Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:
“PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn’t store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.”
Right. You have to dream up counterfactual fantasies in order for it to be a problem.
And you don’t need to worry about it, because as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.
Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this. How much mass do those asteroids have? What’s their collective cross-section, and how does that compare to the volume of space they’d be passing through? How big is Earth in comparison?
I’m betting the odds will still be microscopic. I feel safe betting that because we have real world evidence that bodies in our solar system don’t frequently get hit by ghost asteroids from the Magellanic Cloud (there’s an 80’s sci-fi movie title for you). Large impacts are few and far between these days,
Once again, sure, you could imagine that ordinary stars sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.
If you want it to actually be a worrying scenario, though, it needs to be backed up with some kind of evidence or theory that makes it plausible. And again, we don’t actually see frequent gamma ray bursts in reality, so whatever mechanism you propose needs to be rare for it to fit the data.
I don’t worry about it, because it is a very small number and my life is likely very short by comparison, but… the very large number of potential sites for life to evolve in the visible universe still yields zero evidence of a technological “WE ARE HERE” sign that we can understand. That implies that either: A) we really are the center of the universe, first to develop technology or B) such developments of energy manipulating technology are an exceedingly small number rare for… reasons that we do not yet understand. And of course C) those of us who have seen irrefutable proof of alien technology are hiding it from the rest of us for… reasons.
Of the possibilities, I find A) much less likely than B), and C) to be impossibly absurd - people just aren’t that good at keeping secrets for long periods of time.
You’re analyzing a risk we could imagine, what you can’t do is analyze a risk we haven’t imagined yet. Looking at the vastness of the Universe and the rate at which our theories about how it all works evolve, I find it far more likely that we haven’t imagined more of actual reality than we have.
Not miraculously, we know some of the causes that make this happen. What we don’t know is all of the causes or all of the existing conditions that will precede such events.
When such event does “miraculously” happen we may be able to learn from observation what likely triggered it and then it won’t be “miraculous” anymore, it will have an analyzable probability - with a rather large window of uncertainty.
Until such an event kills us all, or at least tanks civilization. We won’t likely learn much from that one.