> currently no major threat to humans
Id say global nuclear war is a very real and very tangible threat to humans and many other species around.
Id say global nuclear war is a very real and very tangible threat to humans and many other species around.
Which in a strange way makes that that statement correct: that threat is not unique to humans. Many earth species share the Anthropocene, meteorites etc. as extinction threats. That being said, it would be nice if the website had a list of universal extinction threats - mostly to send a message.
You can keep your alarmist apocalypse messages to yourself, the world doesn't need more of those.
How about a message that everything is just peachy, for a change?
Optimist: everything is peachy.
Pragmatist: let's fix these problems.
There's a big difference between solving problems (which means communicating about them) and getting upset with problems. Changing the world for the better is inspiring, not depressing. Whether you get upset with the message is a choice that you have made.
FTFY
"Everything is peachy" is just wishful thinking.
Everything IS peachy. Fixing problems is the opposite of what life is about. It's fine as a hobby, albeit a rather dull one (I can think of a thousand other things I'd rather be doing, but hey, whatever rings your bells).
In purely hypothetical terms imagine that within 30 years climate change becomes severe enough that it unavoidably affects my life. For example sake, let's assume that I live in Dubai and Dubai becomes uninhabitable[1]. This would limit me on a daily basis and I wouldn't be able to do the things that I want to do.
If that's not your concern, that's perfectly fine. It's also perfectly fine that I discuss these problems with other people who care about them. If you don't care about this discussion it's always trivial to ignore it.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/extreme-...
Also distorting our sense of danger is our moral psychology. No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better, and bearers of good news are often advised to keep their mouths shut lest they lull people into complacency. Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.
It seems he was right in this instances as well, as evidenced by the down votes being applied to your comment.
Actually, everything, at least in my local area, is pretty good. There's no food shortage, we have medicine and vaccines, I voted recently and, at the polling booths, there was no one with guns telling me where to mark the ballot paper. The employment rate is pretty good. I feel safe and secure in my home and on the street.
What is it with everyone trying to scare the crap out me everywhere I turn.
Sure, things could be better, but I don't recall the last time the marauding hoards of barbarians came through and took all the women and children and burned all the crops, so can we all just relax for a moment? We might get along better that way.
We're a pretty persistent pest, we've even learned to write things like "Deliberate concentration and inhalation of contents of can may prove harmful or fatal" on the back of cans of fly spray - that's pretty impressive for a species who posses The Bomb.
We'll make it through these troubling times, just like we've made it through the past, what? 40,000 years?
Just chill the <expletive deleted> out.
*Conditions apply, nothing is free
And "nothing is free" is a stupid belief. Lots of things are free. Pretty much everything that matters IS free.
I remember the marauding hordes, genocide has occurred in your lifetime. Just not to you.
To be taken seriously any thought of our species has to consider the whole world and several hundred years of history and future.
This happened very recently to the Yazidi people, but maybe it didn't happen to you. The only difference is they killed all the men too.
That should only happen when things are actually "just peachy". It might be a while before then. Several years at least.
I'm not saying the science is wrong, just that there's a constant thread throughout human history of worrying about it.
Global nuclear warfare would've happened by now if it wasn't for both the fear of mutually assured destruction and global nuclear conventions, I think. And sheer luck.
And preparing for an extinction-event sized asteroid isn't a bad idea either; the chances of it occurring in our lifetime is small, but the chances of it occurring again is 100%. The chances of people being able to detect it early enough and do something about it are actually pretty high, in part due to the fear of it happening again. Detection could still be better, of course.
More like pure survivor bias on your part!
An event that kills all humans in one continent would be horrible but would not present "a threat to humans" in the meaning of species survival/preservation.
An event that kills 90% of people worldwide would be horrible but again, would not present a threat to species survival, the humans were just as dominant in 1700s with less than a billion of us than we are now with 7.4 billion.
Global warming can really hurt hundreds of millions of people, but it doesn't have the potential to be an extinction event, you need far more serious threats for that.
Speaking of which, wasn't there some kind of massive reduction of the homo sapiens population at two point in time ? I seem to recall a documentary with a few scattered tribes walking in the blizzard. Something like ony 10 000 humans left.
My view is that a nuclear exchange is very unlikely, and the likelihood of an exchange of global proportions practically nil.
Which two or more of the 9 known (or suspected) countries with nuclear weapons would participate in this global war?
The fact remains that even a misinterpreted signal has not lead to the trigger of retaliation.
I'd even go as far to say that nuclear weapons have never been used in an act of aggression in a time of war. The war was already over when the US blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what the US did was just ass-hattery.
But if you find it helps your moral psychology to worry about it, by all means, go right ahead. I'm going to continue to feel more concerned about being involved in a motor vehicle accident, if you don't mind.
The Japanese were closer to collapse than we realized, but if the invasion had started, neither side could have prevented major losses, even if both side's leadership would have preferred to. And we were days away. The war had a momentum of its own.
It's true that a misinterpreted signal has not led to retaliation... so far. We've been quite lucky. If Vasili Arkhipov had been a little more cranky on October 27, he could easily have been convinced to agree to launching a nuclear torpedo at American forces. Similar with Stanislav Petrov in 1983, although it's an open question as to how the leadership would have reacted had he informed them of the supposed attack. In 1995, Russia came within two minutes of deciding to "retaliate" in response to a scientific rocket launched from Norway. A slightly different trajectory or radar reading could easily have made the difference there.
Given the past 71 years, the risk of accidental nuclear war appears to be fairly low. However, we have no real idea if "fairly low" means the risk is 1% per year or 0.000001% per year. Both are consistent with what we've seen, but the former means that nuclear war is extremely likely in the medium term, while the latter means we can probably ignore it.
[0] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/local-nuclear-war/
If USA and USSR at height of paranoia and hatred can't get it together to kill us all, I doubt they ever will.