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by yesenadam
1748 days ago
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In the documentary The Man Who Saved The World, Stanislav Petrov travels to meet Kevin Costner, his favourite actor, at home. Costner asks him, if he hadn't acted as he did, how many people would have died. You expect him to say, 50 million, or something. He says, everyone. Everyone on earth would've died. It's a chilling moment. (And there's been a lot more than that one near miss.) What kind of crazy species are we that we build a system that when it malfunctions (as it did that day) seems likely to kill everyone on the planet?! Now I read on HN that the danger of nuclear war is hyped out of proportion to its true severity, and should be considered only a little. Sorry, maybe I misunderstand. I have read a similar thing on HN a few times though, people that seem to think nuclear war really would be no big deal at all. But it always seems weird to be how some people are so worried to the point of obsession about global warming without apparently ever giving a thought to the ever-present risk of full-scale nuclear war—something infinitely worse. (Well, hardly "war", just a flurry of button-pressing for a few minutes.) |
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Like, if there's a scale of catastrophic events that goes from 0 to 10 where 0 is no big deal and 10 is human extinction, then the worst events humanity has ever seen are somewhere below 1 on that scale and absolutely horrific mass death is something like 2/10 - because the gap between the damage required for that and damage required for extinction is so much larger than the gap between no big deal and worse mass death than we have ever seen. Arguably the worst damage that life on Earth has seen is the dinosaur-ending asteroid, and IMHO a fraction homo sapiens (though perhaps not our civilization) could survive even that. A full scale USSR-USA exchange in 1960s might perhaps kill most people in the northern hemisphere and perhaps cause a nuclear winter decreasing crop yields with an associated famine - but if just a fraction of people in South Asia and Africa and South America survive the famine while the North nukes themselves to radioactive glasslands, that's very, very far from extinction.
Killing half of humanity would literally be an unprecedented level of horror, but it would not end our civilization; killing 90% of humanity would likely end our civilization-as-we-know it but would not end our species, that would bring us to the population level that Earth had in 1700s; and killing 99.99% of humanity would definitely destroy our civilization but it would "just" push back our population growth to the numbers we had ~70 000 years ago - horrific for every individual, but still not an extinction event.