Word: posner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Beyond the legal world, Posner is renowned as a prolific and insightful scholar: he is the author of more than 30 books, and—according to one list—number 70 on the list of most frequently-cited public intellectuals alive. (Granted, Posner did compile the list himself...
...Posner argues that his background as a lawyer and an economist need not disqualify him from opining on the “strangelet” question. Fifty pages of footnotes attest to the fact that Posner is no scientific dilettante. But is he an alarmist...
...Posner considers a slew of world-ending scenarios with REM-style enthusiasm. He reports one scientist’s estimate that there’s a 1 in 100,000 chance of an asteroid smashing earth in any given year and killing a billion people. Alternatively, Posner speculates, “superintelligent robots” might turn on their human creators and “kill us, put us in zoos, or enslave...
RHIC, which generates high-energy subatomic collisions between gold ions, quietly opened for business in 2000. Even RHIC’s sharpest opponents calculate the risk of a world-ending “strangelet scenario” to be very, very small. According to Posner, an upper-bound estimate of the danger of a strangelet disaster is 1 in 500,000 over the 10-year period for which RHIC will be in operation. An alternative estimate from Swiss and Israeli scientists puts the danger at 1 in 500 million. But although the likelihood of a strangelet catastrophe is minimal, should...
...Posner blows the whistle on the Relativist High Ion Collider (RHIC)—affectionately known among physicists as “Rick”—a federally-financed research facility on Long Island...