This all seems very plausible to me, I’ve always been sceptical of the idea that nuclear war (or climate change, or a pandemic) could kill all humans on the planet. There’s a lot of us, we’re very widely distributed and we’re very adaptable, we’d probably just end up with a new world order dominated by Australia, New Zealand, Africa and Latin America. It would be great to have more research on nuclear winter, especially since it would overlap with climate modelling and potentially with geoengineering projects designed to deliberately cool the planet, so understanding this better would be great for the future.
Nuclear war would still be very bad, and I think we should probably be concerned with non-existential risks, since after a near miss it would take a very long time for things to return to where they are today.
The idea that we should lobby the military to be selective in its nuclear targeting is interesting, I’m not sure how tractable that is but the pessimist in me does suspect that militaries are the only branch of government incentivised to think long term.
This all seems very plausible to me, I’ve always been sceptical of the idea that nuclear war (or climate change, or a pandemic) could kill all humans on the planet. There’s a lot of us, we’re very widely distributed and we’re very adaptable, we’d probably just end up with a new world order dominated by Australia, New Zealand, Africa and Latin America. It would be great to have more research on nuclear winter, especially since it would overlap with climate modelling and potentially with geoengineering projects designed to deliberately cool the planet, so understanding this better would be great for the future.
Nuclear war would still be very bad, and I think we should probably be concerned with non-existential risks, since after a near miss it would take a very long time for things to return to where they are today.
The idea that we should lobby the military to be selective in its nuclear targeting is interesting, I’m not sure how tractable that is but the pessimist in me does suspect that militaries are the only branch of government incentivised to think long term.