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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?

#231

Post by arethuza »

arethuza wrote: post #191
jackcviers3 wrote: post #188

Earlier 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" ....

The first part of the book is available online:

https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html

The exact quote that stunned me being:

"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#232

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

grawprog wrote: post #96
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…

>One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars. This is what the thinking was during the early part of the cold war, the whole duck and cover era. The decades after that and the knowledge gained during the cold war is what lead to our current fears and justification for focusing on disarmament rather than nuclear war prep. Whether or not…

> life sure is going to suck a whole lot for literally every living thing on Earth.

Not at all. Many organisms would still find it easy to survive in a post-nuclear-war world and would eventually evolve to fill the roles of those that went extinct.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#233

Post by scotty79 »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #225
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 no strawman. Fiction often depicts nuclear wars as near-extinction events with very few human survivors. Going by similar topics, it's safe to assume many people consider this a realistic scenario beyond just fiction. The real strawman is in your comment though. Who said nuclear war wouldn't be bad, just because it likely won't cause human extinction? Most people agree that regular wars are bad, and there never…

I don't see anywhere in the article that it's no a near extinction event. Just it's not exactly an extinction event.

The article mentions that most human would die just from food production capacity collapse. Just not exactly all of us.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#234

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

api wrote: post #116
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…

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.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#235

Post by WanderPanda »

gampleman wrote: post #230

What we don't really understand is the lethality of the second and third order effects. People who can't be fed (because industry has collapsed) don't just sit and die peacefully. Foraging is unlikely to work, since our natural ecosystems are not large enough to support large-ish human populations and would soon be destroyed by overuse (damage to them from the actual nuclear war being beside the point). A huge immigr…

At first I was thinking there is no historical precedence for the thing you are describing, but then again there was the fall of the Roman Empire succeeded by the medieval times. So hopefully that pattern does not repeat

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#236

Post by jariel »

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…

Civilizational Collapse is something totally different from extinction and it's actually something very important to concern ourselves over because it's on the cards, i.e. a possible outcome we should probably be thinking about and planning for.

If it were to happen, a lot of people would accept the new reality and bear it, people are resilient.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#237

Post by ralfd »

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…

> Nuclear caused extinction is actually a preferable outcome

Wtf? Strong disagree. Extinction is the end. Anything else is of course preferable as it means live goes on and civilization has the chance to rise again.

> I'd rather just instantly die than live in a brutal post sociatle apocalypse.

That is just because because you're weak, your bloodline is weak, and you will not survive the winter without central heating and Uber Eats. But other people are more resilient.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#238

Post by netflixandkill »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #227
baybal2 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IIRC the EU is just a few cut powerlines on a windy day away from completely overloading and destroying most of the power grid.

Overloading, sure, destroying, no.

I would bet millions of Euros there have been islanding plans in place for years in the event of wide scale disconnects or voltage/frequency collapse. The aftermath wouldn't be fun but most of western Europe at least would only be enduring planned rotating blackouts at worst.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#239

Post by tylerjwilk00 »

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…

Seriously!?

Thank Darwin we had ancestors with thicker skin and stronger will.

Nobody wants nuclear war or to live in the aftermath of it.

However, should it ever happen I intend to do everything in my power to survive. Early humans endured terrible hardships so we had the privilege of building great comfortable societies. It's our duty to the future to keep carrying the flame.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#240

Post by ralfd »

Balgair wrote: post #129
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…

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?

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