Alright, make it one petaton bomb then. That’ll definitely do it.
Exactly. We’re not going to have a solution that will save even 1% of the population, let alone all of us. The last 20 years is going to be generation Omega. The most emo group of people in history. How much of humanity is going to devote themselves to getting 2000 or 20000 people away? How many groups are going to see this as trying to evade the wrath of God and will actively do everything possible to prevent it?
So far everyone has been addressing the question as if there is a way out. How about if it’s armageddon and there’s nothing to be done for it? Do we still inform the public at large? Or so we let them live out their days in ignorant bliss? Is there anything to be accomplished by telling everyone they’re on death row and there’s no appeal?
It depends on who “we” are. I’d have no problem telling my friends the world was doomed, so they could do what they want. If I were in charge of the country, I’d keep it quiet until the last minute, so people can say their last prayers etc, without descending into raping and pillaging. You know they will. Turn off the power in LA and let word out it’s not coming back on again, and see what happens.
Of course you tell the public. You’ve got no right to keep it from them. You’re their employee, not their master.
You don’t need any other reason. I don’t even know why you’d assume that the ‘secret’ was yours to keep.
And by the way, to their credit NASA has issued press releases announcing a potential threat long before they were certain that it would or would not hit. They’re not thinking in a mode where questions of whether or not they should release information to the public are not even seriously considered. As it should be.
Also, the very question has a hidden insinuation that the public is someone crazier, or dumber, or less capable of solving things than is the government. What you don’t seem to understand is that if this threat were real, the best way to find any kind of solution at all lays within the abilities of the 6 billion people on Earth, not with the handful of bureaucrats who happen to represent them at any given time.
Think of how the market might address this: Do you not think Aerospace companies would be selling proposals or otherwise trying to tap into the huge demand for a solution? Do you not think the R&D budgets of these companies would explode? That there would be thousands of startups with innovative ideas that might contribute to a fix?
And can you not see that you need this kind of motivation to cause wholesale changes in the workforce, to create jobs in the endeavor to fix things?
You have to tell the world, because you need the world. But anyway, the decision isn’t yours to make.
Exactly, you don’t have the right not to tell them.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Why? We didn’t tell them the last time the Earth was destroyed.
Oh wait, I shouldn’t have said that.
Nevermind. Nothing to see here.
I think you may be surprised. I’ve come close to death a couple of times, and never felt like suddenly becoming religious.
We atheists aren’t just pretending you know. 
As for the OP itself, you should tell the world.
Give people the opportunity to deal with the knowledge as they see fit.
If there are so many saboteurs around that not even a single shuttle leaves earth then, well, it was probably for the best.
I’m not anti-human; but it’s a fair test I think.
But I suspect that there won’t be saboteurs, or such a small minority that they will easily be kept away. But there will be hoardes of people wanting to be on one of the ships.
QED described in the linked thread that wouldn’t be easy (well, he said “Not a chance in Hell”), but looking at some of the other proposed solutions, the expense and difficulty of launching an interplanetary (let alone interstellar) lifeboat has to be of comparable, if not orders of magnitudes greater, difficulty than deflection of the incoming object. If we went balls-out on launch vehicles, including building them out of carbon nanotubes so they were hugely strong but weighed practically nothing, we could bombard one side of the bogey with multi-megaton nukes to nudge it, coupled with a series of Earth-bound lasers that could steadily target it, causing part of its surface to vaporize, for similar nudging. With most of Earth’s industries geared toward the problem, I don’t doubt we could arrive at a solution, or at least make a damn good try.
How about telling all who are involved that the only chance of their loved one’s survival **depended **on it being kept secret? Would they be as keen to whistleblow if their place on the Ark was at stake?
I don’t think you appreciate just how massive an object we’re talking about here. The figures I calculated in the other thread are based on applying the thrust of nearly 2000 Saturn Vs 24/7 for 62 years…starting NOW. Now, we can probably build that many rockets in a reasonable timespan. But making enough fuel to keep them firing that long? No way.
Nope. Given the number of people you’d have to have involved, the likelihood of having at least a few who are willing to put the fate of humanity as a whole over that of a few, even their own, becomes a near certainty.
Really? When was this universal right to knowledge granted? And by whom?
You seem to be under the impression that individuals and nations will be rational in the face of the destruction of everyone and everything they know and love.
Admitted, everyone coming into this world and surviving long enough knows they’re going to die. Most of them choose to ignore this bit of knowledge based on the fact that they don’t know when it’s going to happen. And barring an accident or mayhem, most of them have years to go before they have to consider it in anything besides the abstract. Being in an accident usually removes the option of being irrational. Those unfortunate enough to have a terminal illness and the knowledge that they have only a few months or years have access to counselors. Even death row convicts can have their time with clergy. There aren’t enough counselors for a doomed world. Billions of people hitting the anger stage of grief simultaneously is not going to be pretty.
What obligation do I have to throw this blanket of despair onto the shoulders of every person on the planet? What right do I have to tell them that there is nothing they can do, nothing they can create, that will matter in a hundred years? What right do I have to tell them that their children will die violently on such and such date and there’s nothing they can do to prevent it?
But Ivan, how many thousands of people are going to be involved in the construction of the space ark? How many scientists, engineers, welders, caterers, janitors, software developers, testers, managers, physicists, plumbers?
How big can a secret get until the probability of the secret becoming public approaches 100%. As the old saying goes, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
How do you keep people working on a secret project when they aren’t going to benefit from that project? It’s one thing to have a secret project to build a really big bomb. But there were plenty of leaks during the Manhattan project, see: Klaus Fuchs - Wikipedia.
Plenty of people who weren’t officially part of the Manhattan project knew what was happening, but they didn’t call the newspapers because they didn’t see any point in exposing the project. In other words, they agreed with the goal of building a really big bomb and dropping it on Hitler and didn’t want to screw the project up.
But only a small fraction of the people working on the space ark are going to get a ticket on the space ark. What’s their motivation? It’s one thing to go home every day knowing that you’re working on a bomb that could win the war, and keep that secret from your family. It’s another thing to go home every day knowing that the entire world is doomed and there’s nothing you can do to save it except possibly help a few strangers escape.
The effort to create the space ark is one thing. But since it turns out that humans aren’t completely altruistic robots, the struggle for seats on that space ark is likely to doom the project.
The premise wasn’t that the project would be kept a secret, just the real reason for it. The official reason for building the ark was much less alarming.
With the acknowledged reason being that there’s a nifty planet out there that we want to exlore and everything is just fine on terra firma, people would be working on it for the challenge but knowing they’d be sleeping at home safe in their own beds and someone more daring would be making the dangerous journey.
If I were President, I’d tell the public. In a media-crazed modern democracy, something of that scope is going to leak eventually anyway. Better to have everyone know what’s going on, trust you to be square with them, and be able to have Congress fund your quixotic, grotesquely expensive save-at-least-some-of-humanity scheme all the way down the line.
The movie Deep Impact touched on some of these issues, BTW. Not the greatest movie ever, but it’s got Morgan Freeman as the President and some nice scenes. Worth a look.
You seem to be of the opinion that keeping everything nice and civil like is more important than any other factor.
Does it really matter if some people freak out, fight, loot, whatever? Not really. They’re all going to die soon anyway.
But at least if you tell the world, people will have a choice as to what to do with their final days.
Of course, whether keeping it a secret is necessary for a space ark mission to be successful is another matter.
As I’ve already said, I suspect we could successfully launch arks even in a panicked world.
Space arks would be a complete, utter waste of effort. It’d be strictly jerking ourselves off.
The proper way to handle this would be to disseminate the information about our impending doom, not hide it. Let such paroxysms as result run their course. We can then concentrate on dying with some dignity. Far better to expend resources on voluntary euthanasia centers than on space ark wankery.
I’d rather see to it that my people get to die painlessly, with dignity, and at a time of their own choosing than waste what time is left trying to give Bill Gates, Vladimir Putin, et. al. and their posses a whole new world to fuck up.
You can concentrate on dying if you like, but I’d prefer to concentrate on surviving. There’s literally nothing to lose by trying, since if you don’t, the human race is dead anyway.
Am I going to get a seat on your ark? No? Then I’m going to die. Can you give me some compelling reason to spend the time remaining to me working on your pie-in-the-sky ark? Before you begin:
- I have no interest in the human race surviving if I and my family are not going to be among the survivors.
- I’m deeply suspicious that, in the unlikely event that a functioning ark is constructed, the people on board will not have been selected because they were the best choices for ensuring species survival.
With those two things now in mind, please convince me that the best use of our remaining time is trying to build an ark.
There may be better plans than the colony ship, but any of them are better than your suggestion that we waste our efforts on suicide.