My thoughts exactly. Setting the world back 100+ years is a disaster of gigantic proportions.
I also find it odd that the author didn't even attempt to provide an estimate of the possible victim count. I'm basically sure it would at least be in the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions.
This is to say nothing about a possible future arms race that would increase the numbers of warheads substantially.
He's an engineer who's job was, in the past, to be one of the people who developed the U.S. nuclear warplans against Russia.
His open source attempt at using his understanding to build hypothetical target laydowns for Russian attacks against the U.S. is here:
The biggest problem I see is the amount of habitable land on the Earth. For short periods of time, people wandering in nuclear wastelands will mostly be OK, however it's not safe to inhabit so we'd have to move the remaining infrastructure to safe places on the planet, wherever that may be. But I think it does underscore the need to diversify off of the Earth.
95% dead is a lot of corpses and demolished infrastructure with no fuel to operate heavy machinery to clean up anything.
Europe after WW2 had the Marshall Plan. Who does this for WW3? China? India? Why not just take the intellectual property? There's no longer anyone, person or government force or leverage to protect it. If cities are destroyed expertise is probably not 95% destroyed, but closer to 99%.
I think the current geopolitics is wiped out. At least the belligerents. Not only are their governments physically destroyed, but they have no legitimacy. They just allowed the worst failure in human history to occur.
There's no assurances what happens next.
Agreed. They however will be spending their time doing subsidence agriculture, basic medicine, hunting, building etc. just like anybody living in premodern conditions.
With 95% population loss you can be damn sure there will be no internet, electricity, water/sewage, refined fuel for transportation etc.
People will quickly revert to the middle ages because they'll have to. There will be no time to tinker with reinventing microelectronics.
> There will be technologically advanced places that will persist—no matter what
You can be basically sure that there won't. The 5% left will be in small remote communities, not in a few big cities.
A strong possibility every nuclear armed state with a hated enemy winds up firing. I wouldn't count on India and China coming out of it much better than the US or Russia.
I’m not trying to be rude, but I don’t think that you have any knowlegde of the logistics and the advanced electronics, biology, chemistry and processes that is necessary for the current manufacturing we have to work. If you look into this and learn how complex even the production of the most simple objects and devices is, you may lose some sleep. And this is only about infrastructure - not engineers/specialists who know how to build and operate it. On top there are no easily available hydrocarbons left to bootstrap an industrial civilization a second time.
If we fuck up this time, or are fucked up by a major extinction event, we’ll be stuck in early middle ages until we die out.
Just because it's not economical to do these things now, does not mean it would be impossible, especially in dire straits.
Would it cut the human population to a few million? Probably. Reset to the middle ages? Hardly.
What are the real innovations that make the modern world?
- the surface plate and 3-plate method
- steel metallurgy
- certain key chemical processes: Haber, Bosch, etc
- electrical generation
- the radio/telegraph
- the transistor
- calculus and algebra
All would survive a full-blown nuclear attack. Rebuild would be slow and tedious, but completely plausible, if not guaranteed.
Running a machine show would be a practice in slow decline to some very basic levels as you expend your specialized materials dependent on more complex supply chains. You could easily starve while trying to bootstr
I would guess some humanity would survive, but it would be a huge dice role wether you had the basic food and energy resources available in your area, as well as the sheer luck to avoid death from environmental poisoning or missing any of a thousand civilizational inputs (like basic medicines).
A lot of people like to playact like they would survive. I think it would be horrific.
In fact, the chip supply chain is one of the most fragile ones given the extreme complexity and precision of making even older chips, and yet almost every device we use now uses electronics instead of mechanical parts just about everywhere it's possible to make the substitution.
Note that diesel engines were made with rather low-tech.