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> We've been hearing since WW2 that we are on the verge of wiping ourselves out. We are still here. A full-out nuclear exchange might last anywhere from 1-3 ho
by titzer 7y ago
> We've been hearing since WW2 that we are on the verge of wiping ourselves out. We are still here.
A full-out nuclear exchange might last anywhere from 1-3 hours and kill every human on Earth. Thousands of nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert is literally on the verge of wiping ourselves out. It almost happened, at least twice.
We're lucky to be here. But survivorship bias is a psychological distortion; it has zero predictive power. You can say the same thing at the individual level. "I've been hearing my whole life that I'm gonna die. Still here." And that's true up until the day you actually die.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoNow, I'm not arguing that a nuclear war is going to be all unicorns and rainbows but I feel like "1-3 hours and kill every human on Earth" is over-estimating our capability a wee bit. Like, sure, all major cities would be gone as would most medium ones but there would be plenty of towns in BFE on all continents that would be untouched because they simply have nothing worth bombing.
- titzer 7y agoA full-out nuclear exchange would be thousands of warheads. It would be all major and medium-sized cities. The radioactive fallout and nuclear winter would kill billions more. There'd be a long tail as Earth's ecosystems collapse, but yeah, there are high-confidence projections that such a war really would kill all living humans.
- chroma 7y agoAround 2,500 nuclear weapons have been detonated in tests[1] and we're still here. The two cities that have been nuked were rebuilt. An all-out nuclear exchange would kill a lot of people and send humanity back to the early industrial or pre-industrial era, but it's not an extinction risk. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
- ceejayoz 7y agoHumans have survived thousands of volcano eruptions, but I suspect we'd be in worse shape if thousands of volcanoes erupted all at once.
- titzer 7y ago> Around 2,500 nuclear weapons have been detonated in tests[1] The vast majority of those were underground, and they were not all at the same time.
- imtringued 7y agoYou're making the false assumption that the goal of the cold war was to kill all living humans. It's a war not a movie plot. The primary goal is to eliminate an enemy country and the most effective way is by destroying their military including all the nuclear warheads they posses instead of shooting some remote french colony island with zero military power that is 5000km away from the mainland.