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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

>One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars.

This is what the thinking was during the early part of the cold war, the whole duck and cover era. The decades after that and the knowledge gained during the cold war is what lead to our current fears and justification for focusing on disarmament rather than nuclear war prep.

Whether or not humans end up totally extinct is irrelevant. Enough post nuclear fiction has been produced that people are well aware, yes, we may not all die, but life sure is going to suck a whole lot for literally every living thing on Earth.

That's the point of preventing nuclear war, that's the point of the world's current attitude towards it.

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Whether or not humans end up totally extinct is irrelevant to the questions like whether nuclear war is bad and whether we should work to prevent it.

However, the question whether or not humans end up totally extinct is relevant when comparing nuclear war with other very horrible risks, some of which do threaten total extinction. To discuss, prioritize and act on very serious (though, hopefully, unlikely to materialize) risks, we need a scale of "horribleness" that doesn't just give every serious problem a 10 out of 10. We need to reasonably prioritize our actions among many potentially dystopian risks - if consider a single one of them an negative infinity, a literal "AVOID AT ALL COSTS", then those "all costs" include increased vulnerability to other risks, and that's not appropriate.

What other risks are there that are directly intentionally human driven that could cause such an extreme amount of destruction, death and societal collapse over the span of a few hours?

Meteorite strike or supervolcano eruption that we could have protected ourselves against but didn't because of resources spent on nuclear war prevention.

Not sure why you added the "within a few hours" qualifier or "intentionally human driven". Have you already thought of something that takes longer, is done by humans accidentally, or is natural? Is it climate change? Does that already answer your question?

Yeah pretty much, because there is nothing else that compares in that way. Climate change is long and drawn out, meteors and disasters are acts of nature.

There is nothing else so swiftly and completely destructive that is entirely driven by humans and their choice as to whether they should destroy or not.

That's the thing about nuclear war, unlike all those other things, it really comes down to a few humans deciding not to do it. That's what makes it more terrifying than those other ones.

The suddenness is a problem because there isn't enough time to adapt? Implying that we'll adapt to climate change? Watch out for heresy there ;)

But asteroid or comet impacts. Comets in particular can come so fast and undetectably that we won't have time to react. We could prevent a comet impact if a few humans decided to build such a defense system, and we might be wiped out if those few humans decide not to do it. Sounds equivalent to nuclear war.

In near-ish future I guess deorbiting sufficiently large asteroids? In maybe further future AI and aliens.

> life sure is going to suck a whole lot for literally every living thing on Earth.

Not at all. Many organisms would still find it easy to survive in a post-nuclear-war world and would eventually evolve to fill the roles of those that went extinct.

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