Comment on If WWIII broke out tomorrow do you honestly believe america would win?
FaceDeer@fedia.io 10 hours agoI assume you're worried about nuclear war? It'll be bad, but there simply aren't enough nukes in existence to pose a threat to humanity as a species.
cecilkorik@piefed.ca 9 hours ago
You might be underestimating just how many nukes there are. As a species, maybe we could survive a full-scale nuclear war, if they all go off under ideal conditions to minimize fallout and radiation spread, and it doesn’t range far enough or last long enough for the radiation to shorten lifespans or sterilize us into a population bottleneck, and the climate effects don’t make the planet uninhabitable so quickly that even with what remaining functional technology our increasingly limited population and damaged infrastructure can continue to cobble together, we simply can’t adapt fast enough (like most of the other life on the planet). These kind of play against each other a bit though, the safest places from radiation are likely to be remote, minor islands and places like Australia, but they have some of the least resilient infrastructure and are also going to be hit very hard by rapidly changing climate conditions.
It’s not going to be a good situation and I don’t think we can really accurately predict whether human life will survive it, there are way too many variables. We are tough and resilient, but nukes will put the entire planet, nevermind human civilization as we know it, into a really really tough place which there may genuinely be no coming back from.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 7 hours ago
Currently there are 12,331. These weapons are divided up among many nations, and only a fraction of them are actually "ready to launch" at any given time. If launched most of them will be targeted at military targets, which are often located in remote places - silos in the middle of nowhere, carrier groups out in the ocean, forward military bases or stockpiles, and so forth. They wouldn't be fired with intent to "wipe out" humanity. There would be entire continents that nobody bothers firing at - why waste precious nukes on countries that are uninvolved in the conflict?
Nuclear winter is no longer thought to be as bad as the most extreme predictions from back in the 1960s. And even with those extreme predictions it still wouldn't lead to human extinction. Humans are an incredibly robust species. We don't need infrastructure to survive in harsh conditions. Inuit survived in the arctic for thousands of years without anything fancy, and you're not going to see conditions that harsh everywhere on Earth regardless.
discocactus@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Well, let’s give it a shot then I guess.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 5 hours ago
This is ridiculously binary thinking. I'm saying it's not as bad as the person I was responding to thinks it would be, and you're interpreting that as "it's fine, there's no downside"?
Being punched in the face is less bad than being shot. Would you interpret that as "it's fine to be punched in the face"?