[sjw987]

Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1? I don't know which country / group of countries it'll be against, but I get the impression that a lot of our fates are being written out right now.

Advertisements around where I live are gradually all becoming about joining the military. My country is sending troops to territories as if they are tripwires.

[DetectDefect]

> Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1?

No. If I had this level of anxiety, I would disconnect from news and online media for a little while to take a walk in the forest to clear my mind and calm down.

[happytoexplain]

As things get worse, this advice gets less relevant. You no longer have to be addicted to social media or 24-hour news to be worried about what's happening. You don't even really need to be paying explicit attention at all.

To call the headline "US threatens to invade Greenland" unprecedented would be an understatement. You only need to see it once to be justifiably anxious.

[sjw987]

I'm already there. I never use social media and I limit news consumption to once per week for catching up.

I'm seeing these messages in the real world. Adverts on the side of buses are telling me to enlist in greater frequency, and job sites have positions in the Royal Army pinned above everything else.

[IAmBroom]

This forum is social media.

[happytoexplain]

Not by colloquial usage of the term, which is often (and in this case) limited to the subset of larger global human-content firehoses where the problems inherent to that dynamic become more dramatic, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, shorts feeds, things like Instagram and Reddit maybe, etc.

[LexiMax]

Hacker News is Reddit with tone policing and a nuclear downvote button.

The only difference is scale, and with the increasing flood of bot users and throwaway alt accounts, that's starting to matter less and less.

[beAbU]

HN is just as much an echo chamber as any facebook group or subreddit. You are making a mistake if you think you are immune from groupthink and herd mentality by limiting your online discourse to this platform only.

[GJim]

Social media is where one shares ones social live; its in the name!

Whist there is often plenty of crossover (think car enthusiast forums), I'd hardly call a technical discussion site 'social media'.

[nullocator]

Unfortunately access to the forest is blocked by ongoing "immigration" enforcement action by masked secret police in the area. Stepping out of the front door under these circumstances may be treated as a crime, punishable by death.

[Tostino]

That is exactly what these troops are. A tripwire force which hopefully doesn't get used for their intended purpose.

[rich_sasha]

Between war, climate change effects, antibiotic resistant bacteria and Alzheimer's, for myself I think I'd pick war. Hard to know what to wish for my children.

[pjc50]

I'm too old for this: not only am I not going to get called up, I also remember the Cold War, where everyone really did think there was a significant risk of a nuclear exchange at any time.

Mind you, the logic of MAD was a lot more .. logical? The canonical example of a cold game theoretic perspective leading combined with enough irrational paranoia to make an unstable situation.

We're more likely to have a war over a dumb tweet.

[cogman10]

It had logic to it. The issue is that the same logic that powered MAD led to WW1.

In short, everyone had treaties signed with everyone else which effectively guaranteed a WW if any nation attacked another nation. The thinking being "nobody would ever start a war because of what it'd lead to".

MAD suffers the same problem, one demented leader can end all life by being irrational.

[bulbar]

> I don't know which country / group of countries it'll be against

What do you mean? Only one country is threatening Greenland/Denmark/EU with military actions directed against the sovereignty of Greenland.

[coffeebeqn]

At least two major powers are threatening Europe with military actions

[ben_w]

> Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1?

Not that high, but I know what you mean. I think there's a reasonable chance that the US system successfully redirects Trump away from actually ordering an attack on Greenland, and a reasonable chance the US military has an actual coup if that order comes through.

But if he gets to take it… the consequences need to be extraordinary, and misjudgement will have already been a precondition and therefore more misjudgement is likely, therefore escalation can be almost arbitrary.

[Aboutplants]

Not approaching 1, but certainly greater than zero and higher than it’s ever been in my life. Maybe 15-20%

[jfengel]

Probably not higher than in my lifetime, because I lived through the Cold War and nuclear annihilation seemed like a serious possibility more than once.

But definitely higher than any time since 1990. With a possible exception for the days immediately after 9/11, when it seemed like there might be follow-ups.

[flowerthoughts]

If humans on Earth have exponential growth, and then decline, in what kind of time period are you most likely to have been born?

[thrance]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

A fun thought experiment, but only that.

[nubg]

Yes. Not necessarily 1 but a once in three generations high number, idk a 0,25.

I wonder how to survive? Nomad lifestyle?

[tim333]

I still figure close to zero.

[M95D]

You probably should revisit your opinion about what wars would look like today.

- WW1 was a competition of troops: how many soldiers each country was willing to sacrifice for victory. Something like 50M soldiers participated.

- WW2 was a competition of hardware, less troops - how much industrial output could each country pour into the battle. Aprox. 300 000 tanks, 200 000 airplanes , 9000 warships (according to chatgpt), 2750 Liberty cargo ships (wikipedia).

- WW3 can't be a competition of troops (where would they get 50 million people, how would they train them, how would they feed them?), and it can't be a competition of hardware (who could make 300 000 tanks, 200 000 airplanes and 9 000 ships today?, where would they even get that much steel?).

World war today could be 1) nuclear and we're doomed, or 2) kids playing with toy drones breaking windows at each other's factories - you're mostly safe, unless you work there.

[ben_w]

> World war today could be 1) nuclear and we're doomed, or 2) kids playing with toy drones breaking windows at each other's factories - you're mostly safe, unless you work there.

Cyber war, especially insufficiently defended industrial equipment control systems.

And about those drones: the category scales up and down, all the way from toys to things that rip apart apartment blocks.

And about quantity, Ukraine is estimated to be at the scale of millions of units last year, expended like munitions rather than like vehicles.

[M95D]

The drones that rip apart apartment block would be as rare and expensive as a tank. We won't see many of those. We're in the era of cheap.

[Scea91]

I am afraid that in a total war, all available resources will be used.

[M95D]

My point is that there aren't that many resources available to make a war big enough to worry about. Unless nuclear, like I said.