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Nah. There will be many survivors, even in the worst case. Realistically, nuclear war is not an extinction threat. For that, you need heavier stuff like antima

Nah. There will be many survivors, even in the worst case. Realistically, nuclear war is not an extinction threat. For that, you need heavier stuff like antimatter missiles or engineered pandemics.

mikewarot 3y ago
I think that thousands of MRVs hitting targets around the world is bound to throw enough stuff into the stratosphere to disrupt agriculture, and push cancer rates through the roof for survivors. As for pandemics, Fauci's deadly toy was just stupidity at work(take a "safe" organism, and make it deadly, but do it in a BSL2 lab, instead of a BSL4 lab), not some grand plan. A planned release of something deliberately deadly would decimate humanity before the mutations hit.
- teekert 3y ago
  There is a very delicate balance between how easily a virus spreads and how well it kills. The best spreading virus has you running around joyfully coughing in everyone's face (like common cold). The best killers die out, because you can't really infect anyone when you're dead (like Ebola). Maybe a virus can be truly airborne (not in aerosols, which do hit the floor or dry out), have a very delayed onset, such that if infects billions and then kills... But we haven't seen this in nature so I'm not really expecting us human to create something so advanced and complex in its behavior.
gmuslera 3y ago
There had been rumors about doomsday devices in the past. But even without that, second and third order effects should be counted too. At least for big or widespread enough events, because we live in a complex system.
yossarian88 3y ago
Read Ellsberg and be terrified.
The_Colonel 3y ago
Yeah, even the infamous concept of nuclear winter is a very uncertain hypothetical scenario. In popular imagination, an all-out nuclear war is civilization-destroying, but that's again far from certain. Contra-intuitively, these are not necessarily good news.

Nah. There will be many survivors, even in the worst case. Realistically, nuclear war is not an extinction threat. For that, you need heavier stuff like antimatter missiles or engineered pandemics.

mikewarot 3y ago

I think that thousands of MRVs hitting targets around the world is bound to throw enough stuff into the stratosphere to disrupt agriculture, and push cancer rates through the roof for survivors. As for pandemics, Fauci's deadly toy was just stupidity at work(take a "safe" organism, and make it deadly, but do it in a BSL2 lab, instead of a BSL4 lab), not some grand plan. A planned release of something deliberately deadly would decimate humanity before the mutations hit.

teekert 3y ago
There is a very delicate balance between how easily a virus spreads and how well it kills. The best spreading virus has you running around joyfully coughing in everyone's face (like common cold). The best killers die out, because you can't really infect anyone when you're dead (like Ebola). Maybe a virus can be truly airborne (not in aerosols, which do hit the floor or dry out), have a very delayed onset, such that if infects billions and then kills... But we haven't seen this in nature so I'm not really expecting us human to create something so advanced and complex in its behavior.

gmuslera 3y ago

There had been rumors about doomsday devices in the past. But even without that, second and third order effects should be counted too. At least for big or widespread enough events, because we live in a complex system.

yossarian88 3y ago

Read Ellsberg and be terrified.

The_Colonel 3y ago

Yeah, even the infamous concept of nuclear winter is a very uncertain hypothetical scenario. In popular imagination, an all-out nuclear war is civilization-destroying, but that's again far from certain. Contra-intuitively, these are not necessarily good news.