Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

lesswrong.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 273 posts

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#191

Post by arethuza »

jackcviers3 wrote: post #188
onecommentman wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner is one of the few books that has literally given me nightmares.

Imagine reading memos with stuff like "we plan to kill at least 600 million people, probably a lot more, a lot of them our allies"....

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#192

Post by user-the-name »

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…

The rationalists of lesswrong.com are fairly cult-like, and have weird obsessions about AGI and other issues. (Look up "Roko's Basilisk" for some real examples of how detached from reality their thinking can easily get.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#193

Post by NiceWayToDoIT »

> I have investigated this issue in depth and concluded

Well it is not deep enough. This kind of articles are detrimental trying to a reduce severity of nuclear war. There are opposite views http://www.grisanik.com/blog/nuclear-war-explained/

Basically each "deep enough" forgets something, and most importantly what I personally distaste is leaving room for "let's try it then, because hey maybe I am the one who will survive".

Someone said that humans are naturally so much optimistic that if scientists said there is 1% of chance to survive, 99% of the people would think they are in that 1%.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#194

Post by NiceWayToDoIT »

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…

Well I suggest you delete that post ASAP. I do not like notion of giving ideas how to solve Climate Change and cool down the planet Trump's way, 2 months before he left office.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#195

Post by baybal2 »

taneq wrote: post #176
baybal2 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having just any weapon is worth keeping a secret. From the moment you have a weapon, and an enemy, the later will try to disarm you.

Not 'worth keeping a secret' - worth controlling the information revealed about it. In the case of nuclear weapons, you want to keep its weaknesses and fallibilities secret while trumpeting its existence from the rooftops. The more parties know you have a mega-weapon, the lower the chance you'll have to use it.

> The more parties know you have a mega-weapon, the lower the chance you'll have to use it.

But if you have to... the lower you have a chance to win, as the enemy with more than 1 gram of gray matter will do just anything to take it down before you can shoot.

Betting all of your strategy on assumption that the enemy is scared enough of you not to attack is stupidity beyond all bounds.

If you attack someone, especially if you attack somebody stronger than you, then you attack with all force available to you, and maximum ferocity.

You assume the enemy will willingly throw away his biggest chance to take away your biggest force multiplier, and the biggest chance to win?

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#196

Post by arethuza »

PeterisP wrote: post #114
XorNot wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Subsistance farming based on potatoes is not without its risks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#197

Post by _y5hn »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #148
onecommentman wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It shows that people from WW2 doesn't live anymore. People forget: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#198

Post by mola »

This is just an argument against a straw man. Nuclear war, is bad, any mass killing is bad, any society collapse is bad. It means actual prolongated suffering for most humans. Nuclear caused extinction is actually a preferable outcome, I'd rather just instantly die than live in a brutal post sociatle apocalypse.

It's like the back talk against climate warming, trying to down play it as a non extinction event. Well that's true, We're not killing the planet, we're not even causing human extinction, we're just building a really bad future for our children.

Ofcourse people born into that future would see it as the norm, but we make decision from our view point, and the norm can be terrible when taken in to context.

But I digress, my point is that the rational community seems to have a smarty pants mentality, taking all rhetoric at face value, and usually creating very serious discussions that usually just sidetrack from the important issues.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#199

Post by trhway »

lmm wrote: post #180
jacobush wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s one thing to build highly optimised things and another to build things that work just well enough.

"Just well enough" may not be enough to rebuild society with. The Greeks didn't lack the knowledge of how to make a steam engine - they had novelty steam engines - but they lacked the industrial base that could actually make them productive.

i imagine how in the year 3000 the people will be arguing why the people of the 21st century, i.e. we, wouldn't build say a fusion engines and power generators (we do have "novelty" fusion devices) , or may be even FTL space ship when it happens to be such a simple thing :) We probably have the tech for the fusion, or very close to it, yet we don't know how to put it together and/or in what direction to make that small final push.
Post reply on HN