1822: "Existential Bug Report"

[somitomi]

Title: ISSUE: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun.
WORKAROUND: None.

Have you tried turning it off and on again? Or just go to Milliways and enjoy the view...

[Whizbang]

If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.

[airdrik]

ISSUE: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the sun

WORKAROUND: I'm not going to live long enough to see that happen

ISSUE: I'm not going to live long enough to see the Earth be consumed by the sun
WORKAROUND: Decelerate the Earth sufficiently that it falls into the sun.

ISSUE: Nobody's going to help me decelerate the Earth
WORKAROUND: Find another objective that doesn't involve total annihilation.

ISSUE: All objectives that don't involve total annihilation are frivolous in the long term.
WORKAROUND: Enjoy life in the short term

ISSUE: Short term objectives don't lead to lasting happiness or fulfillment
WORKAROUND: Not that short term.

ISSUE: You're not very helpful
WORKAROUND: Neither are you.

[Vorticity]

Issue: Entropy will ultimately render the Universe into a quiescent miasma of homogeneous radiation.

Workaround: THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

[Soupspoon]

Issue: Entropy will ultimately render the Universe into a quiescent miasma of homogeneous radiation.

Workaround: THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Issue: My AC cannot gather sufficient data for a meaningful answer.

Workaround: If we wait long enough (...)

[cellocgw]

Issue: Entropy will ultimately render the Universe into a quiescent miasma of homogeneous radiation.

Workaround: THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Issue: My AC cannot gather sufficient data for a meaningful answer.

Workaround: If we wait long enough (...)

Methinks you missed the cultural reference there. Hint: maybe we can accelerate the Sun's expansion by means of a thiotimoline probe.

[Soupspoon]

Methinks you missed the cultural reference there. Hint: maybe we can accelerate the Sun's expansion by means of a thiotimoline probe.

Methinks that, if I did, you obviously have a completely different cultural reference in mind than the one I thought we referenced in both the penultimate and last questions...

[Mikeski]

ISSUE: cultural references are not universal.

WORKAROUND: invent the borg.

[Whizbang]

ISSUE: The Borg can't even effectively assimilate one ship on an exploratory mission.
WORKAROUND: Reboot the franchise

[Lode]

ISSUE: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun.
WORKAROUNDSOLUTION: Strap a rocket to the Earth

[cellocgw]

ISSUE: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun.
WORKAROUNDSOLUTION: Strap a rocket to the Earth

Cixin Liu investigated this. It didn't end well for a lot of people. (I'm not giving away the success/failure. Go read it. )

[StClair]

Damnit, (several) someone(s) beat me to my "meaningful answer" joke.

( )

[jello34543]

ISSUE: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun.
WORKAROUND: None.

WORKAROUND: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization

[Quizatzhaderac]

ISSUE: The Borg can't even effectively assimilate one ship on an exploratory mission.
WORKAROUND: Reboot the franchise

Well, to be fair to the Borg, the Q were acting against them.

Also the reboots turned Kirk into Wesley, so no thank you.

[Copper Bezel]

ISSUE: The Borg can't even effectively assimilate one ship on an exploratory mission.
WORKAROUND: Reboot the franchise

ISSUE: Fans are so attached that we can't even properly reboot the franchise without connecting it to the original as an alternate universe spinoff in the vein of Equestria Girls to My Little Pony, and setting a new series in the original canon besides.

WORKAROUND: Change time to create a real alternate universe in which Star Trek died in the '80s, then reboot that.

[radams]

Some synchronicity here between Randall and Zach:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/efficient-sorting

[gcgcgcgc]

ISSUE: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun

Cannot reproduce; Issue closed.

[Soupspoon]

(Issue: Cannot reproduce; Workarounds: According to the nature of problem... 'Educational' publications, IVF, surrogacy, gamete donation or adoption.)

[orthogon]

Some synchronicity here between Randall and Zach:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/efficient-sorting

That's a bit like the sleepsort. O(1) in terms of the length of the input but ... actually i suppose it's better than sleepsort: it's O(1) whatever way you look at it. Unfathomably slow for any realistic input, but scales extremely well. But this isn't the individual SMBC comics forum...

See also https://xkcd.com/1185/

[teelo]

Workaround: If we wait long enough, eventually that job won't be needed anymore.

[NumberFourtyThree]

In the end, all things come to nothing.

[scrife]

Is a program just a named series of bytes? What defines a program that crashes?

If I have an executable file called "Photoshop" but it is ever unusable due to a bug, do I really have the "Photoshop" application?

It's easy enough to justify that there is source code that identifies a program that allegedly runs and is called "the Photoshop source code."

It's true that there are bytes being sold by those people and those bytes are referred to as Photoshop. This could be called "the Photoshop binary distribution."

The truest definition of Photoshop, I argue, is a full or partial specification of Photoshop in one's mind that may have been formed by hearing about Photoshop by witnessing an artistic rendering of computing, actual Photoshop usage, mistakenly believing that oneself used Photoshop, or any combination or the these things. Such a definition is consistent with solipsism and the existence of Photoshop as an idea is definite. Given that one may predict the outcome of the Photoshop's usage, it is arguable that the idea of Photoshop is even an application.

Simply put, an executable that has crashed is not a program at all. As such, every single version of a lot of progams is really just a maybe-useful file that resembles software someone thought of.

[Pfhorrest]

It's too late to give this further thought, but I suspect the above reasoning fails for the same reason that a collection of matter that may, in some circumstances, fail to execute whatever functionality we define as life, may nevertheless still be alive, in other circumstances.

(E.g. just because, in an oxygenless environment, I will fail to live, and even in an oxygenated environment my life functions will eventually fail in one way if not another, does not mean that I am not, presently, alive).

[Copper Bezel]

Pick an Aristotelian causal dimension and there's a way of defining a word according to it, and the context defines which one is relevant, including the immediate context of attached modifiers. I suppose very obvious ones simply become oxymorons, like "failed success", but almost all things are non-obvious.

Doesn't stop scrife's post from being funny, though.

[Soupspoon]

Does an arbitrary GIMP program have the same "tableness" as an arbitrary Photoshop program, though?

[Qiset]

The work around for the sun expanding in about 4 billion years is to move the earth further away. By then we will be able to to just that. All it would take is a slight speed up for several years.

[Mikeski]

oxymorons, like "failed success"

...a Pyrrhic Victory?

[Copper Bezel]

Point taken.

Does an arbitrary GIMP program have the same "tableness" as an arbitrary Photoshop program, though?

I have nothing to add to this except that you're the very best, Soupspoon. XD

Edit: Hmm, what about the tableness of Excel vs. the tableness of Dreamweaver?

[Eternal Density]

ISSUE: cultural references are not universal.

WORKAROUND: invent the borg.

Due to the lack of a capital letter, I misread that as 'bong'.

[Pfhorrest]

We are the Bong. You will be asslmuta... assermu... ass.... hahah, ass. Dude. Have you ever really just like. Looked at your hands, man?

[rmsgrey]

The work around for the sun expanding in about 4 billion years is to move the earth further away. By then we will be able to to just that. All it would take is a slight speed up for several years.

I think regarding the Sun's eventual expansion as a problem is a very optimistic view - if "expanding Sun" ever kills a human, then we, as a species, will have been around for roughly half the time there's been anything reasonably describable as "life" on Earth.

[Pfhorrest]

It's probably a safe bet that whatever is around by then will not count as human, even if humans never go extinct per se. Just like whatever amniote species first crawled onto land isn't around any more, though some individual members of that species had children whose children's children's children's ... etc are still here posting on these forums right now.

[GlassHouses]

The work around for the sun expanding in about 4 billion years is to move the earth further away. By then we will be able to to just that. All it would take is a slight speed up for several years.

I think regarding the Sun's eventual expansion as a problem is a very optimistic view - if "expanding Sun" ever kills a human, then we, as a species, will have been around for roughly half the time there's been anything reasonably describable as "life" on Earth.

Not only that, but we'll have to have moved the Earth outward already. With the sun's brightness increasing by 1% every 100,000,000 years, the planet would otherwise have become uninhabitable long before the Sun becomes a red giant.

[Pfhorrest]

I had a thought a year or so ago thinking on what use would a human civilization capable of moving the Earth even have for doing so, and settled on the answer "history/nostalgia/education/entertainment". The same reason we preserve the ruins of monuments of ancient civilizations whose reasons for building those monuments no longer apply to us.

That lead me to sketch an idea for a story I never got around to writing where, some time unfathomable ages into the future where the universe as we know it really ought to be dead to life like us, but post-post-posthumans have long since transcended to nigh-immaterial godhood, the Earth is still around, and modern humans (and other later stages of humanity too) are still around, because the entire planet is a living museum and human "zoo" of sorts. In an apparently-empty cosmos thanks to the accelerating expansion of the universe, around the lonely merged Milkdromeda supermassive black hole, orbit a few white dwarves that have been saved from the fates of all the other stars that were either swallowed by it or flung into the intergalactic voids, among those saved stellar remnants that of our sun, around which the Earth orbits at a distance that gives it the same insolation as it presently gets, with its moon now-stably orbiting at its present distance.

The entire surface of the planet is preserved or recreated areas of different cultures from different periods of history, and all the biological humans still living on it spend their time basically doing the equivalents of renaissance faires, but for more cultures of more time periods than just that one, teaching and learning how the different peoples of those eras lived and did the things that they did, while always having convenient access to the comforts of technologies far beyond our comprehension (administered by the benevolent gods of post-post-posthumanity) so that nobody ever really suffers like the people of those cultures actually did.

The protagonists are an "Ancient Egyptian" woman who guides tours of "Giza", and some kind of hermaphroditic posthuman from an offworld colony (which is also now a museum like Earth, and whose species have also been recreated by the post-post-posthuman gods), who visits the "Ancient Egypt" region of Earth and meets her. She falls in love with him(?), and the conflict of the story is about their forbidden love: first how the other (modern) humans think it's weird that she's into a posthuman, then how his species look at him as basically a monkey-fucking pervert for reciprocating her interests, and finally about how the post-post-posthuman gods can't allow interbreeding like this because they have to preserve the right genetics for their museum, but the two are welcome to upload their consciousnesses into whatever transcendental heaven the post-post-posthumans live in and continue their relationship, while their memories of the entire thing are wiped from the brains still in their old bodies and those bodies go back to their old lives. Hurray?

[Eternal Density]

Lots of humans have died from the sun at its current size

[bazza]

ISSUE: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun.
WORKAROUND: Deep space travel, planet terraforming tech, colonisation