From: Matt Mahoney (matmahoney@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Feb 13 2009 - 08:09:32 MST
--- On Fri, 2/13/09, John K Clark <johnkclark@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> It’s hard to believe that if a nat farted in your third grade classroom you
> would have a different political philosophy today; I think it would take
> a very long time for chaos alone to make minds diverge.
The rate of divergence could not exceed the write speed of human long term memory, 2 bits per second. Nevertheless, big changes could accumulate. Suppose that in a copy of our universe a single atom was deflected. The altered thermal motions of atoms would propagate at the speed of sound. Within hours, hardware random number generators throughout the two worlds would start generating different cryptographic keys with different times for hackers to crack. Brownian motion would affect the outcome of sperm cell races. In one world a boy is born; in the other a girl. Random DNA mutation would be affected. Within a year one world leader might get cancer, another would not. Within another year, one world might have a major war and another with different leadership would not.
-- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com
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