The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

In the documentary The Man Who Saved The World, Stanislav Petrov travels to meet Kevin Costner, his favourite actor, at home. Costner asks him, if he hadn't acted as he did, how many people would have died. You expect him to say, 50 million, or something. He says, everyone. Everyone on earth would've died. It's a chilling moment. (And there's been a lot more than that one near miss.) What kind of crazy species are we that we build a system that when it malfunctions (as it did that day) seems likely to kill everyone on the planet?!

Now I read on HN that the danger of nuclear war is hyped out of proportion to its true severity, and should be considered only a little. Sorry, maybe I misunderstand. I have read a similar thing on HN a few times though, people that seem to think nuclear war really would be no big deal at all.

But it always seems weird to be how some people are so worried to the point of obsession about global warming without apparently ever giving a thought to the ever-present risk of full-scale nuclear war—something infinitely worse. (Well, hardly "war", just a flurry of button-pressing for a few minutes.)

Nuclear war (especially during the cold war, when we had much more warheads than now) would absolutely be a big deal and a horrible mass death, but it would not have ended humanity.

Like, if there's a scale of catastrophic events that goes from 0 to 10 where 0 is no big deal and 10 is human extinction, then the worst events humanity has ever seen are somewhere below 1 on that scale and absolutely horrific mass death is something like 2/10 - because the gap between the damage required for that and damage required for extinction is so much larger than the gap between no big deal and worse mass death than we have ever seen. Arguably the worst damage that life on Earth has seen is the dinosaur-ending asteroid, and IMHO a fraction homo sapiens (though perhaps not our civilization) could survive even that. A full scale USSR-USA exchange in 1960s might perhaps kill most people in the northern hemisphere and perhaps cause a nuclear winter decreasing crop yields with an associated famine - but if just a fraction of people in South Asia and Africa and South America survive the famine while the North nukes themselves to radioactive glasslands, that's very, very far from extinction.

Killing half of humanity would literally be an unprecedented level of horror, but it would not end our civilization; killing 90% of humanity would likely end our civilization-as-we-know it but would not end our species, that would bring us to the population level that Earth had in 1700s; and killing 99.99% of humanity would definitely destroy our civilization but it would "just" push back our population growth to the numbers we had ~70 000 years ago - horrific for every individual, but still not an extinction event.

Exactly, this article is pretty goofy. There was never a real possibility that the Trinity test would ignite the atmosphere; the idea was proposed largely in jest and dismissed with the briefest of calculations. The modern-day equivalent would be the protesters who argued that the LHC (and before it, the RHIC at Brookhaven) shouldn't be powered up because it might create a black hole that swallows the Earth. Or those who argued that the RTG on the Cassini probe might break apart in a launch accident and poison vast swathes of life on Earth. Why didn't the author mention those concerns? They had just as much merit.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, on the other hand, was no joke. We were amazingly lucky that Murphy was on vacation that month. Our reliance on luck to avoid destroying humanity is much, much scarier than our reliance on reason.

There’s a game about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_Inc.

I'm not sure I agree with these, honestly. Take the first one (opening Apollo 11's doors "prematurely"). No matter what decision was made, no ill could come of it, since there weren't any microbes to be unleashed.

Deciding not to launch a "counterattack" with nuclear weapons based on a hunch that the alert you're getting is false; THAT'S a world-changing decision.