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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?

#161

Post by lmm »

trhway wrote: post #150
pacificmint wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#162

Post by londons_explore »

solveit wrote: post #136
Imnimo wrote: post #100

Does there exist any scholarship that argues that nuclear war could cause human extinction, or is this just a refutation of a sort of folk knowledge that "obviously" nuclear war could lead to extinction? The author engages a bit with the scholarship surrounding the idea of nuclear winter, which is nice, but reference to an argument in favor of the possibility of extinction, it's tough for me as lay person to judge wh…

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 some primates or mammals or something warm blooded survived.

My ranking of how much I care about something is almost directly the same as my genetic similarity to it, which I suspect is no coincidence.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#163

Post by kortilla »

eloff wrote: post #120
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…

Very few things could actually make humans extinct at this point. It would take an impact like the one that produced the moon to finish us off. We're so adaptable that some of us will survive and rebuild. If we can ever get back to technological civilization without easily accessible fossil fuels is debatable, but I think we'd find a way - it would just be a lot harder and take longer. What worries me is not extincti…

covid19 wasn’t that disruptive though beyond superficial shit. Nobody went hungry, water supplies kept going, electricity kept flowing, etc. We’re nowhere near the brink of any kind of regional societal collapse, let alone anything national or global.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#164

Post by kortilla »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #160
sudosysgen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, OK, I know how to wrap copper and spin it around magnets, and get _some_ electricity, but I don't know how to measure or manage the voltage and the current. I don't know how to make an inverter. I don't know how to make a light bulb or a battery (or really anything that "uses" the power). Exiting appliances only have only at most 20 years in them. With everybody struggling to raise crops and livestock, let alon…

> With everybody struggling to raise crops and livestock, let along trying to reinvent the light bulb, it would a long slow climb back to civilization.

People aren’t going to forget how to trade. The people with that manufacturing and engineering knowledge aren’t going to be busy with livestock. They’ll be trading these valuable goods for food.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#165

Post by trhway »

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.

That is my point - the necessary material science in many respects is just a knowledge. If you have copper it is relatively easy to make copper wire, at least some crude one, if you know what it is for. It took 2000 years to build the knowledge, yet having that knowledge one can rebuild a lot of stuff in orders of magnitude shorter timeframe. Btw, that reminded about that book that i liked a lot back then as a child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island - rebuilding a significant pieces of civilization starting from scratch almost.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#166

Post by lazyasciiart »

frank2 wrote: post #61
tshaddox wrote: post #10

When I think about nuclear war leading to human extinction, the first thing that comes to mind isn't any of those 3 mechanisms, but rather economic damage. Not economic damage as in "I lost my retirement investment," but as in "we can't produce enough food." I'd be worried about even much smaller and less deadly nuclear wars leading to massive civil unrest and breakdowns in large-scale social institutions and economi…

>as in "we can't produce enough food." US nuclear-war planners in the 1970s or 1980s estimated that there was enough food in silos in the US to feed the survivors for about 3 years. I think they assumed that 50% or 60% of Americans would survive. Usually, most of the grains and beans in those silos would go to feeding livestock, but in an emergency they could be used to keep people alive instead. So, unless the lives…

Food rotted in fields this year because the supply chain wasn't even agile enough to switch from supplying restaurants to supermarkets. Given actual disaster, distribution would be even harder because people would definitely attempt to hoard food.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#167

Post by onion2k »

lopmotr wrote: post #131
mynegation wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post discusses only first order effects. In case of nuclear war most people will die not from kinetic shock or radiation, but from famine and deceases caused by collapse of supply chain and medical infrastructures, and from unavoidable violence during the fight for scarce remaining resources.

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.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#168

Post by FooHentai »

lixtra wrote: post #108
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…

> While there is ~500m km2 of land on the planet, only about 60m km2 is habitable (less desert, poles, mountains etc). Not inhabited, habitable. So yes that's not only sufficient to wipe out all population centers, it's double the amount needed to wipe out all locations on earth capable of sustaining human life. You also have to consider how connected that area is. I.E. How many nukes do you need to kill each valley…

Absolutely, some folks live truly out in the boonies far away from any likely strike target (e.g. Agafia Lykova way out in the Khakassia mountains). That's a double-edged sword however, as very few people live in those fringe areas without outside support and, since there have been no true frontiers remaining on earth for the last few hundred years, those isolated settlements are in areas that cannot sustain the basics of human life in perpetutity and complete isolation at the same time.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#169

Post by lmm »

trhway wrote: post #165
lmm wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That is my point - the necessary material science in many respects is just a knowledge. If you have copper it is relatively easy to make copper wire, at least some crude one, if you know what it is for. It took 2000 years to build the knowledge, yet having that knowledge one can rebuild a lot of stuff in orders of magnitude shorter timeframe. Btw, that reminded about that book that i liked a lot back then as a child…

It's not though - it's a whole interlinked ecosystem of industry and even if you have the knowledge that doesn't mean you'd be able to bootstrap. A simple example is that most wind turbines today are likely built from steel that was made in an electric arc furnace, which themselves require massive amounts of electricity to run. (And that's just the basic material, to say nothing of the tools and processes you need to actually build one).

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#170

Post by Haga »

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.

Very view people would have contraceptives and lots of people would have themselves for sale.

Not mentioned but important newer warheads make one missile count for ten old. Hypersonic missiles subvert early warning systems, so the overall danger has risen.

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