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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?

#141

Post by jcranmer »

Balgair wrote: post #129
FooHentai wrote: post #95

>multiple that by 14,000 warheads, and we get 112 million km². That's a lot! It's still less than the 510.1 million km² of earth's land mass, but it's a lot more than the ~10.2 million km² of urban space. Presumably this is enough to cover every human habitation, so in principle, it might be possible to kill everyone with radiation from existing nuclear weapons. While there is ~500m km2 of land on the planet, only ab…

James Burke went into this in The Trigger Effect [0] back in the late 1970s. It's an incredible film, if only for the timing on the last in-person voice shot [1]. The amount of lucky breaks you must have to survive even a non-nuclear civilizational collapse event are astounding. Even if you make it out to a remote corner of the world, you'll need a farm with some supplies and no one still sulking about. The really ha…

You don't need to plow soil to grow crops, and you don't need an ox to draw your plow (it does make it less labor-intensive though). What plowing does is turn the soil over, so that you can make some of the deeper nutrients more available to plants. It's only really necessary if you're doing intensive agriculture.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#142

Post by adrianN »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #139
tachyonbeam wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, if there was a full-scale nuclear war, famine and violence would kill 90-95% of people. It would also destroy a lot of our technological capabilities. There are only a handful of silicon fabs in the world, and they have complex supply chains. It could bring us back to some kind of a technological middle age, except we'd have guns, electricity and radios.

The ammo and electricity would not last long in most parts of the world. I think a lot of communities would have real trouble even feeding themselves and a few hard winters could wipe them out.

Some electricity is not that hard to generate with late middle-age manufacturing techniques. It won't be a nice stable grid, but you'd likely be able to run e.g. mining pumps with power generated from a nearby water mill.

Similarly, some refrigeration is not super difficult to build once you know how it works. That would help quite a bit against starvation from bad harvests because it allows you to have bigger stores of food.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#143

Post by User23 »

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…

The hysteria over nuclear war has definitely done great harm to civil defense and preparedness in the USA. I have a print copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills[1] that I review regularly because an hour a year seems worth it to me.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-Expanded/...

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#144

Post by howlgarnish »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #139
tachyonbeam wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, if there was a full-scale nuclear war, famine and violence would kill 90-95% of people. It would also destroy a lot of our technological capabilities. There are only a handful of silicon fabs in the world, and they have complex supply chains. It could bring us back to some kind of a technological middle age, except we'd have guns, electricity and radios.

The ammo and electricity would not last long in most parts of the world. I think a lot of communities would have real trouble even feeding themselves and a few hard winters could wipe them out.

Solar panels and diesel generators are pretty ubiquitous these days. Actually building more of either is more complicated, but bootstrapping the capability to do so before existing supplies of either run out (and we're talking years here) is quite feasible.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#145

Post by baybal2 »

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…

> Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse....full stop.

Each China, and India has more people, and potentially more troop, than USA, and Russia combined.

As I wrote before, the next third power in any massive war has an extreme incentive to stay neutral, to take the lead, or may well be land, after.

You think that Xi, and Modi will stay still at the opportunity to do the biggest land grab in history?

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#146

Post by [deleted] »

codekilla wrote: post #29
austhrow743 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civilisation can be rebuilt. Focus on existential threats over far more likely civilisation collapse threats is done by those who view unrealised potential as loss. So it’s 7 billion humans vs the trillions that could exist if we keep spreading and growing and start colonising other planets. Here’s a good review/summary by a rationalist of a book on the topic by someone who if not a rationalist (I don’t actually know…

> In my view, the greatest risk to humanity’s potential in the next hundred years comes from unaligned artificial intelligence, which I put at 1 in 10. One might be surprised to see such a high number for such a speculative risk, so it warrants some explanation. The above is from the article you link. Where.....oh where....are you getting the 1 in 10 number? This is pure, and I mean pure...uncut conjecture . This is…

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#147

Post by cma »

>There simply aren't enough nuclear warheads to kill everyone directly with kinetic force,

This assumes nuclear warheads only and not a doomsday device. If Teller Ulam scales with additional hydrogen stages needed only, and not fissile ones beyond the primary, then a doomsday device is possible that does kinectic damage to the entire earth, wiping everyone out.

A smaller country that can't develop warheads and delivery systems could potentially none-the-less develop a doomsday device, and it may be rational for them to do so if they think they will otherwise be annihilated and they value others much less than themselves like practically every other nation state in history.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#148

Post by simonebrunozzi »

onecommentman wrote: post #127
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…

This is mostly Herman Kahn redux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn When there were 3 TV channels in the 1960s, in prime time programming you would often hear discussions just like this, from Kahn himself at times. Topic and people inspired the movie Dr. Strangelove and was at the forefront of the national consciousness in the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s. As a set of ideas and concerns, it was beaten to…

> For everyone else, repeat after me, nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war.

Some Japanese people would disagree with you.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#149

Post by sudosysgen »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #139
tachyonbeam wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, if there was a full-scale nuclear war, famine and violence would kill 90-95% of people. It would also destroy a lot of our technological capabilities. There are only a handful of silicon fabs in the world, and they have complex supply chains. It could bring us back to some kind of a technological middle age, except we'd have guns, electricity and radios.

The ammo and electricity would not last long in most parts of the world. I think a lot of communities would have real trouble even feeding themselves and a few hard winters could wipe them out.

You could scavenge electric motors, some metal sheets and a bunch of wood into a hydroelectric generator. So there would still be electricity.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#150

Post by trhway »

pacificmint wrote: post #81
monocasa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised, there's a lot of advancement that we might not be able to replicate if our civilzation fully collapsed. For instance, so much of our early nuclear technology was dependent on the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the DRC, and it's orders of magnitude better uranium purity than anything else we've found. > Our best source, the Shinkolobwe mine, represented a freak occurrence in nature. It contained a tre…

> 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'…

>But without easily accessible fossil fuels, it's much harder to envision the next civilization having an industrial revolution. They might indeed never rise to our level of technology again.

knowledge is the key. Even Ancient Greeks could have built a wind electricity generator if they knew how - ie. if they knew about copper wire and electrical charge movement in it. And you can collect sun light and focus it on a boiler while still being in Ancient Greeks situation - that gives you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile which can be used to generate electricity too. And they could have possibly have that too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaic_pile or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Cat_whisker_d... - piece of crystal and a wire making a diode - and you can have primitive radio.

So, the newly built civilization bypassing fossil fuels would even be better :)

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