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Comment by johnisgood

15 days ago

That sounds even more plausible.

Wasn't there at least one movie, where that was not a good thing?

  • Seveneves by Neal Stephenson was a good book that goes into what happens when things change between the Earth and Moon.

  • There was. I think it was titled "Moonfall", or maybe "Another Earth". There is also "Oblivion" in which the Moon was partially destroyed. There are probably other ones, too, but I think "Moonfall" is the one to which you are referring. I might just give it a watch in a bit!

    But yeah, it would not be a good thing, according to the movie at least.

    • In "Bruce Almighty" Jim Carrey uses his God powers to move the moon closer to create a more romantic view for his date. If my memory serves correct, the next day we hear briefly on the news about terrible freak flooding over the world.

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  • Counterpoint: in Despicable Me the moon was shrunk and brought down to Earth with almost zero consequences... so maybe it would be just fine!

An early 20th Century scientist named Olaf discovered a means to do this by intensifying the level of intelligence on Earth. If you ask me, the first step towards this must be slashing government funding for anything that smells of tolerance. And making bizarre tweets that coincidentally correlate with buying and selling shares.

  • Ah yes, the Olafian Lunar Proximity Theory. While government defunding might accelerate intelligence in peculiar ways, I've found that the most effective method involves strategically placing enormous quantities of vintage ThinkPads at precise geomagnetic nodes around the Earth.

    The collective electromagnetic resonance of their legendary keyboards creates a subtle gravitational anomaly that could, over approx. 17.3 years, reduce the lunar orbit by up to 4% (!), according to my rigorous calculations and simulations.

    My recent paper[1] on "Retrotech Gravitational Manipulation" was mysteriously rejected by mainstream journals, likely due to Big Space's vested interest in maintaining the status quo; the current Earth-Moon distances for profit reasons.

    Have you came across my paper, considering you have heard about Olaf?

    [1] https://arvix.org/abs/2108.05779v3 ("Retrotech Gravitational Manipulation: Theoretical Applications of Legacy Computing Hardware on Celestial Body Dynamics")

    Edit: Ugh, the site seems to be down at this moment, typical HN hug of death. Sorry about that. Forgot to archive! My rookie mistake. :/

    • No problem; I've pored over and deeply understood your paper by a process I call "vibe-grokking". I'd explain more but have a patent currently in application.

      Do you think the gravitational anomaly could be intensified by having the Thinkapds run multiple local copies of GPT-4.5 passing messages in an input/output circle? I call this setup "ChatGPT whispers" and frequently utilise it to write the abstracts of my own papers. I also used it to design, code and publish the website "https://www.chatgptwhispers.com/". I've only vibe-surfed the website myself but feel free check it out the old-fashioned way.

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