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Wrong. Societies have dealt with far worse situations and managed to survive. Societal cohesion is what prevents anarchy in the long run, not avoiding natural d
by ceilingcorner 5y ago
Wrong. Societies have dealt with far worse situations and managed to survive. Societal cohesion is what prevents anarchy in the long run, not avoiding natural disasters.
- msbarnett 5y agoPrecisely none of “climate change, nuclear war, biological warfare” constitute a natural disaster, nor has this quasi-neo-confucian conception of societal cohesion via filial piety historically triumphed over anything worse than any of these modern extinction scenarios.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoNone of those things would result in the complete extinction of human beings. The Black Death was pretty horrible and yet European society still exists.
- msbarnett 5y agoI’m not going to bother arguing about it, but suffice to say I don’t share your sunny optimism vis-a-vis nuclear holocaust.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoMany scholars have posited that a global thermonuclear war with Cold War-era stockpiles, or even with the current smaller stockpiles, may lead to human extinction. This position was bolstered when nuclear winter was first conceptualized and modelled in 1983. However, models from the past decade consider total extinction very unlikely, and suggest parts of the world would remain habitable.[25] Technically the risk may not be zero, as the climatic effects of nuclear war are uncertain and could theoretically be larger than current models suggest, just as they could theoretically be smaller than current models suggest. There could also be indirect risks, such as a societal collapse following nuclear war that can make humanity much more vulnerable to other existential threats https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust
- michaelmrose 5y agoWe might live but we wouldn't live well and our long term prospects would be dim.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoThe claim was “extinction event.”
- msbarnett 5y agoThe phrase I used was actually “extinction scenario” rather than a singular event, and “most people die immediately, an unlucky few eke out lives of unspeakable horror and pestilence for a handful of generations before the species collapses entirely” was basically what I had in mind. Really though I can’t imagine what you think this pedantic obsession with whether or not everyone gets blown up immediately is adding to the conversation.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoIt’s not pedantic, it’s referencing actual studies on the topic. No expert thinks that humans would go extinct.
- oblio 5y agoWe're incredibly resilient. We can eat anything and we have technology that can be used in some of the worst environments on the planet and that allow us to get shelter and food. We'd be 10 thousand not 10 billion and life would suck but we would survive. And the fallout would clear within a few decades or centuries.
- sudosysgen 5y agoNo, we wouldn't. The fallout could feasibly kill everyone without WMD protection within a few years. 10 000 people is not nearly enough for a modern division of labour - we'd be reverted back to prehistoric technology levels within a generation, with a bonus of fallout and absolute climate dysfunction. Given a sufficiently destructive nuclear exchange literally every single human could die.
- gBszkp6V 5y agoWhy did you just shift the goalposts from societal collapse to complete human extinction?
- ceilingcorner 5y agoBecause the comment used the word extinction?
- fidesomnes 5y agowe found the redditor!
- slacktide 5y agoEuropean society exists today, but experienced societal collapse at the time, which extended for hundreds of years. Y'know, the Dark Ages?
- Thiez 5y agoThe Dark Ages were before the Black Death...
- sudosysgen 5y agoNuclear war could definitely kill literally every human. Even more if you get bio weapons and omnicidal nuclear strikes at once. The Black Plague is not even a cold compared to what we can engineer.
- not_jd_salinger 5y agoCan you please list some of this "far worse situations" than nuclear war and climate change as we are currently facing? "Societal cohesion" doesn't do too much to help us survive crop failures and wet bulb temperatures over 35C. Aside from that, I think you might misunderstand your causal arrows a bit. It is fair more likely that massive industrialization and late state capitalism led to a society that valued the individual over the social unit, rather than that a sudden desire to be individuals sprung up in people's hearts and made a mess of the world.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoBlack Death and Mongol Invasions were probably worse on a per-person basis for those affected than even a realistic nuclear war would be.
- sudosysgen 5y agoAbsolutely not, not even close. 99.9% of the population dying within a few years is not comparable to a disease that killed ~10% of the population and a series of invasions that killed at most a single percent.