{"id":3336,"date":"2017-07-17T18:13:32","date_gmt":"2017-07-17T23:13:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=3336"},"modified":"2019-01-28T14:31:28","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T20:31:28","slug":"three-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=3336","title":{"rendered":"Three things"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was shocked and horrified to learn of the loss of Maryam Mirzakhani<\/a> at age 40, after a battle with cancer (see here<\/a> or here<\/a>).  Mirzakhani was a renowned mathematician at Stanford and the world’s first and so far only female Fields Medalist.  I never had the privilege of meeting her, but everything I’ve read about her fills me with admiration.  I wish to offer condolences to her friends and family, including her husband Jan Vondr\u00e1k<\/a>, also a professor at Stanford and a member of the CS theory community.<\/p>\n

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In other depressing news, discussion continues to rage on social media about “The Uninhabitable Earth,”<\/a> the New York<\/em> magazine article by David Wallace-Wells arguing that the dangers of climate change have been systematically understated even by climate scientists<\/em>; that sea level rise is the least of the problems; and that if we stay the current course, much of the earth’s landmass has a good chance of being uninhabitable by the year 2100.  In an unusual turn of events, the Wallace-Wells piece has been getting slammed by climate scientists, including Michael Mann (see here<\/a> and also this interview<\/a>)—people who are usually in the news to refute the claims of deniers.<\/p>\n

Some of the critics’ arguments seem cogent to me: for example, that Wallace-Wells misunderstood some satellite data, and more broadly, that the piece misleadingly presents its scenario as overwhelmingly probable by 2100 if we do nothing, rather than as “only” 10% likely or whatever—i.e., a mere Trump-becoming-president level of risk.  Other objections to the article impressed me less: for example, that doom-and-gloom is a bad way to motivate people about climate change; that the masses need a more optimistic takeaway.  That obviously has no bearing on the truth of what’s going to happen—but even if we did<\/em> agree to entertain such arguments, well, it’s not as if mainstream messaging on climate change has been an unmitigated success.  What if everyone should<\/em> be sweating-in-the-night terrified?<\/p>\n

As far as I understand it, the question of the plausibility of Wallace-Wells’s catastrophe scenario mostly just comes down to a single scientific unknown: namely, will the melting permafrost belch huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere?<\/strong>  If it does, then “Armageddon” is probably a fair description of what awaits us in the next century, and if not, not.  Alas, our understanding of permafrost doesn’t seem especially reliable, and it strikes me that models of such feedbacks have a long history of erring on the side of conservatism (for example, researchers were astonished by how<\/a> quickly<\/a> glaciers and ice shelves fell apart).<\/p>\n

So, while I wish the article was written with more caveats, I submit that runaway warming scenarios deserve more attention rather than less.  And we should<\/em> be putting discussion of those scenarios in exactly the broader context that Wallace-Wells does: namely, that of the Permian-Triassic extinction event<\/a>, the Fermi paradox<\/a>, and the conditions for a technological civilization to survive past its infancy.<\/p>\n

Certainly we spend much more time on risks to civilization (e.g., nuclear terrorism, bioengineered pandemics) that strike me as less probable than this one.  And certainly this<\/em> tail, in the distribution of possible outcomes, deserves at least as much attention as its more popular opposite, the tail where climate change turns out not to be much of a problem at all.  For the grim truth about climate change is that history won’t end in 2100: only the projections do.  And the mere addition of 50 more years could easily suffice to turn a tail risk into a body risk.<\/p>\n

Of course, that the worst will<\/em> happen is a clear prediction of reverse Hollywoodism theory<\/a>—besides being the “natural, default” prediction for a computer scientist used to worst-case analysis.  This is one prediction that I hope turns out to be as wrong as possible.<\/p>\n

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OK, now for something to cheer us all up.  Yesterday the group of Misha Lukin, at Harvard, put a paper on the arXiv<\/a> reporting the creation of a 51-qubit quantum simulator using cold atoms.  The paper doesn’t directly address the question of quantum supremacy, or indeed of performance comparisons between the new device and classical simulations at all.  But this is clearly a big step forward, while the world waits for the fully-programmable 50-qubit superconducting QCs that have been promised by the groups at Google and IBM.<\/p>\n

Indeed, this strikes me as the most exciting news in experimental quantum information since last month, when Jian-Wei Pan’s group in Shanghai reported<\/a> the first transmission of entangled photons from a satellite to earth—thereby allowing violations of the Bell inequality over 1200 kilometers, teleportation<\/a> of a qubit from earth to space, and other major firsts.  These are breakthroughs that we knew were in the works ever since the Chinese government launched the QUESS satellite<\/a> devoted to quantum communications.  I should’ve blogged about them in June.  Then again, regular readers of Shtetl-Optimized<\/em>, familiar as they already are with the universal reach of quantum mechanics and with the general state of quantum information technology, shouldn’t find anything here that fundamentally surprises them, should they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was shocked and horrified to learn of the loss of Maryam Mirzakhani at age 40, after a battle with cancer (see here or here).  Mirzakhani was a renowned mathematician at Stanford and the world’s first and so far only female Fields Medalist.  I never had the privilege of meeting her, but everything I’ve read about her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[31,4,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-quantum","category-the-fate-of-humanity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3336"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4101,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3336\/revisions\/4101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}