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Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

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Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#111

Post by redis_mlc »

The article and related HN posts are quite our of date.

Here's what's happening today:

- China only has 200 nukes now, but it doubling that. The CCP has been in an undeclared war with the US since the Korean War, so most are pointed at the US:

Mao, "Hide our strength, bide our time."

- We will have nuclear explosions resulting in war in the next 20 years. Both North Korea and the Islamic world are motivated to get them.

- the Islamic community has a weird sense of victimhood (losing the science race, resulting in the loss of their caliphate) and superiority (read the Koran) that guarantees the use of nukes against the West. To them, the more chaos, the better. It's like 1.2 billion chess players, who can only think 1 move deep.

- Russia has a military doomsday SkyNet program "Dead Hand" that will automatically launch nukes after it detects launches from other countries, intentional or not.

Moscow is protected by a ring of ABM rockets, so they believe their leaders can protect themselves.

- China has monopolized the Himalayan headwaters, diverting water from several other countries, including Pakistan. This is an age-old reason for war. With 8+ billion people, add in overpopulation, too.

- nuclear arms control experts are very concerned about what's happening, likely the most since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The West's secular liberalism is under attack by two powerful ideologies, the CCP and Islam (the #1 baby name in the capitals of Europe is Mohammed.) As we've seen in Europe, our tolerance loses to their intolerance. Hopefully the US can learn from Europe and HK and take action to protect ourselves before it's too late.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#113

Post by PeterisP »

xxpor wrote: post #85
pacificmint wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, without the very dense energy in the easily accessible fossil fuels we've very nearly mined out, restarting an industrial revolution would be at best extremely problematic. I feel like this is the more important of the two points you made. Even without Uranium, it's conceivable to have a second industrial revolution. We don't need nuclear power for that. But without easily accessible fossil fuels, it'…

Could we not bootstrap with coal? There's still plenty left. Oil would be an issue though.

We've dug out almost all the easily accessible minerals - we're currently mining minerals that are cheaply accessible to us with modern technology, but the ones that were cheaply accessible to pre-industrial civilizations are long gone.

For some minerals (e.g. metals) that might possible even be a bonus, as we've brought it up to the surface and it might be more accessible than before (a scrapyard that's buried under some soil could be an excellent place to mine iron), but there won't be shallow coal or shallow oil that a second industrialization could use as a cheap power source.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#114

Post by PeterisP »

XorNot wrote: post #86
robocat wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a vast range of non-native eadible plants and animals that have now been introduced to every country. 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?

There still isn't enough to sustain people on subsistence farming. And subsistence farming, is well, subsistence-level - it precludes specialization which means it precludes most of the advantages technology brings us today. If you're ever in a civilizational collapse scenario, literally the most important thing you can do is rapidly restart the farm supply chain by whatever means necessary - anyone imagining buildin…

Subsistance farming for a limited number of people can be done by burying potatoes in the ground and digging them back up in the autumn. Well, it's a bit more to get a good yield, but not that much more, you can (and some places do) teach that to literal kindergartners in a single day. We can't sustain 7 billion of people this way, but if some catastrophe kills 99% of humanity, the availability of better cultivars makes subsistence farming for the remainder much easier than five hundred years ago.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#115

Post by PeterisP »

tzs wrote: post #97
jcranmer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post discusses nuclear winter briefly, but I'll cover that in more detail here: The theory of nuclear winter is predicated on a specific chain of events: * The mass use of nuclear weapons causes massive firestorms in large cities. * These firestorms pump soot in unprecedented amounts into the stratosphere. * The stratospheric soot causes massive, persistent climatic cooling. If any of these claims fail to be true…

This paper [1] looks at a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with 100 Hiroshima sized nukes on the most populated urban areas in the country. Taking into account the amount of combustible material in the target areas, they estimate 5 Tg of soot aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere. They apply climate models to that and get a mean 1.8 C temperature reduction and 8% precipitation reduction for at least 5 ye…

To be cynical, we're not far off from a scenario where a 1.8 C temperature reduction would simply mean getting back to normal temperature range to which our agriculture is well suited.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#116

Post by api »

codekilla wrote: post #11

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…

Standard issue "rationalist" flex: pick a controversial topic, take a contrarian (or at least apparently contrarian) position, argue it in some creative way.

Bonus points if it treads close to some socially or politically taboo topic while avoiding anything that goes directly for it. Being overtly inflammatory and divisive is for low-brow YouTubers. High brow rationalists only hint at the possible controversial implications.

* Also YouTuber could be translated as "you are a potato."

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#117

Post by devy »

mynegation wrote: post #75
landfish wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The post discusses only first order effects. In case of nuclear war most people will die not from kinetic shock or radiation, but from famine and deceases caused by collapse of supply chain and medical infrastructures, and from unavoidable violence during the fight for scarce remaining resources.

Exactly!

The intangible disruptions of a human society will indirectly cause eventual death due to the nuclear war. Think about it, just the COVID-19 lockdown of a few weeks can cause economy collapsed, people out of jobs, can't paid rent, utilities. A nuclear war will immediate cut off or contaminate essential human necessities, like food, water, shelters, electricity etc., so even without getting harmed by kinetic force, radiation, climate alteration, people still cannot survive long term.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#118

Post by codekilla »

benlivengood wrote: post #109
codekilla wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the fundamental problem as I see it: probabilities are meaningless . We can talk about conditionals...potentials...likelihoods....whatever until we are blue in the face. All they do is provide a thin veneer over what I see is the truth: we simply have no real idea regarding most existential risks. Probability is a false god that justifies our wasting resources on problems we can't hope to solve, as we don't ev…

> AGI is the canonical problem of this type--absolutely no real understanding of the parameter space. What can it do...can it do this or that...what will it do...how to bound/align what it will do...???; well--just tell me what it is first. Aliens could show up tomorrow and smoke us (in theory), so what dollar amount should we spend on that (it's the same problem really...what capabilities will the aliens have so as…

> Just to be clear; do you mean completely wiping out humanity or a reset to some small population that might have another chance at it?

Either might occur, given deployment of nuclear or bio technology.

> Getting nations to truly cooperate probably means giving up a lot of identity based on tradition, origin, and history. I have no clue how best to convince people that what really matters about them and their neighbors is how individually happy, fulfilled, and free to explore they are regardless of their differences. Getting rid of false beliefs in zero sum economics and the futility of status signalling might be a start, but humans are sort of innately programmed for a lot of counterproductive beliefs about status, pride, fairness, worth, etc.

Yes, and I think one needs to realize that this is a 100 year project. Technologies like nuclear fusion, and quantum computing I put into this '100 year' category, that is those that would catalyze profound transformations of humanity (synthetic biology being another, Abstract General Intelligence another [I do not like the term 'artificial']) given about 100 years and sufficient resources.

So rebuilding and rethinking completely the way humans govern themselves I think is one of these 100 year projects. Things like nomadic citizens (humans without borders), economics with externalities an explicit factor, zero secrecy non zero sum international relations. All stuff that is easy enough to write down, but with no real chance of swift movement towards. Future economic systems are hopefully cooperative, perhaps further enabled by greater gains in digitizing the economy (though risks towards greater inequality that is further destabilizing seem just as likely) .

> reason under uncertainty without probabilities.

I got started in math and computation working on quant stuff during the first financial crash. It was a front row seat to how probability goes wrong (your copulas aren't worth the pixels you graphed them on). The idea is that you have to recognize some things just aren't accurately quantifiable. If you don't recognize that, you just place yourself in a situation where you have a false sense of certainty about uncertainty. You just simply can't assign a probability accurately to anything you so choose. It's not that probability isn't worthwhile, it most certainly is, the point is to be able to accept when you are dealing with a situation where it is non-informational (and likely even counter-informational).

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#120

Post by eloff »

landfish wrote: post #28
codekilla wrote: post #11

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…

Very few things could actually make humans extinct at this point. It would take an impact like the one that produced the moon to finish us off. We're so adaptable that some of us will survive and rebuild. If we can ever get back to technological civilization without easily accessible fossil fuels is debatable, but I think we'd find a way - it would just be a lot harder and take longer.

What worries me is not extinction, but societal collapse. We've seen how disruptive covid19 was, and it was a baby event compared to things that have happened in earth's history.

Climate change and nuclear war both seem highly probable causes of societal collapse. Both are preventable if we can just find a way to not be collectively stupid. I don't how we do that, but it's insane we're not trying harder.

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