently talk about and make predictions about what would happen if certain kinds of lower-energy states existed. (Such as predicting that they’d be meta-stable and spread throughout the universe.) But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we can move the universe to such a state.
Thanks for the in-depth comment. I agree with most of it.
Agreed, I hope this is the case. I think there are some futures where we send lots of ships out to interstellar space for some reason or act too hastily (maybe a scenario where transformative AI speeds up technological development, but not so much our wisdom). Just one mission (or set of missions) capable of self-propagating to other star systems almost inevitably leads to galactic civilisation in the end, and we’d have to catch up to it to ensure existential security, which would become challenging if they create von-Neumann probes.
Yeah this is my personal estimate based on that survey and its responses. I was particularly convinced by one responder who put 100% probability that its possible to induce (conditional on the vacuum being metastable), as anything that’s permitted by the laws of physics is possible to induce with arbitrarily advanced technology (so, 50% based on that chance of the vacuum is metastable).
Hm, this doesn’t seem right to me. For example, I think we could coherently talk about and make predictions about what would happen if there was a black hole with a mass of 10^100 kg. But my best guess is that we can’t construct such a black hole even at technological maturity, because even the observable universe only has 10^53 kg in it.
Similarly, we can coherently talk about and make predictions about what would happen if certain kinds of lower-energy states existed. (Such as predicting that they’d be meta-stable and spread throughout the universe.) But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we can move the universe to such a state.