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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?

#201

Post by lopmotr »

onion2k wrote: post #167
lopmotr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those effects won't cause extinction though because they'll diminish as the population shrinks so it'll reach some equilibrium. This is about extinction, not just lots of people dying. Nuclear winter wouldn't get less harmful the fewer people are around.

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.

That's nonsense. People had children through the ice age! Poor struggling Africans and Indians keep having children. The people who choose not to have children seem to be contented wealthy professionals. If you're able to keep yourself alive, it's not much more work to keep children alive.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#202

Post by adrianN »

lmm wrote: post #161
trhway wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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. Did they have the level of materials science to build a practical one? They weren't able to produce steel, for example.

You can build turbines that produce a few kW out of wood.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#203

Post by adrianN »

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'…

As long as we don't forget how to build renewables we could skip the fossil fuel stage. Bootstrap solar panels and wind turbines using some biomass as fuel and continue from there.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#204

Post by pmachinery »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #172
onion2k wrote: post #167

Earlier 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…

If all humans aren't eradicated by nuclear war, I don't see why all memory, books, hard drives, other archives, computers, power plants, machinery, or even all contraceptives would be.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#205

Post by [deleted] »

londons_explore wrote: post #162
solveit wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Straw man. Anyone who actually studies this for a living is well aware that nuclear war is very unlikely to lead to full extinction. But the popular impression is that nuclear war could lead to everybody dying. Partly this is because if you are Joe Average, the difference between everyone dying and you and all your friends and family dying is not very important.

> if you are Joe Average, the difference between everyone dying and you and all your friends and family dying is not very important. I'm Joe Average. I don't want to die, but if I do, I'd like my family to survive. If they die too, I'd like my friends to survive. If they die too, I'd like people from my region/country to survive. If they die too, I'd like some humans to survive. If they die too, it would be nice if s…

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#206

Post by NiceWayToDoIT »

mola wrote: post #198

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 th…

Spot on. In the entire scenario it seems we forget recent pandemic, and what happen few days in.

In the case of nuclear war exchange there won't be any toilet paper, period. :)

Joking aside, we forget how hooked we are to industrial society. Any such event would mean world without shops, internet, new version of anything... no progress... for at least one human lifetime. Back to stone age. Everything we are used to and enjoy (technology wise), would simply seas to exist, and it is questionable how long would it take to build knowledge and start a new, especially when simple necessities as food and water are only priority.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#207

Post by formerly_proven »

mola wrote: post #198

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 th…

> It's like the back talk against climate warming, trying to down play it as a non extinction event.

It's quite similar to invoking freedom of speech in order to defend a position -- "Oh, it's not _literally illegal_ to say this? That sure sounds like a compelling argument to me"

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#208

Post by refurb »

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…

10% of the landmass of the earth is habitable? You got a source for that? That seems unlikely.

For example, the people in Arizona might take issue with "deserts aren't habitable".

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#209

Post by refurb »

lwneal wrote: post #47

Today, the 1950's era "Duck and Cover" drills [1] are sometimes laughed at. However, in the event of an actual nuclear blast, some simple preparation would save lives. When a bright flash lights up the sky, people indoors will naturally run to the nearest window to see what happened. This is the wrong thing to do, because the bright flash of an explosion is followed a few seconds later by a pressure wave, turning the…

Exactly. Duck and cover won't help much if you're out in the open less than a km from ground zero. But it will help a lot if you're 25 miles away from a several hundred kiloton blast and indoors.
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