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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?

#91

Post by exolymph »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #72
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…

lol pretending lesswrong, who also believe in roko's basilisk, are either tech or press

Your strawman of LessWrong writers and readers is, well, a strawman.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#92

Post by Spooky23 »

landfish wrote: post #28
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…

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…

With respect, I think that’s a narrowly scoped proposition that ignores obvious perils with significant impacts.

Look at COVID-19 impacts on supply chains in the US and China, due to short term disruptions. Any significant nuclear conflict would have huge impacts. Destruction of Long Beach, Chicago and similar hubs would implode the economy in an extreme way.

It’s also a loss of control on the societal level that would unleash other horrors.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#93

Post by ChomskyNormal4m »

landfish wrote: post #28
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…

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…

> While of course we should try to prevent it, we should also try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur!

I used to have an old Stanford Research Institute report from the 1980s where the author tried to project that if the US and USSR had a full scale nuclear war, US GNP would be back to normal within five years.

Who knows what government bureaucrat had a program requiring an Orwellian report like to justify whatever policy.

Who is this we? If you want to store up MREs and tin foil hats and build a bomb shelter, be my guest. Most of our efforts will be to prevent a large-scale nuclear war from happening or needing to happen.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#94

Post by codekilla »

XorNot wrote: post #83
codekilla wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sa…

That’s not how it was presented in [0], which is one book I had read, among others. And that’s fine if that particular argument is incorrect, the logic of the point I’m making still stands. I can envision a feasible chance of a technological improvement to explosives that would make them ‘completely’ dangerous (kill every last human) if that’s what we’re going for.

[0] https://anniejacobsen.com/pentagons-brain/

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#95

Post by FooHentai »

>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 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.

The ecosystem destruction alone, let alone spectrum social, ecological, agricultural and atmospheric effects that total nuclear war would cause, pretty much guarantee a wipeout of large mammals from the planet a-la the Cretaceous-Paleogene exctinction. In fairness, the impact from that event was equivalent to 100 million of the largest bombs we have ever made, detonated in one spot. But it's destruction was global, total, and immediate. The survivors of the first hours of a total nuclear war won't have such a quick death to look forward to.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#96

Post by grawprog »

landfish wrote: post #28
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…

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 humans end up totally extinct is irrelevant. Enough post nuclear fiction has been produced that people are well aware, yes, we may not all die, but life sure is going to suck a whole lot for literally every living thing on Earth.

That's the point of preventing nuclear war, that's the point of the world's current attitude towards it.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#97

Post by tzs »

jcranmer wrote: post #68
shams93 wrote: post #6

What about the Nuclear Winter effect? I would think going like 100 years without being able to grow food would cause everything but the heartiest life forms to die out including humans who are much harder to keep going than simple bacteria.

The post discusses nuclear winter briefly, but I'll cover that in more detail here: The theory of nuclear winter is predicated on a specific chain of events: * The mass use of nuclear weapons causes massive firestorms in large cities. * These firestorms pump soot in unprecedented amounts into the stratosphere. * The stratospheric soot causes massive, persistent climatic cooling. If any of these claims fail to be true…

This paper [1] looks at a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with 100 Hiroshima sized nukes on the most populated urban areas in the country. Taking into account the amount of combustible material in the target areas, they estimate 5 Tg of soot aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere.

They apply climate models to that and get a mean 1.8 C temperature reduction and 8% precipitation reduction for at least 5 years. Using state of the art crop models they estimate the food loss over that time, with the strongest effects in temperate regions of the US, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 years.

It's not an end of humanity scenario, but it seems it would be a lot worse than any past volcanic eruptions. A lot of people would go hungry, and not just in the poorest countries.

This particular scenario seems particularly worrisome because both India and Pakistan depend on Himalayan glaciers for a large part of their fresh water, and climate change is hitting those. India and Pakistan already hate each other, so it is not hard to imagine a fight breaking out over dwindling regional water supplies.

Here's an article about that paper that summarizes it well [2].

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/13/7071

[2] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-india-...

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#98

Post by jbay808 »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #70
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…

Full scale nuclear war means big cities will be bombed and millions of people die. What civilizational collapse are you talking about? The lack of Hollywood movies and absence of the NYSE?

Target lists might not include Aunt Emma's farm, but probably still would take out any important industrial and rural targets: mines, mills, chemical plants, refineries, pipelines, textiles, machine shops, warehouses, granaries...

Civilization would look very different for sure.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#99

Post by marcosdumay »

xxpor wrote: post #85
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'…

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

There isn't any easy to get coal anymore, just as any other fuel.

We may be able to start low scale stuff to bootstrap renewables, but if we lose our knowledge, things get much harder.

Re: Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

#100

Post by Imnimo »

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 whether the author is refuting the best case for extinction, or just a straw man.
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