| War won't end human existence. If there's one thing you can learn from the recent wars in Iran and Ukraine, it's that conventional air-bombing has acquired a terrible cost:efficacy ratio that cannot be sustained, that drones have leveled the playing field on the ground, and that attackers generally appear to lack the stomach for mass mobilization and mass casualties in war. Again, there'll be winners and losers. Some in fortresses; others in famines and droughts. It is, of course, imperative that we do what we can do now to mitigate this. But the continuation of the human species is, I am sure, not in doubt. Our ancestors in prehistoric times have, assuredly, gone through FAR worse, including real population bottlenecks. |
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| ▲ | adrianN 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | War definitely can end technological civilization. Bootstrapping it again will be quite difficult as a lot of the easily accessible natural resources are already depleted. | | |
| ▲ | A_D_E_P_T 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Bootstrapping it again will be quite difficult as a lot of the easily accessible natural resources are already depleted. That's a myth, but let's assume it isn't. I'm thinking it sounds like a job for you. Okay, here's what you've gotta do. Buy some titanium slabs. Etch onto them, in simple and decipherable language (there's a technical way to approach this, I can explain later,) the secrets of solar panels, how to refine scrap metal, the basics of modern materials science, and so forth. Include the secrets of nuclear power, germ theory, semiconductors, DNA, important mathematical and physical formulae, and whatever else you feel like they ought to know. Warn them against the once-low-hanging fruit of fossil fuel; tell them that hydrocarbons ought to be used as chemical building blocks, solely. Bury the slabs in a seismically stable vault, and leave clues to its existence at various geographic landmarks. That's it, you've saved technological civilization in 50,000AD. | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Any high technology has incredibly long dependency chains. I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty of bootstrapping, say, WW2 level tech from irradiated wastelands after major nuclear exchanges. | | |
| ▲ | A_D_E_P_T 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Irradiated wastelands" -- surely you realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are large cities today? Harmful radiation usually doesn't stay harmful for very long. In any case, I don't share your low opinion of future humans. They'll be as capable as we are; maybe far more capable. You also over-estimate and over-weight how destructive nuclear exchanges really are, the readiness state of the world's nuclear arsenals, and the willingness of their possessors to lash out at effectively unaligned countries like Argentina, Chile, Austria, Morocco, Fiji, and I could go on all day. | | |
| ▲ | nmeagent an hour ago | parent [-] | | > surely you realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are large cities today? I don't think you understand the massive difference in scale between detonating a couple of atom bombs vs. thousands of thermonuclear devices, each with at least an order of magnitude (~16 kt vs hundreds) more destructive power. Nevermind the vast fallout dispersal that would blanket the northern hemisphere at least, as well as the ridiculous amounts of soot in the atmosphere from the resulting firestorms that would, to put it mildly, be a bit of a setback for agricultural yields for a damn long time. You might be okay in those unaligned places, sure, bit if you're in roughly half of the world you're pretty much effed. |
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| ▲ | Dumblydorr 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You seem to forget about hydrogen bombs. War can 100% end everything. | |
| ▲ | iso1631 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Depends if that war turns nuclear. Perhaps a few million will survive with sustinance living in areas like patagonia, new zealand, global population of nomadic tribes around the same level as pre-agricutural civilisation - say about 10k years ago |
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