Word: posner
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...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...
...Posner takes a midpoint between the two disaster estimates, and he posits—for the sake of argument—that the likelihood of a world-ending strangelet scenario over the next decade is 1 in 10 million. In other words, there’s a 1 in 10 million chance that 6 billion people will die at some point in the next decade because of RHIC. Thus on average, we would expect RHIC to kill 60 people per year. Is that a sacrifice we should be willing to make to push the frontiers of physics forward...