In what sense are you using the word imagine, and how hard have you tried to imagine a billion years?
I have a really poor intuition for time, so I”m the wrong person to ask.
I can imagine a thousand things as a 10x10x10 cube. I can imagine a million things as a 10x10x10 arrangements of 1K cubes. My visualization for a billion looks just like my visualization for a million, and a year seems like a long time to start with, so I can’t imagine a billion years.
In order to have desires about something, you have to have a compelling internal representation of that something so you can have a desire about it.
X didn’t say “I can too imagine a billion years!”, so none of this pertains to my point.
My visualization for a billion looks just like my visualization for a million, and a year seems like a long time to start with, so I can’t imagine a billion years.
Would it help to be more specific? Imagine a little cube of metal, 1mm wide. Imagine rolling it between your thumb and fingertip, bigger than a grain of sand, smaller than a peppercorn. Yes?
A one-litre bottle holds 1 million of those. (If your first thought was the packing ratio, your second thought should be to cut the corners off to make cuboctahedra.)
Now imagine a cubic metre. A typical desk has a height of around 0.75m, so if its top is a metre deep and 1.33 metres wide (quite a large desk), then there is 1 cubic metre of space between the desktop and the floor.
It takes 1 billion of those millimetre cubes to fill that volume.
Now find an Olympic-sized swimming pool and swim a few lengths in it. It takes 2.5 trillion of those cubes to fill it.
Fill it with fine sand of 0.1mm diameter, and you will have a few quadrillion grains.
A bigger problem I have with the original is where X says “It’s really important to me what happens to the species a billion years from now.” The species, a billion years from now? That sounds like a failure to comprehend just what a billion years is: the time that life has existed on Earth so far. I confidently predict that a billion years hence, not a single presently existing species, including us, will still exist in anything much like its present form, even imagining “business as usual” and leaving aside existential risks and singularities.
First, I imagine a billion bits. That’s maybe 15 minutes of high quality video, so it’s pretty easy to imagine a billion bits. Then I imagine that each of those bits represents some proposition about a year—for example, whether or not humanity still exists. If you want to model a second proposition about each year, just add another billion bits.
That’s maybe 15 minutes of high quality video, so it’s pretty easy to imagine a billion bits.
Perhaps I don’t understand your usage of the word ‘imagine’ because this example doesn’t really help me ‘imagine’ them at all. Imagine their result (the high quality video) sure, but not the bits themselves.
I have a really poor intuition for time, so I”m the wrong person to ask.
I can imagine a thousand things as a 10x10x10 cube. I can imagine a million things as a 10x10x10 arrangements of 1K cubes. My visualization for a billion looks just like my visualization for a million, and a year seems like a long time to start with, so I can’t imagine a billion years.
In order to have desires about something, you have to have a compelling internal representation of that something so you can have a desire about it.
X didn’t say “I can too imagine a billion years!”, so none of this pertains to my point.
Would it help to be more specific? Imagine a little cube of metal, 1mm wide. Imagine rolling it between your thumb and fingertip, bigger than a grain of sand, smaller than a peppercorn. Yes?
A one-litre bottle holds 1 million of those. (If your first thought was the packing ratio, your second thought should be to cut the corners off to make cuboctahedra.)
Now imagine a cubic metre. A typical desk has a height of around 0.75m, so if its top is a metre deep and 1.33 metres wide (quite a large desk), then there is 1 cubic metre of space between the desktop and the floor.
It takes 1 billion of those millimetre cubes to fill that volume.
Now find an Olympic-sized swimming pool and swim a few lengths in it. It takes 2.5 trillion of those cubes to fill it.
Fill it with fine sand of 0.1mm diameter, and you will have a few quadrillion grains.
A bigger problem I have with the original is where X says “It’s really important to me what happens to the species a billion years from now.” The species, a billion years from now? That sounds like a failure to comprehend just what a billion years is: the time that life has existed on Earth so far. I confidently predict that a billion years hence, not a single presently existing species, including us, will still exist in anything much like its present form, even imagining “business as usual” and leaving aside existential risks and singularities.
Excellent. I can visualize a billion now. Thank you.
First, I imagine a billion bits. That’s maybe 15 minutes of high quality video, so it’s pretty easy to imagine a billion bits. Then I imagine that each of those bits represents some proposition about a year—for example, whether or not humanity still exists. If you want to model a second proposition about each year, just add another billion bits.
Perhaps I don’t understand your usage of the word ‘imagine’ because this example doesn’t really help me ‘imagine’ them at all. Imagine their result (the high quality video) sure, but not the bits themselves.