The human body is already close to thermal limits in many regions

Re:The human body is already close to thermal limits in many... by titzer on Monday July 29, 2019 @03:58AM (#20552410)

> We've been hearing since WW2 that we are on the verge of wiping ourselves out. We are still here.

A full-out nuclear exchange might last anywhere from 1-3 hours and kill every human on Earth. Thousands of nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert is literally on the verge of wiping ourselves out. It almost happened, at least twice.

We're lucky to be here. But survivorship bias is a psychological distortion; it has zero predictive power. You can say the same thing at the individual level. "I've been hearing my whole life that I'm gonna die. Still here." And that's true up until the day you actually die.

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Re:The human body is already close to thermal limits in many... by dsfyu404ed on Monday July 29, 2019 @08:42AM (#20553955)

Now, I'm not arguing that a nuclear war is going to be all unicorns and rainbows but I feel like "1-3 hours and kill every human on Earth" is over-estimating our capability a wee bit. Like, sure, all major cities would be gone as would most medium ones but there would be plenty of towns in BFE on all continents that would be untouched because they simply have nothing worth bombing.

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Re:The human body is already close to thermal limits in many... by titzer on Monday July 29, 2019 @09:12AM (#20554233)

A full-out nuclear exchange would be thousands of warheads. It would be all major and medium-sized cities. The radioactive fallout and nuclear winter would kill billions more. There'd be a long tail as Earth's ecosystems collapse, but yeah, there are high-confidence projections that such a war really would kill all living humans.

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Re:The human body is already close to thermal limits in many... by chroma on Monday July 29, 2019 @09:31AM (#20554379)

Around 2,500 nuclear weapons have been detonated in tests[1] and we're still here. The two cities that have been nuked were rebuilt.

An all-out nuclear exchange would kill a lot of people and send humanity back to the early industrial or pre-industrial era, but it's not an extinction risk.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests

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Re:The human body is already close to thermal limits in many... by ceejayoz on Monday July 29, 2019 @09:55AM (#20554600)

Humans have survived thousands of volcano eruptions, but I suspect we'd be in worse shape if thousands of volcanoes erupted all at once.

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Re:The human body is already close to thermal limits in many... by titzer on Monday July 29, 2019 @10:04AM (#20554689)

> Around 2,500 nuclear weapons have been detonated in tests[1]

The vast majority of those were underground, and they were not all at the same time.

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Re:The human body is already close to thermal limits in many... by imtringued on Monday July 29, 2019 @03:36PM (#20558509)

You're making the false assumption that the goal of the cold war was to kill all living humans. It's a war not a movie plot. The primary goal is to eliminate an enemy country and the most effective way is by destroying their military including all the nuclear warheads they posses instead of shooting some remote french colony island with zero military power that is 5000km away from the mainland.

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