71–80 of 273 posts
What a lot of people seem to gloss over is that the southern hemisphere is, for the most part, blissfully uninvolved in nuclear politics and unlikely to be targeted. Global wind patterns would dump most of the fallout in the northern hemisphere. Google and Facebook would be gone because there are too many primary data centers in the northern hemisphere but Wikipedia might not even go down. Humanity on the historical…
Oh horror
What is the point of writing a post like this? I feel like there is an impetus in the 'rational' tech press to want to downplay threats like nuclear war, and emphasize dubious threats like AGI. I really don't care if nuclear war doesn't kill every single human instantly . So what? Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse.... full stop . Should we forget about disarmament?....guess not every single p…
What is the point of writing a post like this? I feel like there is an impetus in the 'rational' tech press to want to downplay threats like nuclear war, and emphasize dubious threats like AGI. I really don't care if nuclear war doesn't kill every single human instantly . So what? Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse.... full stop . Should we forget about disarmament?....guess not every single p…
Full scale nuclear war means big cities will be bombed and millions of people die. What civilizational collapse are you talking about? The lack of Hollywood movies and absence of the NYSE?
And then what is left would have to face the fourth horsemen of the Apocalypse; carrying famine, disease, pestilence.
Oh and conventional warfare would occur as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends No, it is not. The reason is this: it is science fiction . This makes it no less, or no more, dangerous than anything else I can make up with a quasi realistic chance of existing in the near term future. When thermonuclear b…
If we're comparing instantaneous risks, then I agree with your arguments. The most likely thing that could kill the most people today (in the next 24 hours) is a large nuclear war, followed by things like a nearby supernova, gamma ray burst, etc. An asteroid large enough to wipe out half of humanity before Saturday is really unlikely to be close enough to not have been observed already. In the first atomic bomb test…
> What do you propose we spend money on that actually moves the conditional probabilities away from global nuclear war?
First, let me say that I appreciate the frank discussion, and that I also appreciate the original author's willingness to author posts on this topic, these are in fact important issues. To answer your question, if it were my decision (I actually just responded to a couple RFPs with a sketch of a system for viral bioinformatics [which were declined]), I would say our largest current existential threat is our systems of government that have not made significant progress in the last couple hundred years. Regardless of how we score existential threats (I eschew probabilities personally), it's clear that we will need effective governance to respond to them as they arise (let's call covid a fire drill that we failed miserably at). We need research into questioning the fundamental assumptions by which we govern (secrecy, militancy, the paradigm of competition). How do we set goals as a world, not as nations? How do we engineer trusted environments, not zero trust environments? This is where my money would be.
What is the point of writing a post like this? I feel like there is an impetus in the 'rational' tech press to want to downplay threats like nuclear war, and emphasize dubious threats like AGI. I really don't care if nuclear war doesn't kill every single human instantly . So what? Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse.... full stop . Should we forget about disarmament?....guess not every single p…
I wrote this post, and the point is to improve discussion of societal risks. As others have pointed out, nuclear war doesn't have to kill everyone to be extremely bad and worth avoiding. I spend a lot of my time thinking about risks from nuclear and biological weapons, and downplaying these risks is not my purpose. One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for…
Who are the people that actually claimed "that a full-scale nuclear war is likely to cause human extinction?" I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that. It would cause societal collapse, perhaps even an extinction of civilization, but not a literal extinction of our species.
I'm sure I've heard the idea that nuclear arsenals can kill us all a hundred times over, or similar. Obviously my half-remembering isn't evidence, but if other people had heard this sort of thing, it would be evidence of a popular idea, however wrong. Even allowing for the larger arsenals at the height of the cold war.
Always look at the bright side of life: not too severe nuclear winter lasting a few years will surely reverse the effects of the global warming.
The collapse of the global economy will limit the addition of more carbon dioxide though.
When I think about nuclear war leading to human extinction, the first thing that comes to mind isn't any of those 3 mechanisms, but rather economic damage. Not economic damage as in "I lost my retirement investment," but as in "we can't produce enough food." I'd be worried about even much smaller and less deadly nuclear wars leading to massive civil unrest and breakdowns in large-scale social institutions and economi…
>as in "we can't produce enough food." US nuclear-war planners in the 1970s or 1980s estimated that there was enough food in silos in the US to feed the survivors for about 3 years. I think they assumed that 50% or 60% of Americans would survive. Usually, most of the grains and beans in those silos would go to feeding livestock, but in an emergency they could be used to keep people alive instead. So, unless the lives…
How would they process into human-usable formats and get it distributed in time in the initial period after the nuclear exchange? Beans are easy, but I would imagine a large proportion of people don't even own a mortar and pestle or other means of improvising a flour mill. It is certainly possible to improvise one, but access to information would also be disrupted immediately after a nuclear war so they couldn't just fire up youtube and watch one of these Primitive Technology videos on how to make a mill. We have forgotten the old ways and I fear many people would simply not be able to cope in a harsher environment without modern conveniences and comforts.
I'm not concerned about food shortages causing human extinction as such. Supermarkets with just-in-time logistics leave no buffer room while the feed is processed, but humans can survive 10's of days or longer without food (as long as they're hydrated, with some variability for body weight, access to vitamin supplements, and so on) and outside of major population centres (which are probably craters by this stage) you'd imagine a good part of the population have decent food stockpiles, and at least some farms would hopefully not be too affected by fallout and could continue producing enough food for at least a small village's worth of people. IIRC you need ~150 genetically healthy breeding pairs of humans to have enough diversity (assuming careful management to avoid inbreeding and so on) to viably repopulate the earth, which should be reasonable - although getting them all into one place might be harder.
Rather, I worry food riots and the associated issues such as blocked roads, torched buildings, looting, and so on could push a civilisation that is already severely damaged over the edge into total collapse.
What is the point of writing a post like this? I feel like there is an impetus in the 'rational' tech press to want to downplay threats like nuclear war, and emphasize dubious threats like AGI. I really don't care if nuclear war doesn't kill every single human instantly . So what? Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse.... full stop . Should we forget about disarmament?....guess not every single p…
In the context of civilization collapse, I think the author is overestimating how likely it is that people will be able to figure out subsistence farming using only locally available materials before they starve. Does anyone on Earth still do that, i.e. with no reliance on materials shipped in from elsewhere?
That would make a huge difference compared with traditional indigenous societies. However farming does require steady state weather - which is unlikely after a nuclear war?