Re: thunderbolt (was Re: Doomsday vs Diaspora)

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 06:05:03 MDT

  • Next message: Aubrey de Grey: "RE: Removing lysosomal aggregates; obviating mitochondrial mutations (was: specific amino acid...)"

    Damien Broderick wrote:
    > At 07:33 PM 4/25/03 -0400, Eliezer wrote:
    >
    >>>thunderbolt singularity?
    >
    >>It's a consistent GR solution for an evaporating black hole which exposes
    >>the naked singularity
    >
    > Erm...
    >
    > < We interpret the prediction of thunderbolts as indicating that the semi
    > classical approximation breaks down at the end point of black hole
    > evaporation, and we would expect that a full quantum treatment would
    > replace the thunderbolt with a burst of high energy particles. The energy
    > in such a burst would be too small to account for the observed gamma ray
    > bursts. >

    Their reason for this is essentially Fermian - they expect at least one
    evaporating black hole in our past light cone, which may ignore the
    anthropic principle (I didn't see any calculations on the expected number
    of black holes or their evaporation time). Also, if you Google a bit
    farther you'll find that people are still working through thunderbolt
    theories, including (I think) quantum treatments that still allow for a
    thunderbolt effect. The point really is not so much to suppose that
    naturally evaporating black holes give rise to thunderbolts, but to ask
    whether it might be possible to create thunderbolts artificially - i.e.,
    whether the Wave of Death is still a self-consistent GR solution that can
    be created given the right initial conditions, just ones a bit more
    elaborate than those in the ordinary black hole. The metapoint is that
    physics may allow for Much Scarier Things than the mere popguns that are
    black holes and supernovas.

    -- 
    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
    Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Apr 26 2003 - 06:24:09 MDT