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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?

#81

Post by pacificmint »

monocasa wrote: post #39
austhrow743 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civilisation can be rebuilt. Focus on existential threats over far more likely civilisation collapse threats is done by those who view unrealised potential as loss. So it’s 7 billion humans vs the trillions that could exist if we keep spreading and growing and start colonising other planets. Here’s a good review/summary by a rationalist of a book on the topic by someone who if not a rationalist (I don’t actually know…

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's much harder to envision the next civilization having an industrial revolution. They might indeed never rise to our level of technology again.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#82

Post by Retric »

benlivengood wrote: post #62
codekilla wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> extremely bad and worth avoiding Shrugs???? What exactly do you mean? Quantify this, how bad...with respect to AGI? > discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). Anything else, and I would classify it as a species wide failure to adapt to technology (In this case EXISTENTIALLY danger…

> Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). This gets at the heart of existential risk. Should we abandon all technology to avoid the possibility of nuclear war and just wait for an asteroid or climate change or resource exhaustion to kill us? Nuclear destruction only gets easier over time as technology progresses. My cell phone is faster than…

You’re making the common mistake to assume AGI significantly increases the advancement of technology. If AI research has demonstrated anything it’s Intelligence doesn’t increase linearly with computation. Compare two identical chess engines where one has 10% more computational power behind it and that program has a surprisingly limited increase in ELO score.

It’s seductive to think AGI will suddenly advance technology dramatically, but dumping more effort into existing technology has a bad habit of hitting diminishing returns. Ideas like nano-machines seem to have vast potential, until you realize biology is already operating at those scales and has significant limitations.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#83

Post by XorNot »

codekilla wrote: post #64
benlivengood wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). This gets at the heart of existential risk. Should we abandon all technology to avoid the possibility of nuclear war and just wait for an asteroid or climate change or resource exhaustion to kill us? Nuclear destruction only gets easier over time as technology progresses. My cell phone is faster than…

> AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends No, it is not. The reason is this: it is science fiction . This makes it no less, or no more, dangerous than anything else I can make up with a quasi realistic chance of existing in the near term future. When thermonuclear b…

Urgh, atmospheric ignition was considered but it was studied 6 months before the first nuclear test was conducted: [1] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/09/12/the_fear_th...

The whole atmospheric ignition thing depends on physics which just doesn't work: specifically, that you can reach a temperature without gravitational pressure that triggers nuclear fusion at ambient atmospheric pressures.

It is in the same category as the "concerns" the LHC would create black holes which swallowed the Earth.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#84

Post by randmeerkat »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67
randmeerkat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The collapse of civilization and the destructive power of nuclear weapons is hyperbole now..?

> The collapse of civilization and the destructive power of nuclear weapons is hyperbole now..? No, extinction as a consequence is. Modern civilisation as we know it will collapse. This was spun, by some people, into nuclear war will end humanity. That’s hyperbole.

Hmm, it still seems advisable to do everything humanly possible to avoid nuclear conflict.

_If_ I survived such a conflict, I’d probably wish I hadn’t.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#85

Post by xxpor »

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'…

Could we not bootstrap with coal? There's still plenty left. Oil would be an issue though.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#86

Post by XorNot »

robocat wrote: post #80
throwhypothetic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of civilization collapse, I think the author is overestimating how likely it is that people will be able to figure out subsistence farming using only locally available materials before they starve. Does anyone on Earth still do that, i.e. with no reliance on materials shipped in from elsewhere?

There is a vast range of non-native eadible plants and animals that have now been introduced to every country. That would make a huge difference compared with traditional indigenous societies. However farming does require steady state weather - which is unlikely after a nuclear war?

There still isn't enough to sustain people on subsistence farming. And subsistence farming, is well, subsistence-level - it precludes specialization which means it precludes most of the advantages technology brings us today.

If you're ever in a civilizational collapse scenario, literally the most important thing you can do is rapidly restart the farm supply chain by whatever means necessary - anyone imagining building a fortress for themselves is building a tomb.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#87

Post by habryka »

gruez wrote: post #77

Off topic: is there a reason why lesswrong.com needs an Intercom button? Shortly after opening the page, the button expanded and asking me "need help?". I understand how that might be desired for a SaaS landing page, but a blogging platform? What "help" can you possibly need while reading an article?

(LessWrong.com team lead here) It's actually really useful for getting bug reports for the site, and we have a number of authors who we help a lot with doing various custom HTML and javascript integrations for their posts, and having a live-chat option for that is quite useful.

I think the "Need help?" text is just the default text Intercom comes with. I should maybe look into seeing whether we can replace that, though not sure what other text would be better.

Agree it's a bit weird for a blogging platform, but it really drastically increased the number of bug reports we get, and a lot of our most active users really like it. We also sometimes get people who ping us about moderation questions, or other issues with the platform they have. They could technically do that via the PM system, or email, but experience has shown that having Intercom really quite drastically increases people's willingness to message us.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#88

Post by frank2 »

waste_monk wrote: post #79
frank2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>So, unless the livestock-feed supply chain has tightened up significantly since the 1970s or 1980s, the US would have about 3 years to get mechanized agriculture back up and running. How would they process into human-usable formats and get it distributed in time in the initial period after the nuclear exchange? Beans are easy, but I would imagine a large proportion of people don't even own a mortar and pestle or oth…

Good point about the need to process the grains and beans. Here is the author of Nuclear War Survival Skills on the subject:

>Whole-kernel grains or soybeans cannot be eaten in sufficient quantities to maintain vigor and health if merely boiled or parched. A little boiled whole-kernel wheat is a pleasantly chewy breakfast cereal, but experimenters at Oak Ridge got sore tongues and very loose bowels when they tried to eat enough boiled whole-kernel wheat to supply even half of their daily energy needs. Even the most primitive peoples grind or pound grains into a meal or paste before cooking. (Rice is the only important exception.) Few Americans know how to process whole-kernel grains and soybeans (our largest food reserves) into meal. This ignorance could be fatal to survivors of a nuclear attack. Making an expedient metate, the hollowed-out grinding stone of Mexican Indians, proved impractical under simulated post-attack conditions. Pounding grain into meal with a rock or a capped, solid-ended piece of pipe is extremely slow work. The best expedient means developed and field-tested for pounding grain or beans into meal and flour is an improvised 3-pipe grain mill. Instructions for making and using this effective grain-pounding device follow. . . . As soon as fallout decay permits travel, the grain-grinding machines on tens of thousands of hog and cattle farms should be used for milling grain for survivors. It is vitally important to national recovery and individual survival to get back as soon as possible to labor-saving, mechanized ways of doing essential work. In an ORNL experiment, a farmer used a John Deere Grinder-Mixer powered by a 100-hp tractor to grind large samples of wheat and barley. When it is used to grind rather coarse meal for hogs, this machine is rated at 12 tons per hour. Set to grind a finer meal-flour mixture for human consumption, it ground both hard wheat and feed barley at a rate of about 9 tons per hour. This is 2400 times as fast as using muscle power to operate even the best expedient grain mill.

https://info.ornl.gov/sites/publications/Files/Pub57110.pdf

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#89

Post by XorNot »

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…

Watching people react to city-level disasters like the ammonia nitrate explosion is why we should still be teaching this. There is way too much YouTube of camera phone footage being taken from right up against glass windows.

If you see anything that looks like that, you absolutely should not be near a window.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#90

Post by throw0101a »

chii wrote: post #65
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…

> try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur! in the case where mitigation is deemed acceptable, it would paradoxically make war more likely! That's why a defensive missile shield technology is not a good investment if you want more peace. The existing MAD mantra is what stops nuclear war. It should continue until humanity unifies into a single world gov't.

> That's why a defensive missile shield technology is not a good investment if you want more peace.

That depends on whether you go for a 'weak' shield or a 'strong' shield. A weak shield may defend a dozen or two warheads: something that North Korea would launch. Japan has a 'weak' shield AFAICT:

* https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1374.html

A strong one would protect against hundreds: another major power. IMHO only the latter would destabilize peace, while the former would help defend agains crazies and potentially rogue operations.

> The existing MAD mantra is what stops nuclear war.

There are a bunch of criticism of MAD:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction#Cri...

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