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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I find these miss one of the key points.

Today, we can kill everyone off with an exchange of the already existing nuclear weapon inventory. But that requires a reasonably large number of people to make mistakes or take action.

We're in the process of killing everyone off by screwing up the natural climate process which requires a large number of people to commit to inaction.

Within this century we will have the means and the understanding for a single individual to craft a DNA based pathogen that can infect and kill nearly everyone on the planet.

These are the three tests for graduation into the club of "long lived intelligent species." Fail any one of them and you don't make it. I call them:

   * Action of the group
   * Inaction of the group
   * Action of the individual

We apparently passed test 1, we're not doing so well on test 2, and we'll have to be a lot better at eradicating hate in individuals if we want to have a hope of passing test #3.

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It's beside the point, but IMO the human species is at almost zero risk of extinction from climate change. Maybe you could find a better example. The worst case would certainly be a calamity, but it would require an immense amount of additional failure for humanity to actually go extinct from it.

There's a difference between biological extinction and cultural extinction. Cultures are incredibly fragile, and the chances of developing current levels of science and technology again if we lost them aren't all that great.

As for runaway climate change - it's definitely a possibility. Current models don't try to estimate potential coupling between the effects of methane and CO2.

It doesn't seem to be considered likely. But a lot of scientists are already surprised by the speed and scale of climate change, and the fact that we're seeing effects in a decade or two that weren't expected until the end of the century.

Worries about runaway climate change may be pessimistic, but they're certainly not unscientific. Considering the stakes, more research would be wise.

If we had loss of technological knowledge (say due to climate change induced conflict), it might not be possible in the future for the surviving humans to re-bootstrap back up to our our current technological level.

We have exhausted all the easily accessible minerals and fossil fuels (i.e. those resources that can be extracted using stone age tools). Any break in our current technological systems might make it impossible to recover for 10s of millions of years.

Like the article posted last week titled "this is not a place of honor" about making obvious markers on nuclear waste to last 10,000 years...

We may also want to invest in creating some "breadcrumbs" for a future civilization to build up from. Say, a reserve of easily accessible fossil fuel and other raw materials, and some long-lasting guideposts that indicate where to find them.

It is a good question of how much breadcrumbs you would need to jump from the stone age to using whatever accessible resources are left after us.

A lack of accessible fossil fuels is likely to be the major factor as it would be really difficult to get an industrial revolution going without access to the easy energy provided by fossil fuels. We could easily find a rebooted society gets stuck in a pre-industrial state with no way of breaking out.

We have cities and garbage dumps that are full of steel, aluminium and plastic that are unlikely to be wiped out completely in any catastrophic event caused by humans. The only true problem is energy, I think. I wonder how far you could get with only biomass as a starter fuel for civilization.

Yes you could probably mine our dumps for metals, but if England is anything to go you will run out of forests as an energy source very early in an industrial revolution. If England had not been sitting on a large amount of easily accessed coal we would almost certainly not be having this conversation - in English anyway.

Depends on how quickly the climate changed. Lets say one year winter came and spring never did. It simply went from less cold to more cold all year long and deciduous plants stopped growing north of say Dallas Texas.

All sorts of food stocks simply die. No corn, no wheat, no cows, chickens, or pigs (in year 2) and no vegetables. Fruits from the tropics perhaps but another huge die off in that vegetation as well as temperatures drop into the 40's at night. There is no "other place" to go, so generally you see (depending on your model) 70 - 85% of the population outside the middle lattitudes die from starvation and general unrest. If you are lucky, you get someone smart enough to create a defensible space in the mid lattitudes that can support the population inside of it. The fisheries will crash in year 3 as the remaining survivors use what is left of the world wide fishing fleet to haul in ever more valuable food (aka fish). Then the people in the defensible spaces need to hold off the people outside those spaces until those outer people die and are no longer a threat. That can take a while and since the outside people will be scavenging weapons from the whole frozen world they will have a lot more ammo and war fighting resources than the people in the defensible spaces.

If it changes fast enough, the people trying to survive kill off everyone. It has happened in colonies before and it can presumably happen on a more global scale.

Would bands of indigenous jungle tribes survive? Good question, anything that moved would be hunted as food, jungle would clear cut to make farmland as quickly as possible.

If it happened slowly? Like over a couple of decades? Sure that would probably allow people to survive relatively intact save for their ability to actually make any new things of any level of technological sophistication.

Look at maps of the late Pleistocene where the glaciers were and plot those out on a modern globe. Now look at what is under those glaciers and try to figure out how long it would take to relocate that capability south. More importantly how long it would take to relocate it south. That sets the parameters for the maximum rate at which the species could tolerate the onset of a new ice age.

I thought we were talking about global warming?

We are, but that is sort of the "trade name" for anthropocentric climate change. Which, if you read a lot of papers track the rising temperatures but have a variety of opinions of how exactly that will affect the climate. One such change can be triggering a sudden glaciation event.

A sort of Mpemba effect on a global scale? That's got to be the goofiest global warming thing I've heard yet, and I've been following the movement since 1992.

Not really, Mpemba is about water freezing. There was a recent Nature paper discussion which looked at the non-linear effects of various climate modifiers[1]. I pointed out that some models have warming causing the onset of a glaciation event, the mechanics are warmer air carries more water vapor (itself a powerful greenhouse influence) which sets up a positive feedback loop making the air warmer and then sucking up more water from evaporation, which retains more heat which makes the air warmer. You cross the dewpoint in the stratosphere and that gets 100% solid cloud cover above the tropsphere. At which point the albedo of the planet goes way up (its a uniform white reflector at that point) and the water in the troposphere precipitates out as the mother of all snow storms and the greenhouse gas equivalent of nuclear winter.

Do I actually think this is going to happen? Not really. Are we recording unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases? Yes. Is the climate we're experiencing similar to the climate that was in effect when those levels occurred in the past? Not really, the early Pleistocene was much warmer than it is now. Moore's paper from 1980 was probably pretty influential here. He, like others, is/was really interested in why we had ice ages in the first place.

The point though is that we talk about "global warming" which implies to a lot of people who don't read the papers that our inputs into the climate will only cause increased heat, but it is more accurate to say "climate change" since we don't have good non-linear models for how the planet responds to all the forcing functions we are throwing at it.

We casually throw around terms like "hottest temperatures ever recorded" or "lowest ice levels on record" but some times lose sight of the fact that the "record" we've been keeping in terms of climate change is, according to ice cores, and other geologic carbon dating of glaciation events, perhaps 2% of a cycle. (assuming 100kyr cycle and 2kr of nominal human recordings). Remember that 2% of a year is one week. We can't take a week's worth of measurements and even imagine all of the variations we'll see that year, so we have to be careful about extrapolating with the amount of data we have. Pretty much everyone (except some really hard liners) can agree that climate can and will change, its understanding that change which we can only develop as we go along. And the latest contribution to our understand was the Nature paper that said, in essence, don't try to model this stuff with linear models.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n5/full/nclimate25...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ted_Moore/publication/2...

Thanks, that's interesting as well as refreshingly reasonable with respect to our limited knowledge. However, your summary seems at odds with the field of climate science's continuous and confident prescriptions for human life. If that is the extent of our knowledge, how can we tell any nation to accept lower growth and poorer health by curtailing fossil fuel use?

I would be interested in seeing "confident prescriptions for human life" in an actual paper. What I have seen, and when I've been present at Q&A sessions with scientists presenting their results, was a lot of discomfort and equivocating when someone would ask the question "If we do <x> will it mitigate or reverse the changes in climate?". I watched one poor guy not answer the question "If I had a magic wand and removed all anthropogenic CO2 from the air, would it stop global warming?" The questioner was clearly a climate skeptic but the truth is that science doesn't actually know. That was the root of the resistance to the iron fertilization experiments[1]

As a result we have a lot of research which clearly indicates that humans are destabilizing the climate which will induce it to change, but no one that I have found has been willing to stand up and claim they could drive the climate in a particular direction or speak definitively on what the eventual result of our destabilizing influences will have.

Our ability to predict outcomes is limited by our understanding of the complex interactions (which is why I like the recent Nature article, it really gets to that point) We can make fairly mechanical predictions of the form "If this much fresh water was dumped into the ocean, it would go up by this many meters." Some have also speculated that the increased weight on the mantle of all that water will cause a massive increase in volcanism as magma is compressed.

The most definitive statement I have ever read from an actual scientist is that by generating fewer green house gases we will destabilize it less. The elephant in the room then is without human participation the planet has seen warm spells and ice ages. So at best, our influence is eradicated and it goes back to what ever was previously changing the climate before we came along.

As a result I don't think telling anyone to accept lower growth and poorer health by curtailing fossil fuel use is a reasonable strategy. You can tell them that the more energy efficient they are, the better their economy will be able to support them. Telling them to suffer because it will stop climate change does them a disservice. Telling them to get off fossil fuel because they will be healthier and more prosperous if they can live on renewable sources benefits from being demonstrably true.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7229/abs/nature07...

I suppose I have been distracted by media reports, but certainly everything you've written here is reasonable.

Let's hope it's a lot harder than you think to reach step three. If we ever reach a point where a lone actor can destroy humanity, we're pretty well screwed. You would have to ensure that 100% of the people with that ability didn't want to use it 100% of the time.

Luckily the number of people who want to exterminate all of humanity seems to be rather low.

Which just leaves the people who want to exterminate part of humanity.

I'm hopeful that once technology like gene editing that has that potential is so cheap and easy that a significant fraction of the people can do it, the same technology that enables them to create killer viruses also enables everyone else to cure them more effectively.

What makes you such an expert on long lived intelligent species? As far as I know, we're all working from the same sample size of one, with a written history and cultural memory that are evolutionarily insignificant.

For all we know, it may be the only long term path of survival for an intelligent species is to accept absolute dictatorship of a genocidal/eugenicist bent. I hope it's not, but if the 20th century's taught us anything, it's that any kind of non-evidence based wishful thinking towards an abstract ideal is probably the most dangerous thing.

The three points he listed are pretty obvious requirements if you want a long lived species. You don't need a large sample size to know that not killing yourself by failing at one of those three is important.

A Phd from Trump University? :-) Seriously though, I don't (and did not) make that claim. I merely state my observation that as technology has advanced it has created opportunities for species annihilation that are both "controlled" by our species and do not exist for nominally 'unintelligent' species.[1]

That said, I'd be interested to understand how you reason from "the 20th century's teachings" to "absolute dictatorship of a genocidal bent". I would also like to understand the characterization of 'non-evidence based wishful thinking'. Happy to walk through the reasoning behind global thermonuclear war resulting in extinction, and sudden massive climate change resulting in the same. Similarly the reasoning for an individually created pandemic can be traced back to the general availability of DNA printers[2] and the ever increasing understanding of genetics and how one might use viruses modify the genetics of living humans [3].

[1] Trust me, the last thing I'd want to do is get into an argument about what constitutes sentience.

[2] http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/05/07/40446024...

[3] https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/therapy/genetherapy

If you reduced the global population to 50 million people with a common culture, climate change would become much easier to deal with, the standard of living would be much higher, and a single nation-state with no rivals would have no need for nuclear weapons.

It would also involve wiping out or sterilizing 98%-99% of the species, but in terms of stabilizing the population and avoiding the possibility of a boom-bust extinction or nuclear war, that would be a solution both "hateful" and geared towards species longevity. I think it's better to risk extinction than to actually do that, but if one's sole concern is to avoid extinction...

Meanwhile, a european nun who chooses to live and work in Africa is definitely filled with genuine love for humanity, but their social and economic views would probably destroy our species and certainly any hope of technological progress if practiced universally.

HaaS: Humanity as a Service

PaaS: Panspermia as a Service

"Like Dropbox, but with DNA"

> Today, we can kill everyone off with an exchange of the already existing nuclear weapon inventory

I'm not convinced we can. For starters, the nuclear weapon inventory is a lot smaller than it was back in the 80s when those sorts of statements were popular. And secondly, as I understand it, it was always a bit of a lie, an estimate based on some silly assumptions (e.g. that everybody in the world lives in cities), which in repetition eventually lost those assumptions.

And yes, I agree with the other poster that it's pretty much impossible to kill everyone on earth with climate change.

Species-ending diseases I do worry about, but maybe that just means I don't know as much about immunology as I do about nuclear weapons.

Recent research has shown that nuclear winter after even a limited exchange would be worse than previously thought. We don't know how/if our technological society would bounce back from N billion starvation deaths.

The U.K., U.S. and Russia have already bombed the world with hundreds of atmospheric nuclear weapons in the mid 20th century.

In effect there was a nuclear war, it's just that all the bombs were exploded on "friendly territory" like Australia, the pacific islands and Nevada.

Atmospheric tests do not produce the same particulates as setting entire cities on fire.

So it was sort of OK "nuclear war on ourselves"?

I believe you misunderstand the cause of a nuclear winter.

The cause isn't the nuclear radiation per se. It is the extreme destruction of many large urban centres simultaneously. The problem is that all of those cities burning simultaneously would send up a tremendous amount of ash and smoke that would block the sky for quite a while.

This would cause a reduction in the amount of sunlight that would be available for growing crops and combined with the almost total destruction of global economy could result in the destruction of the entire human race through mass starvation.

Indeed, just 100 small warheads would (maybe) do it. See Mills' Multidecadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict [0] which models the effects of a limited nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan.

[0] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000205/full

There are many fewer weapons available for an impromptu nuclear war, and despite the horror that I think many readers here underestimate, that reduction is a Very Good Thing. The problem is that the nuclear explosives may have been taken apart to some extent, but they can also be put back together.

The nuclear arsenal is predominantly hydrogen bombs, and they are insanely powerful. The Hiroshima bomb was 16 kilotons. A W-87 and W88 warheads are a bit under half a megaton, or roughly 30X more powerful. The W-78 is about 350kilotons, about 20X larger. The B-83 bomb lets you dial in just how spectacular you want a return to neolithic life to be, all the way up to 1.2 megatons, about 70X larger than the Hiroshima bomb. There are fewer than 250 cities with over 1M population. With just the ready US arsenal you could blanket most of the populated parts of the planet.

In 1967 the US maintained an arsenal of about 30,000 (!!!!!) nuclear weapons. You have to wonder. Now the stockpile is about 4500 and about 1500 are deployed and ready at a moment's notice.

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