Thursday, May 19, 2011

The End of the World


So, apparently, the Bible says no man can know when the world ends. It's kinda funny, I mean, now people are saying the world can't end on Saturday at 6pm local time, because some random Joe thinks it will.

Think about that for a second. It's highly exploitable.

So here's the plan:
1) A computer assigns (future) dates and times to every person on Earth, and to new arrivals as they appear.
2) These people are told that this is the date, hour, minute, and second that the world ends and tell no one else the date they were given.
3) As people die, their dates are placed back into the computer and doled out again if they are still in the future.

There are approximately 6.77 billion people on Earth, which comes out to about 214 years during which the world cannot end without a single one person knowing the date or hour (or minute or second; the last thing we need is God slipping the end of the world in between two hours). Unfortunately, we can't go to milliseconds; that only gets us one fifth of a year.

It is absolutely critical that each person knows only the date and time they were assigned: the moment a person knows two, there is an uncertainty with his own, and the world ends.

It may be necessary for the people operating the computer to not participate in this project.

For safety, some people should be held in reserve, in case it becomes necessary to quickly have someone know when the world ends (i.e.: someone died and the world ends tomorrow). That may not be strictly necessary, since this knowledge should apply from the afterlife as well, but we should not take any chances.

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