Why are we entertaining this utterly wrong article? It is myopically naive on a very dangerous topic.
Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
181–190 of 273 posts
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very few people would choose to have children and raise them in a post-nuclear war environment, even if the radiation didn't make viable babies impossible. It's possible that the population would die out simply because it wouldn't be replaced quickly enough.
Some people don't "choose to have children." They feel like fucking so they do, and children happen afterwards. I wouldn't expect that to change after a nuclear war, especially in a world without contraceptives. That aside, there really needs to be more understanding of the difference between species extinction and cultural extinction. Humans could survive for hundreds of millennia in a devolved state. They wouldn't…
Just continue this thread of contrarianism, I doubt we could eradicate human knowledge from the planet if we tried at this point. It is encoded in our minds, our books and our silicon chips.
We may lose the know-how / capacity to produce certain things, such as we did with Damascus steel or roman concrete, but we are an endlessly resourceful species. I place my faith in our ability to adapt and come up with new solutions as required.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#183What 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…
Absolute panic is not the best response, even to a civilization ending event. Calm rational understanding is required to evaluate the true nature of the threat. Not to downplay it but purely to understand it. No one is saying disarmament is less critical. Please be willing to examine a truth that might counter a narrative that can be used to motivate the world in a positive direction. To do so should not be seen as herecy. We live in very tribal times please do not assume someone pointing out an inconvenient truth is opposed to everything you believe in.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK anti-missile shields aren't a realistic option. Modern ICBM designs have multiple independently targetable warheads. There are also submarines with nuclear missiles. You can also launch decoys (eg: aluminium foil or flares). And uh. Recently, I was reading a book called Skunk Works. The author explains that, basically, the US was able to keep the existence of stealth fighters a secret from the public (and Russi…
I don't understand why you would keep such a thing secret. As Dr. Strangelove rightly pointed out, a doomsday device is pointless if nobody knows about it.
Knowing you have a stealth ICBM doesn't change a thing if there is no way for the other side to defend against the non-stealth ones, so it wouldn't be a deterrent to most possible adversaries, but the optics of disclosing such a thing developed in, say, the 90s wouldn't be great.
Those that might conceivably try to defend themselves against conventional ICBMs are few and might very well know such a thing exists, it may work as a deterrent in that context.
If such a thing exists at all, not quite sure how you might make an ICBM stealthy, couldn't think of a way to hide launch and reentry signatures...
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the UK, installation, bases and navies are very close to or embedded in cities. PJHQ is Northwest London. The Royal Navy is based near large cities on the South Coast and Scotland. Thermonuclear attacks on these bases would affect millions of people.
Yes, because the UK is densely populated. Not every country is like that.
The location of the UK's current nuclear submarines bases, surprisingly close to Glasgow - the largest city in Scotland, was mainly due to the preferences of the US Navy.
The UK Government had agreed to US submarines being based here and wanted them somewhere reasonably remote (Scotland) - but the US Navy also wanted to be reasonably close to airfields and other facilities. So a site at the Holy Loch was selected for US Navy use and the Royal Navy decided it should position its bases next to the US base.
Source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0171SWRGI/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...
Apparently the Royal Navy originally wanted to use somewhere much further north such as Loch Glendhu - which is fairly empty and nowhere near a major city.
Edit: US Navy stopped having a submarine based in Scotland in '92:
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, it still seems advisable to do everything humanly possible to avoid nuclear conflict. _If_ I survived such a conflict, I’d probably wish I hadn’t.
> everything humanly possible Does this include, say, accelerating climate change? This isn't an idle hypothetical, nuclear reactor technology is similar enough to nuclear weapons technology that any country with a reactor can produce crude nuclear weapons in a matter of months. Hard decisions exist and must be made. At some point we must quantify risks.
But they won't be made unless someone is ready to bear the consequences. Those are decisions which have no all-positive outcome.
Just a single point: climate change will devastate many of our coastal areas and that's where a huge portion of our economy, culture and populations are based.
Displacement (migration) and economic collapse are inevitable here since the next 150 years will see nearly all sea trade ports in big trouble. And shipping is absolutely at the backbone of our economy - most stuff you use comes from another continent.
Sure, you can leave New York City or Hamburg and setup shop farther inland but... it's not like this will happen overnight and then we have new coastal lines ready for new ports and sea trade and everyone can send iPhones around the planet again.
Don't even try to move the shipping volume of sea trade to air freight btw.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#187There are very few things that will cause total extinction of homo sapiens, but quite a few things that will end human civilization as we know it. The Sentinelese may nevertheless persist.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#188Earlier 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…
Kahn actually ran studies to come up with his numbers of a nuclear war causing a ten year economic regression and only killing 50% of a country. His point was that on a long enough timeline it would/will eventually happen, and with adequate preparation a country could ensure both objective victory and survival for the majority of its populace and civilization.
Someone has to think about the unthinkable. Wishing nukes away won't make them disappear, and as shown in Daniel Ellsberg's the Doomsday Machine, nuclear weapons have been used as weapons of war in U.S. foreign policy for decades as indirect threats and bluffs. They will eventually be used again as explosive ordinance. Civil defense was lambasted and deprioritized in the west because people thought with their hearts instead of their minds with regard to the destructive power of nuclear weapons.
Decades of poor science on nuclear winter based off of the terrible TTAPS climate model have engendered the notion that nuclear war is a death sentence to humanity. It's not true, academia knows it is not, but nobody will push the subsequent corrective nuclear winter stories because the fear of nuclear winter keeps nuclear hawks at bay in political office. The top answer in this quotation question has a ton of links on this: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-nuclear-winter-a-hoax
They are weapons of war. They are effective weapons of war. They will eventually be used as explosive ordinance and not just threats and bluffs. Calling them unthinkable and anyone who plans for survival following their use a horrible person is bad emotional rhetoric. We should have an implementable plan for civil defense like China and Russia do. We should not allow fear to prevent the survival of our way of life.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#189To really stand a chance of killing everyone you need to contemplate much larger weapon designs - inevitably Edward Teller did just that with 1Gt and 10Gt designs:
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-big...
NB That's not a typo, I did mean gigaton
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#190Very often the problem doesn't seem to be the disaster itself, it's how unprepared we are to deal with it and the fact it's economically unfeasible. People can't just move to a healthy, habitable planet nearby because there is no such (known?) thing.
Think about how devastating nuclear war would be on our lifestyle, when things such as viruses and a higher frequency of cold and heat waves are already disrupting it.