It's possible to have more than one existential risk at a time. We even have a third, since nuclear war doesn't seem completely impossible these days. We probably shouldn't ignore any of them.

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roncesvalles 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Nuclear war is hardly an existential risk.

An all-out global nuclear war (all nuclear nations landing 10% of their warheads in populated areas) would be a disruption comparable to COVID at best.

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bigmadshoe 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can you elaborate on this? I’m not an expert at all but this seems so far from true I’m struggling to understand if you’re serious.

Wouldn’t we expect tens of millions of casualties, nuclear fallout rendering large swathes of countries uninhabitable, and ensuing total societal collapse once the globalized western world is separated from their foreign means of production?

	▲	DennisP 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Of course you're correct. Here's a 2019 simulation of escalating full-scale war between the US and Russia, done at Princeton based on what's publicly known about actual force postures. Immediate effects would be 34 million dead, 91 million total casualties, and 30 major economic centers destroyed on each side. https://www.icanw.org/new_study_on_us_russia_nuclear_war Fallout would cause significantly more casualties. Then there are the environmental effects. Science on that has evolved over the past few decades, so wikipedia is a good starting point for an overview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter Since none of this is certain and we're talking about risks, considering the worst cases seems appropriate, and those involve agricultural collapse, several billion dead, mass extinction, and an ozone hole covering most of the planet. It might not kill off the human species, but modern civilization would struggle to recover.

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13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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