Can we get an "official" remark on what specifically causes the opinionated editorialization of some titles with a question mark? I know I'm not the only one who finds it off-putting.
Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
241–250 of 273 posts
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
You don't need a nuclear war for all that to happen. As I once read in one defence publication, USA is only 4 biggest fertiliser complexes away from the famine, assuming the assailing party can blockade the country to prevent food importation. The same is for the biggest oil, and fuel manufacturing complexes. USA is also "just" 50 power stations away from the grid becoming useless. USA is though much, much better off…
If we've gotten to the point that an adversary can and would effectively blockade the US, destroy its infrastructure, and effectively prevent it from being rebuilt for an extended period of time, then odds are we have bigger issues than famine to worry about.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#243This 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…
Humans are hard bastards to kill. The biggest and best tool is the one between our ears and the capability to draw a blank expression in the midst of hell is undoubtedly our best asset. It would take much more than nuclear weapons to wipe out humanity. We are the cockroaches of the mammals. The virus of kingdom animalia.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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" ....
There were only 3 billion on the planet at the time, too. Estimates for U.S. casualties were 120 million dead in 1969. Out of 202.7 million
That still would have left the U.S. as one of the largest countries on the planet, and fallout would largely have dissipated after two to six weeks. Congress, the president, and the federal reserve agents would likely have survived thanks to top secret bunkers and Looking Glass. The military would have been wiped out. Food production would be largely unaffected for grains and vegetables, but nearly every nonhuman animal in the midwest, coastal cities, and big sky parts of the country would be dead from fallout. Food delivery and distribution would rely largely on coal rail and river barge transport, but it still did mostly at the time. It would take ten years to rebuild a refining capacity and restore the power grid and military Things would eventually return to normal. The cities would be rebuilt and reinhabited.
I know it is hard to believe, but look at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, German firebombed cities from WW2 like Dresden; they were rebuilt from the ashes. Germany was nearly entirely destroyed by WW2. It came back.
Barring nuclear winter actually occurring (which the Kuwait oil field fires kinda proves won't happen), total nuclear war is something countries can recover from, which makes it even more likely to happen in the future. As Ellsberg put it, "any nonzero chance is crazy."
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#245What 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…
If nothing else, and I think there is something else, it provides intellectual exploration and discovery, which is both fun and an excellent way of expanding knowledge and understanding.
If such things are not for you, then that's cool, but for those with a curious mind the point of such things is self-evident.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, especiall…
> If you attack someone, especially if you attack somebody stronger than you, then you attack with all force available to you, and maximum ferocity.
True, IF you attack someone. But if you see someone who is unassailably stronger than you, that you couldn't possibly defeat, then you don't even go there. And that is the point of MAD. An enemy with one nuke is scary, scary enough to make them worth attacking. But an enemy with thousands of nukes, scattered across the globe, in unknown locations, which will launch at their signal (or lack of signal)... You just don't attack them.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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, especiall…
> If you attack someone, especially if you attack somebody stronger than you, then you attack with all force available to you, and maximum ferocity. True, IF you attack someone. But if you see someone who is unassailably stronger than you, that you couldn't possibly defeat, then you don't even go there. And that is the point of MAD. An enemy with one nuke is scary, scary enough to make them worth attacking. But an en…
And that's an extremely dangerous assumption. You don't need to dive deep into history for good examples of the opposite.
And if you dive deeper, you will find examples far more suicidal disparities in between warring factions.
Second, you do not count in a possibility of your opponent not even trying to win. If wars were fought by rational people, we would've long had math PhDs for generals.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 impli…
One thing I like about the rationalist community is they tend to focus on what is factually true, instead of the metadiscussion of what a person's hidden motives are which consumes so much of the rest of the internet.
I agree that there's too much focus on hidden motives. The left has its postmodern deconstruction mindset that looks for hidden racism, etc., and the right has conspiracy theory thinking which is just its own spin on the same thing. In both cases it gets taken too far, with the left seeing phantom racism everywhere and the right seeing phantom "liberal bias" or lately "pedophilia" everywhere.
That being said, hidden motives always exist. All human activity is driven by motives that are rooted in the actor's world view and philosophy. It's how our minds work. We are idea-driven teleological beings.
Discussing these hidden motives too little just leaves them unexamined, and it's very easy to push hidden agendas through apparently rational discourse by strategically selecting what data to choose and what lines of argument to pursue. It's similar to "how to lie with statistics."
I consistently see certain hidden motives throughout the rationalist material. The most common is elitism rooted in a belief that certain people possess biologically innate superior intelligence that makes them effectively "more right" than other people. It's a biological determinist version of the idea that certain people are divinely blessed with special powers that make them superior.
This kind of biological intelligence elitism is a superstition. What you believe and how you think matters more than how big your brain is. It's like saying having a bigger engine in a car makes you a better driver. It doesn't. In fact it means that a bad driver can get into a more severe accident more easily. Highly intelligent people with irrational or deluded systems of belief can delude themselves more effectively than less intelligent people. Your average flat-Earther is probably more intelligent than the average person, not less.
I personally make a distinction between what I call dumb-dumb and smart-dumb. Dumb-dumb is a lack of intelligence. Smart-dumb is intelligence grossly misused, or coupled with a gross deficiency in emotional intelligence or a lack of self-awareness.
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> He times his narration to end with a rocket launch, down to the beat! What timestamp?
Oh no, the film is too good to skip through :)
Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
> Joking aside, we forget how hooked we are to industrial society Us city-people, yes. But there's enough people out there who are mostly self-sufficient, and there's even a bunch of urban preppers who would more than likely have a relatively easy time surviving complete industrial collapse of a nation. (I say relatively easy because it would obviously be hard and unpleasant times for everyone, but for some that woul…
I agree partially, even those people in rural areas depend on fuel, machine parts, technology, books, cleaning provision and most importantly medicine and medical attention.
Just imagine, dying because of simple cuts as you do not have antibiotics, or after few years, having issue with tooth decay, food poisoning... communication wise probably those that would remain would go back to good old radio wave, and what when all parts burn out... there wouldn't be anymore China or Amazon to order spear part, how many people know how to make diode, transistor or resistor DIY?
I am not saying it is not doable, but thinking about people who got crazy during pandemic just because they were in quarantine for few weeks, and then multiplying that on a bunker environment for few years until long term fallout from nuclear power plants settles down simply does not seems as a feasible for 99.999% of people. Probably only pockets of people would survive at the end Also question is in what form and how badly would be long term DNA damage for human offspring.
Nature would find a way, as it always does, not sure about humans. Literally, it could be as a ancient story of flood but this time with fire...