We will discover some new "dark quantum thingy" energy source which some scientist will want to use to create super cheap energy. Unfortunately because of the third world war someone will first build a bomb. Handheld sized enough to destroy any major city. Someone will than say: I have become death... and after we have destroyed half of the world we will rise from the ashes and fly to the stars. Afterwards we create an organization called The Federation!

> I have become death

I like the Oppenheimer quote [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac

An attitude really pissed off Truman:

> The meeting between Oppenheimer and Truman did not go well. It was then that Oppenheimer famously told Truman that "I feel I have blood on my hands", which was unacceptable to Truman, who immediately replied that that was no concern of Oppenheimer's, and that if anyone had bloody hands, it was the president. ...

> Truman had very little use for Oppenheimer then--little use for his "hand wringing", for his high moral acceptance of question in the use of the bomb, for his second-guessing the decision. Cold must have descended in the meeting, as Truman later told David Lillenthal of Oppenheimer that he "never wanted to see that son of a bitch in this office again". Truman would retell the story in different ways, but with generally the same result, waxing about how he dismissed the "cry-baby scientist".

It's probably fair to assume that Truman had more immediate and frequent casualty reports and projections than Oppenheimer.

So the former was weighing against alternatives, and the latter was weighing against inaction.

In Oppenheimer's defense though, at the time he couldn't have known that (a) the US would refrain from using nuclear weapons in subsequent wars, (b) other countries would rapidly acquire nuclear weapons, (c) MAD would become normalized as the only acceptable use of nuclear arms.

None of which were guaranteed to pass, meaning a very different perspective in 1945.

The documentary "the fog of war" is a nice view (via the study of Robert S. McNamara) of just how brutal the war in the Pacific was in terms of civilian casualties.

The US was using (in modern parlance, however ugly it is) data science to optimize bombing missions to the point that the nuclear weapons were merely a large blip rather than a sudden burst of killing sandwiched by silence.

Le May (whose group dropped the bomb IIRC) and McNamara both agreed they'd have been tried as war criminals.

For Truman at least I can see why he'd be annoyed. Maybe not as annoyed as he claimed to be, but in terms of decision making I think anyone who claims to have an easy answer to whether to drop the bomb or not is either a fantasist or an idiot.

Truman was a bit of a shithead, and nowhere near Oppenheimer's caliber.

He also lied heavily about about his finances as a sympathy play as he left the presidency, and basically stole petty cash on his way out the door.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman#Financial_situ...

Truman was one of the best presidents the US ever had by basically any measure. What a childish take.

You can like his policy or not, that's your aesthetic choice. But are you claiming he didn't do what I described?

After reading, I am: I gave it a charitable reading, and either I missed it (probable) or you're staking out an extreme position unsupported by facts (less probable, I trust you)

You can read Campos's paper at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3895116 .

"The Truman Show: The Fraudulent Origins of the Former Presidents Act"

> Using recently released and until now unexamined archival evidence, this Article demonstrates that, in a complete contravention of the existing standard historical record, Harry Truman was, as a direct result of being president, a very wealthy man on the day he left the White House, with an estimated net worth, in relative economic terms, of approximately $58 million in 2021 dollars. The Article reveals that this wealth was a result of both Truman’s enormous presidential salary — several times larger, in real terms, than the current salary for the office — and, more problematically, of the evident fact that Truman misappropriated essentially all of the multi-million dollar — in 2021 terms — presidential expense account that was set up for him by Congress at the beginning of his second term.

> The Article also reveals that, again contrary to the current historical understanding, Truman made another fortune after he left the presidency, by doing precisely what he claimed he was not doing, that is, exploiting his status as a former president to maximum economic advantage. Indeed, by the time Congress passed the FPA in response to Truman’s various claims that he was at least teetering on the brink of potential financial distress, Truman’s net worth was, in relative economic terms, approximately $72 million in 2021 dollars.

Some of the information comes from Bess Truman's files, which were only recently released, for example:

> “The cash in the box at the Columbia has been for emergency use,” he wrote. “I kept it in the little safe in the White House as long as I was there. It came out of the $50,000 expense account that was not accountable for taxes. It should be put into bonds except what you need for immediate use.”

This is money from the White House expense account that he did not need to report as taxable income - about $550,000 per year in Y2021 dollars when adjusted for inflation.

See also the section on how much he made from his publication in Life.

> a perusal of the Schedule C attachments to Truman’s tax returns during the years when the installment payments on the memoirs were made (1955 through 1960) reveals that Truman enjoyed a net profit of at least $299,186 on the memoirs

> Converted to 2021 dollars, this means Truman enjoyed, in inflation-adjusted terms, a post-tax and expenses profit from the memoirs of $2,866,000.136 But again, in terms of relative income, this is a radical underestimate: a writer today, to earn a comparable post-tax profit on a book, would need to make approximately $7,600,000–after taxes and expenses

None of that backs the claim that Harry Truman lied.

I still think you have good intentions and believe this, I certainly cannot falsify your claim just because I can't prove it.

TL;DR for following section: a good reset point when you start getting challenge would be stating your claim in a sentence, paragraph max, then providing a sentence, paragraph, max two paragraphs, that back it up, and a link or two out to the source.

Breaking the onboarding flow for this idea into discrete, easy to follow steps that lure the interlocutor along always keeps the temperature low

If I had to hazard a guess why people reacted strongly to the claim:

A) it's much more likely the popular narrative, especially as history progressed, exaggerated the situation than an ex-president made claims about his finances that are falsifiable

B) when arguing an extreme position, especially after the initial round of reactions noting it's extreme, it's better to take due care to link a one sentence claim you have to a paragraph that backs up the claim. Making people weed through a dense Wikipedia article section, then a long comment, neither providing anything that helps put ground under the claim, would reinforce the idea the claimant is mistaken

How does Campos's paper not back the claim? Which of his evidence was insufficient?

Again, this time with Truman's lies highlighted: "Truman made another fortune after he left the presidency, by doing precisely what he claimed he was not doing, that is, exploiting his status as a former president to maximum economic advantage. Indeed, by the time Congress passed the FPA in response to Truman’s various claims that he was at least teetering on the brink of potential financial distress, Truman’s net worth was, in relative economic terms, approximately $72 million in 2021 dollars."

> Making people weed through a dense Wikipedia article section, then a long comment, neither providing anything that helps put ground under the claim, would reinforce the idea the claimant is mistaken

All you've done is be dismissive, using meta-argument rather than presenting counter-evidence.

My comment highlighted parts from Campos's paper showing A) Truman lied about his finances, B) how the popular conception came to be, and C) mentioning how some of the evidence was only recently open to researchers.

Truman was the wrong man at the wrong place and time.

It was almost impossible to have gotten someone worse.

> and that if anyone had bloody hands, it was the president

An idiot that would be incapable of understanding even what was at stake.

Half a gram of antimatter could destroy a city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon

Half a gram of antimatter would cost a bit over $30 Trillion to make at the moment.

We could probably just buy the whole city instead and not worry about blowing anything up.

An interesting thought: A superweapon more powerful than nuclear weapons might with a single use cause the end of life as we know it. As such, you would not test or demonstrate it, therefore the weapon might not be useful.

Nobody needs a bigger bomb though, it wouldn't be any more of a threat. We can already destroy a whole city with a single weapon or trigger a mass extinction event in somewhere between an hour and a day, being better than that isn't really any more scary.

No, the "better" superweapon would be about precision and speed of destruction... like the ability to resolve the whole surface of the planet at sub cm resolution and pick out and destroy any target in moments... imagine a starlink-type constellation but spy satellites with space lasers instead backed by enormous AI facial-and-other recognition to identify where anybody or anything was. Or maybe something like being able to read thoughts at a distance or even influence them.

A bigger bomb though is just about doing something we can already do slightly more quickly. We can also already build bigger bombs than we have but there's no strategic advantage.

> Or maybe something like being able to read thoughts at a distance or even influence them.

We have that, it just doesn't work quite the way you think. One of its many manifestations is called "Twitter".

This isn't a joke. Consider the conventional notion of a mind control device, a magical mind-laser that can target one person at a time from a distance and modify their thoughts or even beliefs. Compare to what a motivated billionaire could accomplish, today, using paid botnets and content farms.

Today's version is wildly more influential, can not only change beliefs but also inoculate the targets against future influences in the other direction(s), and operates at a mass scale. It is so successful and effective that it doesn't even need to be kept secret like the usual scifi version.

The only thing exaggerated in my description is that it doesn't require the resources of a billionaire. You can operate it for far less.

We need an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's "sufficiently advanced technology" quote.

> the "better" superweapon would be about precision and speed of destruction...

Taking that idea to its extreme (and while we're discussing an article about potentially exotic physics) a superweapon (or superpower) could be simply "teleportation".

If you could trigger the creation of two ends of a wormhole to appear at arbitrary points in space (without needing any equipment at either point), you could teleport remote photons from your enemy's territory into your research station, which would effectively give you an invisible spy camera that can view anywhere on Earth in real time, allowing you to track all the military hardware and personnel that the enemy has.

An attack would involve (re)moving a few grams of electronics or neurons from the target, and would be almost invisible and unstoppable.

Even if the wormhole had to be "sent" using something like a portal gun, that would still dramatically change the dynamics of the battlefield.

We're quite close to the moment where we'll be able to release 1000 drones/robot dogs in a city with the mission to blow up all the tanks or white/blue arm-band soldiers.

Possibly with a human in the loop for final confirmation, which receives a target image on the screen for engagement approval. One human could approve hundred of hits per hour if you don't want to go fully autonomous.

Of course, the ability to automatically defend against drones/robot dogs will be next.

But to the main point, a nuke-like powerful bomb without radiation fallout would be quite valuable.

hypothesis: the Great Filter is that every sufficiently long-lived society eventually invents and uses the Deplorable Word from C.S. Lewis's "Narnia" universe.

hypothesis: the great filter is simply an adequate understanding of physics. The galaxy (and beyond?) is happily chattering away using physics we do not understand. We are a pre-contact tribe in the jungle completely unaware of the "radio" signals passing all around us. Once we understand the principles, we can build such a radio and participate.

So "inadequate", not "adequate", right?

I for one look forward to chatting on ultrawave and being allied with the Transcend

Is this falsifiable?

But wasn’t that just a metaphor for the atomic bomb?

If so, it was a poor one - the Deplorable Word kills every single person on the planet but the speaker. Not a hint of MAD in sight.

One could always test it on some other planet like the Death Star in _Star Wars_.

We don't need to; nuclear weapons in the giga tonne range are practical. Anything over about 200 kilo tonnes just isn't that useful because cities aren't so big, and aren't circular.

"Surpass" is a tricky concept. Nuclear weapons won't become less devastating, so they won't stop mattering, even if something more devastating comes along. Maybe being easier to build than nukes would do it, where suddenly everyone had the new superweapon including the old nuclear powers, since even they might as well use the new easier thing if they use anything.

How about some hypothetical technology that can scan space for nuclear weapons and destroy them from a distance even if stored within thick walls of lead and without leaving a trace?

That would be delightful, but as I read it the question was about a weapon singlehandedly rendering nukes irrelevant by its own destructive potential, not in tandem with an otherwise pretty low-damage nuke-nullifier that happens to be invented around the same time. Unless your idea of "destroy them" is to actually detonate your enemy's own nukes in their bunkers... well, that's still a hard sell for "surpassing", since you're either using the nukes after all or just convincing your enemy to take them off the table.

Surpass in destructive power doesn’t mean much since we can already destroy all life on the planet with nukes. That’s what makes the doomsday weapon in Dr. Strangelove so ironic and funny. But if a new weapon type that at least approximates nukes in destructive power while also surpassing them in ease of proliferation, cost of production, or detectability? Those are much scarier propositions.

Nukes are several orders of magnitude away from destroying all life on this planet.

https://youtu.be/JyECrGp-Sw8

It’s a distinction without a difference. For human purposes, nukes can effectively destroy us completely. We don’t need to also physically rip the planet apart and destroy all the single celled organisms to ruin the planet for ourselves.

The nukes that actually exist today would reduce us to a medieval or early industrial existence, except with a lot of information about how to rebuild faster — Hiroshima and Nagasaki both got rebuilt and are now thriving, and while modern weapons are higher yield and much of the industry to rebuild with would be destroyed, not all of it would be, and roughly half the global population would still be alive to do it.

I wouldn’t count that as “effectively destroy us completely”, even though it would be really bad.

Keep in mind that all the easily-mined coal, oil, and gas deposits have been used.

We might be kinda screwed if something takes out civilization (e.g., the nukes fly).

I guess we can hope that nuclear winter is exaggerated or non-existent and the southern hemisphere pulls through with intact infrastructure after the exchange.

Sure, everything would suck for a while[0]. But we had wind and hydro for a long time before electricity and steam, so those that survive could rebuild, analogously as to how we are presently weaning ourselves off fossil fuels without such destruction.

[0] I realise given the context of global thermonuclear war this may seem like understatement. Well, I’m British and I have a stereotype to uphold.

It might not be as easy as you'd hope to rebuild.

This essay does a good job of explaining why it's probably possible in principle and why in practice it might be quite difficult:

https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation...

(Incidentally, I highly recommend that author's book _ The Knowledge_, which is a more extended meditation on industrial civilisation and what it would take to reinvent it if we lost it.)

Lasers and other energy weapons may become practical in this century as an answer to artillery and hypersonic missiles. They will change the balance dramatically.

In addition to that we will see more robotic warfare and probably more information warfare.

I predict the next super weapon will be an AI that generates content so captivating, that it acquires everyone’s attention, and/or induces unhealthy biological response.

Proof of attack vector:

https://www.thegamer.com/15-people-who-have-died-playing-vid...

Imagine, for example, a content generator whose reward function is heart rate.

It already exists and is largely related to time (but not space)