Astral Codex Ten

Earth

13 min read

Earth

Article

Earth is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between September 09, 2021 and January 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Martian water has five times more deuterium than Earthly water”; “probability of a 2 km comet impacting the Earth”; “around Earth – then you probably agree this is a problem worth solving”. It most often appears alongside Scott, America, Elon Musk.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 11
  • Issue count: 11
  • First seen: September 09, 2021
  • Last seen: January 02, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Unbearable Semiheaviness Of Being
September 09, 2021 · Original source
This probably doesn't have enough medical benefits to have been worth my time to research or yours to read. I still find it fascinating. I keep being amazed at how many dimensions things can vary along. You think you know what kind of things medicine has to investigate - how different chemicals interact, the effects of food and smoking and sleep and so on - and unless some weird Hungarians remind you, you would never in a million years remember that there are multiple different isotopes of water and this seems to have some effect on living cells. You would never think to check whether attempts to mine the Martian icecaps for drinkable water will result in dangerous water that could sicken the unfortunate astronauts who drink it (answer: it might! Martian water has five times more deuterium than Earthly water and seems to kill shrimp). You would never think that you could buy something called "deuterium depleted water" on Amazon, or that it would be completely safe to drink. But here we are!
Inline links: and seems to kill shrimp
Highlights From The Comments On "Don't Look Up"
January 07, 2022 · Original source
On a timescale of two years, a maximum effort by the United States of America could probably divert a comet or asteroid of up to ~2 km diameter. A long-period comet of 2 km diameter impacting the Earth would lay waste to one average continent, or the coastal regions bordering one ocean, but it wouldn't be an extinction event.
And since I have the notes, the probability of a 2 km comet impacting the Earth is ~5E-7 per year, and the probability for a 10 km comet is ~1E-8 per year.
Assuming this is a 9-km comet of typical composition, "aimed" at a spot 70% of the distance from the midpoint of the Earth to its periphery, with Our Heroes having perfect knowledge of all of this, then deflecting the comet to barely miss skimming the Earth's atmosphere given six months' notice would require approximately 220 megatons of military-surplus thermonuclear weapons. You wouldn't want to use anything bigger than 5 megatons for this, and the biggest weapon in current US inventory is the 1.2 megaton B83, so call it two hundred of those just to be safe.
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#13: Scholarships In Ethiopia The non-profit Omo Valley Research Project provides scholarships for indigenous students from the Omo Valley in Ethiopia, home to some of the most traditional groups on earth, most of whom typically live in small-scale subsistence communities. Less than 1% of members of the Omo Valley have received any formal education but increased development is opening up new opportunities for education as well as transforming their livelihoods. For students who start school, attendance after Grade 5 is often financially out of reach and a vocational college or university impossible. Supporting education for those who desire it equips community members to fully participate in the opportunities generated through development, gives them the ability to maintain a degree of cultural autonomy, and negotiate with the governmental and market-based organizations that are transforming their lives. Finally, many students yearn to learn about the world, to learn history, science, and math. Giving these students the ability to pursue their dreams is the greatest investment in human capital I know of. We support secondary, university, and vocational education through direct contributions for tuition or cost of living expenses. The students we support are all from traditional nomadic pastoralist communities including the Hamar and Nyangatom ethnic groups. [Email us at] Omovalleyresearchproject@gmail.com [or check out our website at] omovalleyresearchproject.org/
#46: Clean Up Space Debris If you’ve heard about space debris – tens of thousands of uncontrollable artificial objects in orbit around Earth – then you probably agree this is a problem worth solving. You might assume there are people working on it (true), and they have found a way to turn this cleanup work into a viable business (debatable). Our project is a novel, first-principles solution that will more cost-effectively address the hardest part of the problem (the multitude of smaller, pre-existing debris in orbits 600-1000km in altitude). We think this method has the greatest chance of major positive impact in decades to come, but regular investors struggle with its lack of near-term gain. I’m Mike Le Page, CEO and Design Lead for Exodus Space Systems, and my two core values are (1) that space exploration is good for humanity, and (2) that sustainability is crucial to everything humanity does in the future. Glad to discuss further: exodusspacesystems.com/contact/
Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism
July 28, 2022 · Original source
There were other experimental problems too. The Michelson-Morley experiment was supposed how fast the Earth was moving relative to the ether. It measured that the Earth was not moving relative to the ether at all. At the very least, the experiment should have been able to see Earth's orbital motion, which points in a different direction at different times of the year.
Conspiracies of Cognition, Conspiracies Of Emotion
January 13, 2023 · Original source
So the evidence in favor of “aliens who knew the speed of light built the Great Pyramid” is that it would explain this otherwise baffling coincidence. The evidence against is everything else we know about history, archaeology, architecture, and common sense. Why would superadvanced aliens have visited Earth, created one primitive stone structure, and left without doing anything else? Why does the Great Pyramid look so much like other Egyptian pyramids, and fit into our narrative of Egyptian history so well? What about marks on the Great Pyramid suggesting it was made with primitive tools? Et cetera.
Crowds Are Wise (And One's A Crowd)
February 06, 2023 · Original source
This looks like some specific elegant curve, but which one? A real statistician would be able to give a good answer to this question. I can’t, but after mashing some buttons on my statistics program and seeing what happened, I got the equation -Epistemic status: Wild speculation outside the limits of my competence- 1/ERROR = 2.34 + [1.8 * ln(CROWD_SIZE)]…which does okay at predicting the n=100 data point too. This equation implies that as crowd size approaches infinity, error approaches zero (albeit very slowly). But I included that assumption when choosing the equation - I didn’t test it. You can also imagine that there’s some consistent bias. For example, if the most commonly used map projection is distorted such that eyeballing the distance on a map perfectly would leave you off by 100 km, an infinitely-sized crowd might converge to an error of 100 km. I can’t tell if that’s going on here or not. For what it’s worth, taking the equation seriously suggests that if all 8 billion people on Earth took my survey, we would have gotten within 50 km of the true distance. Nick Bostrom speculates that in the far future, a multigalactic supercivilization might be able to support 10^46 simulated humans per century. If all of them took my survey, we could get within 12 km. Can You Really Do Wisdom Of Crowds With Yourself? As mentioned above, the average respondent was off by 918 km on their first guess. They were off by 967 km on their second guess. And on the average of their guesses, they were off by . . . it depends if you mean arithmetic or geometric average. The arithmetic average was better, 916 km. The geometric average was worse, 940 km. Arithmetic average is more commonly used. But I’d been using geometric average before, to deal with outliers. But this is a simple averaging of two quantities, where “outlier” is meaningless. So maybe arithmetic mean is more appropriate again? If we remove all ridiculous outliers from the data (anything above 40000 km, which would get you all the way around the Earth, or below 200 km, which wouldn’t even get you out of France) the picture is similar. Error on the first guess goes down to 858 km, on the second to 898 km, on the geometric mean to 873 km, and on the arithmetic mean to 845 km. Now all differences are significant at p < 0.001. Notice that two guesses from the same person were much less effective than two guesses from two different people, bringing the error down by 2 - 13 km instead of 200. This analysis is limited by having only one question, meaning that I can’t test whether the choices I made were good vs. p-hacking. If I had another question like this, I would like to confirm that removing outliers and using arithmetic instead of geometric mean for the stage where you average the two guesses still produces better results. At this point I can just say that I’ve found suggestive evidence that the wisdom-of-crowds-with-yourself hypothesis holds. Is the bound as number of guesses goes to infinity still zero? Can you get any question right just by guessing thousands of times, then averaging the results? Surely the answer has to be “no” - otherwise it would be too OP. Van Dolder, Van Den Assem Van Dolder and Van Den Assem did a much bigger wisdom-of-inner-crowds experiment, published here in Nature Human Behavior. It answers the “infinite inner crowd” question and tells us more about how the phenomenon works. VD and VDA got data from a Dutch casino that had a “guess the number of objects in a glass container” contest each year for several years (the real number was usually in the tens of thousands). Several hundred thousand people played, some more than once. Here are their results: If I’m reading this right, they find: Both inner and outer (ie real) crowds get more accurate as crowd size increases.
Inline links: speculates that, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6WSb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2db186c6-b785-4513-bb9a-7f971afc817f_860x773.png
Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
Unirt pushed back against my claim that colonizing Mars wasn’t useful, saying it was a good way to avoid extinction if Earth got hit by an asteroid. I wrote:
Inline links: I wrote
You can solve the asteroid threat more easily by tunneling underground on Earth and building a colony beneath the surface.
Not that it's logistically easier to maintain agriculture on Mars than set up survival bunkers with lots of grow lights around a nuclear power plant or something, but any major settlement on Mars will likely, simply as a matter of cost reduction, have substantial local greenhouses taking advantage of the natural sunlight on a reasonable day-night cycle, plus reasonable local supply of CHON elements. If Earth's atmosphere is rendered opaque, a large Mars colony might manage to keep humanity going.
Links For April 2024
April 04, 2024 · Original source
23: Did you know: the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring.
Inline links: the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring
A Theoretical "Case Against Education"
May 23, 2024 · Original source
7% know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun (Copernicus)
Highlights From The Comments On Tegmark's Mathematical Universe
February 21, 2025 · Original source
1650: why does the Earth orbit the Sun the way it does? Of course, because it's a mathematically consistent possibility, ellipses are nice, and we'd be dead if it didn't! What more is there to say? But actually it was Newton's law of gravity.
1970: why don't protons decay? You dummy, it's because otherwise the Earth would have disintegrated by now! But actually it was because baryon number conservation is enforced by the structure of the Standard Model.
I think this is false. Tegmark's version of the anthropic principle says things should be as simple as possible, preferably fit on a chalkboard. If you tried to put "Earth orbits sun in an ellipse" to something that on a chalkboard, you'd run into trouble defining "Earth" and "Sun", and if you tried to do it rigorously you would end up with something like gravity. Or even if you didn't, explaining orbits and tides with the same thing would be simpler than using an equation for both of them.
You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
January 02, 2026 · Original source
In 2014, I wrote In The Future Everyone Will Be Famous To Fifteen People. The argument was: suppose humanity ends up occupying millions of galaxies. People will still remember Earth as a special time. The mountainous mass of future historians will press down upon a tiny speck of current people. There’s no reason the colony ships won’t contain flash-drives of the whole 2026-era Internet, so, rather than being limited to a few prominent figures, these historians can study the generation around the Singularity almost in its entirely.
Inline links: In The Future Everyone Will Be Famous To Fifteen People