> And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.”
I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.
Hah, if Harlan Ellison were alive for the dawn of LLMs as a widespread technology, he would have had many (dangerous) things to say about the copyright issues, and potential horrors
What I find so strange about the awe and horror of the atom bomb, its utter power and violence, is how it was the result of decades - well, centuries - of abstract thinking in mathematics and theoretical physics. And how it required particularly new paradigms about the nature of the material world.
Imagine a cosmic being looking at the Earth through a microscope, and seeing this bubble pop on the surface in mid-20th century. Then another, and another pop. Some of them evaporated hundreds of thousands of human beings, melting and dying in gruesome ways you can't imagine in the worst nightmares of hell. Later these organisms learn to harness this destructive force for more useful and productive purposes, powering their cities and data centers for machine intelligence. And this massive amount of energy is released by breaking up the tiniest particles of matter, the nucleus of an atom, how clever and strange is that. Well, no more strange than the phenomenon of life itself, I suppose.
The really mad thing is that while you say it's centuries of abstract thinking and the like, it was only 50 years between the discovery of X-rays and radiation and the first atom bomb, or 40 between the first idea that you could use fission to make a bomb. Neutrons and the nuclear chain reaction was only theorized in the 30's, about 10-15 years before the first nuclear bomb was detonated.
But likewise, there was only a few decades between the first airplane and the first person on the moon (although rocketry goes back hundreds of years. Actually TIL rocketry is older than Newton's laws of physics)
Whenever I’m tempted to think that potential AGI/ASI scenarios sound “too sci-fi” I have to remind myself of this. We live in a world with nuclear weapons and spaceships and microwave ovens. It might prove impossible and it might not, but we can’t predict that based on a general vibe of sci-fi-ness.
At the end of the day.... everything we see and do is just the abstract result of potential energy being released in some form. What is an atom bomb other than an extreme form of this?
The survival of the human species relies on its ability to expend energy. Grow food? We need gas to run the tractors.
Travel to your jobs? Gas or electricity.
Travel to another planet? Massive amount of energy.
Ride away on a spacecraft to another solar system? Massive amount of energy.
The amount of energy required to do these things is probably more than the amount of energy required to erase ourselves from existence. And when we have the ability to harness that energy, do we really think we are responsible enough to not do that, accidentally or adversarial-y?
One of my big gripes with the film Oppenheimer was the blast itself, obviously a climactic moment in the film.
It looked like someone set off a bunch of chemical explosives. That’s not how it looked in real life. Totally bizarre decision. I don’t know if they were trying to avoid effects on purpose of go gritty and retro or something but the “unearthly cosmic horror” feel of the first a-bomb blast is important. It’s what led Oppenheimer to recite “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
I suppose that's true, but it's still positioned as the focal point or climax of the film I think.
But Nolan intentionally hamstrung himself by eschewing CGI in favor of practical effects. I mean in theory you could do a practical effect of a nuke but that requires detonating a nuke; the west hasn't done that since 1992, the last nuclear detonation was done by North Korea in 2017.
Because that's exactly what it was. I agree with you, the puritanism around special effects doesn't make sense when there's plenty of high quality archival footage out there, and instead of using that or CGI to look similar, you do something that looks completely wrong.
Yeah, Nolan's well known for practical effects - to the extent of actually driving a 747 into a warehouse! - but this is one spot where that approach failed hard.
With the films budget they could have sourced a small nuclear bomb the size of the original Trinity test and detonated it just for the movie. Just make sure the camera is rolling as it's a one take shot.
I’m in Australia, so it’s only a (relatively) short drive to Woomera.
We should make sure our (the West’s) nuclear deterrent still actually works, and put the fear of God back in to everyone.
And also demonstrate how relatively benign the fallout from a thermonuclear weapon is, ie. relatively little radioactive material is generated from modern nuke.
The picture I find most meaningful it the one showing the back side of an instrumentation bunker with the foreground occupied by welders on skids with the broom and shovel in the dirt. Those things are essentially the same today even down to their construction. The way they are used is the same. Yet the world we live in is completely different.
I suspect the actual first frames are still classified as they likely evidence detonator tech/performance. So the real first moments of the nuclear age will never be shown. (The high-speed cameras would have started filming shortly before the blast.)
I think Peter Kuran has said that the majority of interesting footage is neglected rather than classified. He specializes in X-ray photos of the first few milliseconds.
I doubt that there’s anything that’s been classified in a long time in 80-year-old footage of tech that’s well understood by any interested party. Fission weapons are rather trivial to manufacture, the bottleneck has always been access to high-purity fissile material. Hydrogen bombs OTOH involve a lot of classified stuff.
> And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.”
I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.
Or in a zoo refusing to mate.
Or as something without a mouth and needing to scream.
Hah, if Harlan Ellison were alive for the dawn of LLMs as a widespread technology, he would have had many (dangerous) things to say about the copyright issues, and potential horrors
What I find so strange about the awe and horror of the atom bomb, its utter power and violence, is how it was the result of decades - well, centuries - of abstract thinking in mathematics and theoretical physics. And how it required particularly new paradigms about the nature of the material world.
Imagine a cosmic being looking at the Earth through a microscope, and seeing this bubble pop on the surface in mid-20th century. Then another, and another pop. Some of them evaporated hundreds of thousands of human beings, melting and dying in gruesome ways you can't imagine in the worst nightmares of hell. Later these organisms learn to harness this destructive force for more useful and productive purposes, powering their cities and data centers for machine intelligence. And this massive amount of energy is released by breaking up the tiniest particles of matter, the nucleus of an atom, how clever and strange is that. Well, no more strange than the phenomenon of life itself, I suppose.
The really mad thing is that while you say it's centuries of abstract thinking and the like, it was only 50 years between the discovery of X-rays and radiation and the first atom bomb, or 40 between the first idea that you could use fission to make a bomb. Neutrons and the nuclear chain reaction was only theorized in the 30's, about 10-15 years before the first nuclear bomb was detonated.
But likewise, there was only a few decades between the first airplane and the first person on the moon (although rocketry goes back hundreds of years. Actually TIL rocketry is older than Newton's laws of physics)
as an example, complex numbers were from the abstract thinking of centuries ago, on which the modern physics derive much value from.
Whenever I’m tempted to think that potential AGI/ASI scenarios sound “too sci-fi” I have to remind myself of this. We live in a world with nuclear weapons and spaceships and microwave ovens. It might prove impossible and it might not, but we can’t predict that based on a general vibe of sci-fi-ness.
At the end of the day.... everything we see and do is just the abstract result of potential energy being released in some form. What is an atom bomb other than an extreme form of this?
The survival of the human species relies on its ability to expend energy. Grow food? We need gas to run the tractors.
Travel to your jobs? Gas or electricity.
Travel to another planet? Massive amount of energy.
Ride away on a spacecraft to another solar system? Massive amount of energy.
The amount of energy required to do these things is probably more than the amount of energy required to erase ourselves from existence. And when we have the ability to harness that energy, do we really think we are responsible enough to not do that, accidentally or adversarial-y?
I keep a small collection of nuclear testing-photography related books, looks like I'm going to have to add this one.
Would love to know your complete list. My copy of 100 SUNS has lived on my coffee table(s) for decades. https://www.michaellight.net/suns-intro
One of my big gripes with the film Oppenheimer was the blast itself, obviously a climactic moment in the film.
It looked like someone set off a bunch of chemical explosives. That’s not how it looked in real life. Totally bizarre decision. I don’t know if they were trying to avoid effects on purpose of go gritty and retro or something but the “unearthly cosmic horror” feel of the first a-bomb blast is important. It’s what led Oppenheimer to recite “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
I felt the same, my thinking at the time was they didn’t want the bomb to steal the show. The movie was about the man not the machine.
/hah very articulate of me for this early in the morning
I suppose that's true, but it's still positioned as the focal point or climax of the film I think.
But Nolan intentionally hamstrung himself by eschewing CGI in favor of practical effects. I mean in theory you could do a practical effect of a nuke but that requires detonating a nuke; the west hasn't done that since 1992, the last nuclear detonation was done by North Korea in 2017.
Because that's exactly what it was. I agree with you, the puritanism around special effects doesn't make sense when there's plenty of high quality archival footage out there, and instead of using that or CGI to look similar, you do something that looks completely wrong.
Yeah, Nolan's well known for practical effects - to the extent of actually driving a 747 into a warehouse! - but this is one spot where that approach failed hard.
I’m of a similar opinion, Lynch created a better depiction of it in twin peaks season 3.
Penderecki did most of the heavy lifting there
With the films budget they could have sourced a small nuclear bomb the size of the original Trinity test and detonated it just for the movie. Just make sure the camera is rolling as it's a one take shot.
It’s pretty morbid but I think I would go watch if there ever was a public nuclear above surface test again. I hope it will never happen.
I would too, and I think it should happen.
I’m in Australia, so it’s only a (relatively) short drive to Woomera.
We should make sure our (the West’s) nuclear deterrent still actually works, and put the fear of God back in to everyone.
And also demonstrate how relatively benign the fallout from a thermonuclear weapon is, ie. relatively little radioactive material is generated from modern nuke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maral...
Some stunning images, looks like a sun plopped down in the middle of the desert.
The picture I find most meaningful it the one showing the back side of an instrumentation bunker with the foreground occupied by welders on skids with the broom and shovel in the dirt. Those things are essentially the same today even down to their construction. The way they are used is the same. Yet the world we live in is completely different.
I suspect the actual first frames are still classified as they likely evidence detonator tech/performance. So the real first moments of the nuclear age will never be shown. (The high-speed cameras would have started filming shortly before the blast.)
I think Peter Kuran has said that the majority of interesting footage is neglected rather than classified. He specializes in X-ray photos of the first few milliseconds.
I doubt that there’s anything that’s been classified in a long time in 80-year-old footage of tech that’s well understood by any interested party. Fission weapons are rather trivial to manufacture, the bottleneck has always been access to high-purity fissile material. Hydrogen bombs OTOH involve a lot of classified stuff.