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A comment on A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement. Parent comment

Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by ceilingcorner on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:02PM (#27838396)
None of those things would result in the complete extinction of human beings.

The Black Death was pretty horrible and yet European society still exists.

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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by gBszkp6V on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:11PM (#27838489)
Why did you just shift the goalposts from societal collapse to complete human extinction?
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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by ceilingcorner on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:13PM (#27838500)
Because the comment used the word extinction?
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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by slacktide on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @06:39PM (#27839360)
European society exists today, but experienced societal collapse at the time, which extended for hundreds of years. Y'know, the Dark Ages?
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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by Thiez on Thursday July 15, 2021 @08:05AM (#27843768)
The Dark Ages were before the Black Death...
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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by sudosysgen on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @08:42PM (#27840250)
Nuclear war could definitely kill literally every human. Even more if you get bio weapons and omnicidal nuclear strikes at once.

The Black Plague is not even a cold compared to what we can engineer.

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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by msbarnett on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:07PM (#27838451)
I’m not going to bother arguing about it, but suffice to say I don’t share your sunny optimism vis-a-vis nuclear holocaust.
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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by ceilingcorner on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:10PM (#27838475)
Many scholars have posited that a global thermonuclear war with Cold War-era stockpiles, or even with the current smaller stockpiles, may lead to human extinction. This position was bolstered when nuclear winter was first conceptualized and modelled in 1983. However, models from the past decade consider total extinction very unlikely, and suggest parts of the world would remain habitable.[25] Technically the risk may not be zero, as the climatic effects of nuclear war are uncertain and could theoretically be larger than current models suggest, just as they could theoretically be smaller than current models suggest. There could also be indirect risks, such as a societal collapse following nuclear war that can make humanity much more vulnerable to other existential threats

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust

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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by michaelmrose on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:15PM (#27838537)
We might live but we wouldn't live well and our long term prospects would be dim.
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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by ceilingcorner on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:23PM (#27838611)
The claim was “extinction event.”
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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by msbarnett on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:34PM (#27838725)
The phrase I used was actually “extinction scenario” rather than a singular event, and “most people die immediately, an unlucky few eke out lives of unspeakable horror and pestilence for a handful of generations before the species collapses entirely” was basically what I had in mind.

Really though I can’t imagine what you think this pedantic obsession with whether or not everyone gets blown up immediately is adding to the conversation.

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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by ceilingcorner on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @11:00PM (#27840977)
It’s not pedantic, it’s referencing actual studies on the topic. No expert thinks that humans would go extinct.
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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by oblio on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:52PM (#27838883)
We're incredibly resilient. We can eat anything and we have technology that can be used in some of the worst environments on the planet and that allow us to get shelter and food.

We'd be 10 thousand not 10 billion and life would suck but we would survive. And the fallout would clear within a few decades or centuries.

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Re:A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement by sudosysgen on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @08:44PM (#27840265)
No, we wouldn't. The fallout could feasibly kill everyone without WMD protection within a few years.

10 000 people is not nearly enough for a modern division of labour - we'd be reverted back to prehistoric technology levels within a generation, with a bonus of fallout and absolute climate dysfunction. Given a sufficiently destructive nuclear exchange literally every single human could die.

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