Hacker News Reader

Comment by lopmotr | Hacker News Reader

Those effects won't cause extinction though because they'll diminish as the population shrinks so it'll reach some equilibrium. This is about extinction, not just lots of people dying. Nuclear winter wouldn't get less harmful the fewer people are around.

View on HN

Very few people would choose to have children and raise them in a post-nuclear war environment, even if the radiation didn't make viable babies impossible. It's possible that the population would die out simply because it wouldn't be replaced quickly enough.

Some people don't "choose to have children." They feel like fucking so they do, and children happen afterwards.

I wouldn't expect that to change after a nuclear war, especially in a world without contraceptives.

That aside, there really needs to be more understanding of the difference between species extinction and cultural extinction.

Humans could survive for hundreds of millennia in a devolved state. They wouldn't be particularly human by our standards, but they'd have the same DNA.

But our culture would be gone. All the accumulated knowledge would be wiped out, and it's very possible nothing like it would ever return.

DNA is fairly robust. Culture, knowledge, and rationality are extremely fragile. We're not doing an outstandingly job of preserving them even without a nuclear war, and I can't imagine a nuclear war would make the situation any better.

Just continue this thread of contrarianism, I doubt we could eradicate human knowledge from the planet if we tried at this point. It is encoded in our minds, our books and our silicon chips.

We may lose the know-how / capacity to produce certain things, such as we did with Damascus steel or roman concrete, but we are an endlessly resourceful species. I place my faith in our ability to adapt and come up with new solutions as required.

If all humans aren't eradicated by nuclear war, I don't see why all memory, books, hard drives, other archives, computers, power plants, machinery, or even all contraceptives would be.

Computers and hard drives have half-life counted in years, and need energy and communication infrastructure to operate. Post-collapse, once all the computers break down, that's the end of XX-century technology. Nobody is going to make new ones, because to build and maintain machines that make computers you need working computers. Same for mining and refining necessary resources, controlling chemical processes, etc.

Whatever technological knowledge survives in the books, most of it will be useless for centuries, as we regress into pre-industrial level of technology and can't climb back out - we've already mined out all easily-accessible high-density energy sources that are necessary for reindustrialization.

If resources are already mined, why we need to mine them again?

Simple computers are relatively easy to make with today tech. Software exists already.

Why would we regress to pre-industrial level of technology? Even if you somehow wipe 90% of the population worldwide, this brings the population back to mid-18th century levels - which is to say, when industrial revolution was already ongoing. But that same number of people would know all the things that had to be discovered back then, and would still have a lot of machinery, and a lot of already-refined materials, to bootstrap from.

Nor is there a particular shortage of hydrocarbons to burn, with consumption reduced so much due to population loss and reduction in quality of life. Consider that US today emits more than 200x carbon into the atmosphere than it did in 1850, and that this growth has been exponential. So what we consider one year worth of reserves today, could provide energy for many decades in this hypothetical.

That's nonsense. People had children through the ice age! Poor struggling Africans and Indians keep having children. The people who choose not to have children seem to be contented wealthy professionals. If you're able to keep yourself alive, it's not much more work to keep children alive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com