
Our Long Bets and Predictions about 02020 - another
https://blog.longnow.org/02020/02/26/12-long-bets-and-predictions-about-02020/
======
jnbiche
Not sure why they're so quick to write off Long Bet #9. It's highly likely
we'll reach 1,000,000 worldwide casualties from Covid-19 during a 6-month
period before the end of year (defined in the bet's terms as
"hospitalizations").

And if the hypothesis turns out to be true that it was an accidental release
from one of Wuhan's 2 laboratories doing bat virus research, that's definitely
a "bioerror" under the terms of the bet.

There's significant circumstantial evidence it could have been a lab
accident(early Chinese reporting about the index case, 1 lab location a few
blocks away from seafood market, bat species, earlier lab accident, etc), but
nothing more at this point. But we may know more by the end of the year.

Edit: This is _not_ the wild conspiracy theory about a bioengineered virus in
a weapons lab. This is a hypothesis about accidental bat pee on a lab worker
conducting routine research, or some similar accident (such accidental
releases are confirmed to have happened _twice_ with SARS-Cov-1 virus in a
Beijing lab). Laboratory-acquired infections do happen, sometimes with deadly
consequences. In my mind, it's the most feasible scenario at this point, given
no one has provided proof that bats were even sold at the seafood market that
was blamed. And we know that many officials were eager to cover this all up.

~~~
spats1990
the main thing about the accidental release theory to me is it neglects the
intermediary animal aspect most scientists seem to agree on.

An accidental transmission from bats to humans in the lab: yes I could believe
that. An accidental lab transmission from bats to pangolins to humans
(currently thought likely) is much harder to believe. It doesn't follow the
rule of simple explanations.

The lab-transmission theory is also dangerous because it's currently baseless
in terms of hard evidence, yet is immensely satisfying for millions of people
who are scared, bored, sick, pissed off, etc due to the virus. Like more
traditional conspiracy theories, the lab transmission theory uses
circumstantial evidence to provide a simple explanation in the face of chaos,
the unknown, the void, the reality that the virus can really mess with us all
this badly. "It's from a chinese lab accident" is not the pseudo explanation
we all need right now, with so many different types of tension nearing
breaking point.

Yes, it could be true, but I hope you'll join me in really hoping it isn't and
in pushing back on it til we see proper hard evidence. Because I unironically
think that if it turns out to be true it could cause a war.

~~~
philwelch
Three points:

1\. It is always going to be a little suspicious, at the very least, that the
first COVID-19 outbreak happened in the same city as a virology institute.
(Conversely, if we had a bizarre viral outbreak in Atlanta, I would have very
similar suspicions.)

2\. Nobody is going to start a war with China. On top of the centuries-old
reasons that attacking China is stupid, they have nuclear weapons.

3\. If it was released from a lab, it was almost certainly the result of an
honest accident. SARS was very serious and China would have wanted to invest
in research intended to prevent the kind of problems we are having now. If
that research led to an accidental exposure and release of this virus, that
would be a very cruel cosmic joke on us all, but it wouldn’t be a conspiracy
for global domination or anything stupid like that.

~~~
arcticbull
1\. It is always going to be a little suspicious, at the very least, that the
first COVID-19 outbreak happened in the same city as a virology institute.
(Conversely, if we had a bizarre viral outbreak in Atlanta, I would have very
similar suspicions.)

I guess, but the last major hop from animal to human was the Hendra virus in
Australia in 2017 -- going from fruit bat to horse to human [1]. This was in
the Brisbane area which I'm sure has viral research labs nearby, but because
they're Australia, nobody even began to speculate as much.

Sometimes shit happens, and it's deeply human to want to create the
fantastical explanation. Not saying it couldn't happen it's just again, not
the simplest explanation at all, and so it's really just not very likely.

2\. Someone sure would start a trade war though.

[1]
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170815095124.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170815095124.htm)

~~~
jnbiche
It's really strange to me that you call this a "fantastical explanation" when
there have already been 2 accidental lab releases resulting in human illness
and death that were _acknowledged by the Chinese government_ of a virus in the
same family (SARS-CoV-1):

[https://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_04_23/en/](https://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_04_23/en/)

[https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/02/content...](https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/02/content_344755.htm)

~~~
JetSpiegel
From the WHO link, 4 people died, and they were tracking 300 contacts.

So a million times less severe.

Conspiracy Theorists will rant about the WHO being a China shill though, you
can never win.

------
diebeforei485
> By "bioerror", I mean something which has the same effect as a terror
> attack, but rises from inadvertance rather than evil intent. [1]

It's not clear that covid-19 isn't bioerror. There is a lot of information[2]
pointing in that direction, so I wouldn't dismiss the theory outright the way
the OP authors did. In any case it hasn't killed a million people.

1\. [http://longbets.org/9/](http://longbets.org/9/)

2\. [https://project-evidence.github.io](https://project-evidence.github.io)

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
'A lot of evidence' isn't one link. But let's look at that link.

"We are an anonymous group of researchers"

Well that's a good start innit (to be fair, it looks like it really is well
intentioned and they are making an honest attempt but without attribution it's
impossible to tell).

anyway, their summary, which you should have posted: "Editors’ note, March
2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified
theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is
no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most
likely source of the coronavirus."

It's not 'a lot of evidence' either way.

~~~
scythe
> We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified
> theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There
> is no evidence that this is true;

"Engineered virus" is a _much_ more drastic claim than "escaped from a lab".
Practically all of the viruses studied in labs are natural. Engineering living
(or quasi-living) things beyond adding this or that protein is still more
science fiction than science.

~~~
ac29
> Engineering living (or quasi-living) things beyond adding this or that
> protein is still more science fiction than science.

Its certainly much farther along than you might think:
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6329/1040.full](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6329/1040.full)
(link to paper "Design of a synthetic yeast genome")

edit: more recent info on the project here
[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05164-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05164-3)

------
emptybits
Impressive prescience over 27 years ago:

"""Precocious associate editor and columnist for the Daily Telegraph, 32-year-
old [Boris] Johnson has been called the "rising star of the write, not right".
After indulging his taste for politics and intrigue as president of the Oxford
Union, Boris exercised his "belief in freedom" as a journalist, Eurobashing
and penning paeans to British "ordinariness". Not shy in clashing with party
lines, Boris would "renegotiate EU membership so Britain stands to Europe as
Canada, not Texas, stands to the USA". Pericles, state-builder and negotiator
of Athenian autonomy, is his hero."""[1] (February 1997)

[1] [https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-
cabinet...](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-cabinet-of-
tomorrow-1277684.html)

~~~
mjw1007
I don't think it's prescience. I think the cause and effect goes the other
way.

One of the mechanisms by which Johnson rose to power was by having his well-
connected friends talk him up as a future leader from a young age.

------
JimDabell
> 75% of all incremental new generation will come from renewable/sustainable
> energy in the U.S.

> Predictor: Jigar Shah.

> Prediction Duration: 16 years (02004–02020).

> Did the Prediction Come True? Yes — 76%, in fact.

> In January, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said it
> expected 76% of new electric generating capacity to come from wind and solar
> in 02020.

What‽ You can't confirm a prediction has come true by citing another
prediction!

------
zamalek
> The technology will exist that will allow for the “faxing” (teleportation-
> sending/receiving) of actual inanimate objects, such as text books,
> clothing, jewelry and the like.

This one has two possible outcomes. Faxing is cloning, not teleportation - so
the parentheses are contradictory. We can definitely fax 3D inanimate objects
(3D scanning, email and 3D printing).

~~~
slg
The fact they listed text books as one of the objects would seemingly rule out
that interpretation of the question since literally faxing a text book was
possible decades before the prediction was made.

------
cl3m
12020 is better than 02020
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs),
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar))

------
11thEarlOfMar
Here is the original 10,000 year clock proposal, Danny Hillis with Wired
Magazine:

[https://www.wired.com/1995/12/the-millennium-
clock/](https://www.wired.com/1995/12/the-millennium-clock/)

~~~
Green_man
This reminded me of a proposal to add a leading 1 to our year[2020 -> 12020]:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs)

Cesare Emiliani proposed that the Construction of the Göbekli Tepe 12,000
years ago could represent a "start of civilization", creating a "holocene
calendar".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Emiliani](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Emiliani)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar)

------
lozaning
Can someone explain to me the reason for including a leading zero? Is that
just a stylist choice of the long now foundation?

~~~
ddeville
From their about page:

> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve
> the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.

~~~
taneq
Still only pushes the problem back for an additional 100k years. If they were
really serious they’d use prefix codes. :P

~~~
posnet
I am more worried about what we will do when we run out of 64 bit seconds for
unix time.

500 billion years is barely half way through the star forming age of the
universe.

~~~
Dylan16807
Well, timespec does have 34 bits it's not using...

------
vagab0nd
Tangential: I wish we had open betting/prediction markets for everything. At
the risk of being naive, I had this idea of matching speculators with
insurance buyers on a platform. Example: If I'm hosting an outdoor event in 2
days and I want to hedge against it raining on that day, I can buy insurance
(bet against sunny) and get paid if it rains. Speculators can make money by
selling insurance. Sort of like options trading but for real world events.
Does this exist? Is it even legal?

~~~
PakG1
Just google "bet on anything". There are a number of websites all listed on
the first page.

------
ekianjo
> In 02004, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that food consumption would be on
> the wane, as “billions of tiny nanobots in the digestive tract and
> bloodstream could intelligently extract the precise nutrients we require.”

Love the fact that Kurzweil is still somewhat taken seriously considering how
poor his track record has been.

------
longtermd
They made a Mistake at Teleportation: "The technology will exist that will
allow for the “faxing” (teleportation- sending/receiving) of actual inanimate
objects, such as text books, clothing, jewelry and the like."

This is TRUE, and can be easily done with 3D printers. Note that "faxing" by
definition is not "teleportation", but "copying at a different location",
which is exactly what 3D printing is.

------
stewbrew
Which year are they talking about? Is this an octal number?

~~~
ComputerGuru
It’s to do with their “long” outlook. They’re thinking of when we’ll be in the
five digits and looking back at the fours.

~~~
stewbrew
I get that. But obviously they never programmed in a language where string to
int conversion routines interpret such a number as an octal number ... which
is quite common.

------
dmos62
I guess 01997 is better than 1.99.7.

