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Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, the end goal (a pseudo AGI) is more like a nuclear weapon than the advent of electricity. The concern is real, even if we are farther away than the author realizes and the risk (like the risk if nuclear war) is not totally insurmountable even if it is extremely difficult.

The first nuclear bombs couldn't end life on Earth either, but it wasn't long before they could, and the scientists working on them saw the trajectory as clear as day when the rest of the world didn't.

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OT, but it's a pet peeve:

> but it wasn't long before they could

The total amount of nuclear weapons ever built is laughably inadequate for the task of ending life on earth. They would not end human life either, and even ending human civilization (as in, agriculture and organized society) is off by many orders of magnitude.

Nuclear war would be horrible, but the actual impact got massively overinflated, largely because of good reasons.

The initial fission stage is the "hard" part of a nuke, but the subsequent fusion stages are much easier to scale up. Arbitrarily large nuclear bombs are theoretically "easy" to make by chaining increasingly large fusion stages one after the other, as they aren't limited by expensive fissile material.

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bi...

Hence scientists extrapolated nukes really could end life on Earth, and in a slightly different reality than ours, they may have.

It would be really, really hard to kill the bacteria and Archaeans that we've since found hiding deep underground. They're long way down and would barely notice.

A whole country the size of the US can crap its collective pants with a freak cold snap and you think 10^4 nuclear detonations destroying all major cities is quite survivable?

Destruction of major cities != all life on earth

I'm glad you took logic in college. Shoulda followed up with ecology.

I’m sorry you think Covid proves anything about nuclear war or that it’s at all relevant to a discussion about life on earth being eradicated.

I have no idea how you got to covid

Fuck off

You butted into the conversation pal

What about Nuclear Winter?

There’s been a ton of studies stating this was likely overblown in the early Cold War for propaganda purposes. It wouldn’t last long enough to wipe out humanity let alone all life.

Correct.

https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness

> To put this another way, each bomb can destroy an area of 34.2 square miles, and the maximum total area destroyed by our nuclear apocalypse is about 137,000 square miles, approximately the size of Montana, Bangladesh or Greece.

(I think that should be Bangladesh and Greece; Montana is larger than the two of them combined.)

Nuclear weapons still can’t end life on earth though.

This is nothing like a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb doesn't choose to explode itself, nor can it replicate itself.

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